This morning I tild her that if she drank again, I was packing the kids up and leaving. I said, “I don’t have to put up with your mother’s crappy cooking and I don’t have to put up with your bad behavior any more either.”
She thinks I don’t know it, but she is drinking again tonight.
I guess I am going to have to take the kids and go. I’m not ready tonight, but it is going to happen soon.
It was a bad psycho drunk tonight. She met me at my daughter’s softball practice, and as she got in the car the stench of vodka was over powering. SHe left early and went back to her parents’ house. As I got ready to leave practice, she called. She was upset. Her mother apparently ripped into her because she found the battery to her Bose remote in the couch and the piece that holds it in place missing. Of course, my daughter will take the hit for this, in spite of the fact that she hasn’t listened to that radio since I got her an iPod this last Christmas. But she used to listen to it and she was practically the only one who ever did. Then her mother started bitching at her because I am cooking dinner for me and my family. My mother-in-law had told me the day before that she just ‘had to cook her asparagus fettucine’. I said okay. I didn’t say I was going to eat it. Then she told me that she knew, ‘The kids won’t like it, but I will.’ Which is fine, but if you are going to deliberately cook something you know the kids won’t eat, you shouldn’t bitch at them about it at the dinner table. Not really their fault. She cooked her dish (and burned the hell out of the pancetta while she was at it) and then to top it all off made a big spinach and strawberry salad. Another thing the kids wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. I didn’t even like it and I like spinach salad. It didn’t help that she didn’t really wash the spinach so there were little bits of rotten spinach stuck to the whole spinach leaves. A couple of days ago, I told my mother-in-law that with my daughter’s practice schedule and my wife’s and my work schedules, it would just be easier if I cooked for us. Apparently I hit a nerve here. So her feelings are hurt and she is taking it out on my drunk wife. Who is freaking out.
Then I came back here and made our dinner. Served it. The kids liked it and my wife wouldn’t eat it. Then my brother in law came and did some work on a door that wouldn’t close. For some reason, my wife latched onto that and went ballistic about that until she went to bed at ten. I refused to get sucked into this argument or any of the others she was trying to drag me into, (and still is, while she is lying in bed, right now.)
I refuse to give any power to any of these people. Her mother with her petty ways, my wife’s drunken insanity, and my sick and aging father-in-law who yelled at his wife several times this evening, adding to the insanity of this household. My wife is demanding that we leave today, even if we have to live in a box. Not happening. Or maybe, but not with her. Again, I refuse to dwell on this horrible mess any longer. I am dropping it and leaving it behind me and as soon as I can do so gracefully, I am taking my kids away from here and out of this insanity. I know things don’t have to be like this and I refuse to accept it any longer, any more then I accepted eating the crappy food my mother-in-law kept dishing up.
Another psycho drunk night. She was obviously drunk and being weird and then our son started practicing his guitar. He was struggling with it and my wife got obnoxious with him and told me that neither of our children have any talent. She said it right in front of them. I told her that very definitely was not true and even if it was, it was a horrible thing to say in front of them. She started going off on me and I cut her off and told her that I was sick of her nasty negativity and that just because she was stuck in a pit of depression and negativity that didn’t give her the right to try and drag the rest of us down with her. She yelled at me a bit, called me a fat fuck and a dumb ass (all in front of the kids of course.) Finally she retreated to her lounge and kept yelling at me, so I got up and shut the door.
Then she discovered that she had lost her cell phone charger, probably on our trip to Providence. Somehow that was my fault, too. More yelling at me. Then she got mad at me because I couldn’t find my old cell phone charger, which I no longer use because my phone died and I got a hand me down from my mother-in-law and it uses a different charger. She kept bitching at me about that for over an hour. I remembered that I did get a hand cranked gizmo with a flashlight and cell phone charger attachments, so I tried it out on her phone. It worked, but she sat there bitching at me the whole time I was cranking the charger to charge up her cell phone becasue she lost her charger. She kept asking me what I was doing. I would tell her and she would say that I was crazy, why did I have that, oh and what the hell was I doing? After about ten minutes of that crap I disconnected the hand crank and tossed her cell phone on the couch next to her and told her it was her problem now. Ignited another barrage of yelling. I went up and put the kids to bed and when I got back down she had passed out, although there was the usual muttering and swearing at me and calling me names while I ignored her and tried to get to sleep.
