June 26, 2009

I was a little bummed out in the afternoon. Not having money and not finding a job sucks. I called my wife, just to have someone to talk to for a few minutes. We did and it helped. But when she came back from work, she was drunk. Way to be there for me, honey.The kids and I had wrestled a little on our bed and messed it up and she accused me of kicking the bed and throwing stuff around because I had been bummed out earlier in the day. Nothing like that happened, not even close. Our daughter and I had made dinner, a chicken and chorizo soup. It was good, but my wife was to drunk to eat. Or maybe she just didn’t want to ruin a good buzz with mere food.

Then she began to bitch at the kids and was going off on bizarre rants about how much her heart was broken because Michael Jackson died. We tried to watch a movie, Defiance, but she got all worked up about war and made me swear that our son was never going to enlist – over and over. I had to stop the movie. Then she started bitching at the kids about cleaning the bathroom. I decided it was time to go ahead and take the kids upstairs and read to them. My wife passed out.

I finished watching the move, it was pretty good. My wife got up a few time and glared at me or staggered up to the bathroom, hugging the wall so as to be as far away from me as possible and not looking at me. She snarled something at me once about the movie. Then she went back and destroyed the bed clothes. I had to pull the sheet our from under her so