She was drinking tonight and got a little weird, but we didn’t fight. I plan to keep it that way. I have spent to much time hurt and angry from the things she has said or done and I am done with it. I have tried to help her, tried to get her to stop drinking and it hasn’t done any good. So I am just going to do what I can to help myself and my kids and just not be dragged down by her, no matter how morose or nasty or angry or depressed she gets. I can’t help her, but I don’t have to go down with her.
This morning I left without talking to her. I just didn’t want to fight with her or rip her a new one over her bad behavior the night before. I am just so done with the whole mess. Why continue to obsess over her bad behavior and drag myself down with her? So I didn’t do the morning after ‘talk’, I didn’t lecture, I didn’t say anything to her. No point, really.
And she proved me right by showing up drunk again tonight. Not horrible, certainly not as bad as last night, but still drunk enough to be wierd and not herself. I am just trying to not get any more emotionally involved and dragged into her drunken insanity any more. I suspect the marriage is over, certainly if she doesn’t stop drinking, NOW, it will be. Our trip last weekend, it was nice, but I realized that it was all about the kids. My wife and I had fun, but there was no ‘us’ there, just a nice time with the kids. I miss my wife, but I think she is gone for good. Not to long ago, she told me she was more assertive now. I told her that I didn’t think drinking until you became insane drunk and obnoxious and mean and pushy was really being assertive. I told her I wouldn’t mind if she became more assertive, but that I didn’t think becoming an alcoholic asshole really counted as positive growth.
I also told her that I hated seeing what she does to herself when she drinks, what she has done to her mind. We have conversations or arguments and she doesn’t remember any of it the next day so we can do it all over again. She really doesn’t remember telling me the same stories over and over. What has she done to herself?
I am going to stop this. I will continue my blog about her behavior, but I am just not going to let it get to me. I am going to stay positive for me and my kids. My wife can either get her act together or we will move onward and upward and leave her behind. I want my wife back, but I can’t wait any longer for her to figure this out. Or maybe she has and I am the dense one. Maybe she just doesn’t want to be my wife any more and this is her roundabout, back door way to get me the hell out. Or maybe she would just rather be a drunk, or is to addicted to stop. I don’t know but in the end, what difference does it make? She still gets drunk and horrible night after night and the kids and I bear the brunt of it.
We had a nice weekend. We went on a trip to Providence to the Roger WIlliams Park Zoo and spent the night in a hotel. During the trip, I mentioned a couple of things I would like to do for the kids (to the kids?) I wanted to cut back on desserts, to weekends and special occassions. All of us are to heavy and that seemed like a minimal change in the right direction. I also proposed that we limit television, I wanted an hour a day, my wife pushed for two. She sounded kind of panicky about the whole concept.
So the weekend ended and now it is Monday night. My wife is psycho drunk. She has been ranting about work and other things, but the ball really got rolling when she told me that I was setting a bad example. I had gotten up to watch a TV show (Heroes), which would have been my first of the day. I was also recording ‘24′ to watch later. That, too, was wrong and a bad example. Then she went on to blame me for the kids being over weight, in spite of the fact that she brought them both candy bars on her way home tonight. I asked her if that was guilt buying. Did she buy candy for the kids when she bought booze for herself? She went ballistic. I said the hell with it and went to bed.
She came to bed and spent the next two and a half hours thrashing, swearing, mumbling, some of it at me, a lot of it I just couldn’t understand. Once, she got up, went out to her smoking lounge and started screaming obscenities (apparently someone (her) had left the back door open and it was icy in there. I think she went out where it was really cold and pissed in the back yard rather then go upstairs where she might run into her father.) Then she came back to bed and started rubbing her feet on me. I wasn’t sure if she was just warming her feet up or coming on to me. If she was coming on to me, she ruined it by kicking my sore knee repeatedly and scratching me with her toe nails. Finally she went to sleep.
Another fine night.
I wanted to talk to my wife about some stuff with about the kids. I wanted to put some limits on TV watching and cut down desserts to special occassions and weekends. But I couldn’t, because she showed up drunk. I also wanted to talk about some of the things she had said the night before, but mentioning her drinking or her bizarre behavior when she drinks and all hell breaks loose. So I didn’t.
She started yacking at me about her job. That would have been okay, except she did it while I was trying to watch a new show on the idiot box. (Okay, it probably wasn’t very good, in spite of the commercials, and I should have tried to pay more attention to her, but she was drunk and it wasn[‘t easy to listen to her.) Then she moved on to tell me some story about some swimming event in Australia where they had found a six foot hammerhead nearby and terrorized the poor shark with helecopters, sailboats, motor boats, etc. Would have been fine, but she told me exactly the same story the night before and didn’t remember telling me any of it. Then she showed me her toenails, which she hasn’t painted in months and you can see how far they have grown out since. Again okay, except that she told me that story the night before, too.
My wife tied on a good one tonight. She was trying to make some kind of point about how things would be different if we had not come up here. I think. That much I could understand, but she lost me when she started saying things like, “If we hadn’t moved up here my brother wouldn’t have had a heart attack at 39.” Or stuff about how my mother’s problems started when we move up here or that her siblings would have had to step up and take care of her parents better if we weren’t here.
I thought I was safe. It was Sunday and you can’t buy booze here on Sunday. I don’t know if she stashed a bottle somewhere or if she pirated off the Jack Daniels my in-laws leave out for my brother-in-law. All I know for sure is that after dinner, my wife got steadily trashed. She was okay most of the day, and I thought things were cool, but afterwards, she sat down to watch TV with me and the kids and suddenly she started telling our daughter that not only did she have to get a comb through her hair, but she had to do it when her hair was dry. She had already gotten a comb through it after her shower. I guess after a pint of vodka (or JD) that was no longer enough. My wife has a thing about the kids’ hair when she is drinking. So that was my first indication that things weren’t going right.
I knew for sure that she was drunk when she sat up and announced that she really was inconsistent. (That was what her boss told her at her performance review when she got denied a raise and her bonus.) She said she didn’t go to college, she stopped trying to be a nurse when she failed algebra. She was inconsistent with the kids.
Then she got mean. She said that she wished her sister’s husband would lose his job so they could see what life was really like. At this point I knew she was gone into vodkaland and there would be no reasoning with her. I went up to put the kids to bed and read to them and came down and went to sleep so I wouldn’t get sucked into any stupid drunken arguments.
Full disclosure. I got myself a six pack and drank three beers – before my wife got back from work. I had left work early to take our daughter to get a physical. At work, we had done with our training (mostly tedious verbatim reading of power point slides – a new high tech pox on humanity!) and they were just giving us make work and told us we could leave if we wanted to, so I did. Mainly so my wife wouldn’t get screwed on her mandatory overtime – again. When I got back from the doctor’s, I had bought some stuff to make dinner. My mother-in-law (Hereafter referred to as the Wonder Chef) asked me if I was planning something for dinner. I said yes. She said she had been planning to make Hopping John, a dish I knew neither her daughter or my son would eat. So I said I would rather make mine. She said okay and then tied up the burners on the stove until after six, cooking corned beef for Sunday’s corned beef and cabbage. When I realized that she was tying up the kitchen, I gave up on cooking dinner and went and got the beer. Later, the Wonder Chef said, “Oh, we must have had some miscommunication, I thought you were making dinner.” I guess the only miscommunication for me was that I would be actually able to use the stove to cook dinner. Oops, silly me. She is such a dip shit. Why she has to ruin four briskets starting on Friday for a meal to be served on Sunday, I have no idea! And she will ruin it. I could have made the whole thing and it would have been good, now the Wonder Chef is working her magic and turning decent food into mediocrity and tying up the kitchen for three days, to boot. I would have made it all Sunday, in a couple of hours, and it would have tasted good, too. So, on to my wife’s drinking this evening.
She gets back from work and I can see she has been drinking. I try not to bitch about the Wonder Chef to much, it just upsets my wife and primes the pump for later nastiness. We went out for dinner and both had a margarita. Dinner was okay, except that she kept acting like a pig at the table, mainly an act to embarrass the kids. As we were waiting for the check, she looks at me and whispers, “I have to fart.” She wanted to go outside. I handed her the keys and as she stood up she accidentally let fly with a real pant ripper. The kids both looked chagrined and then burst out laughing. So did she. I laughed and just shook my head. I got the check, paid, and we headed back to our dungeon.
As soon as we got back and we sat down to watch the idiot box, she again announced that she was ‘tired’ and going to bed. I am seeing a trend here. I still guess this is better then fighting, but it isn’t my idea of a marriage.
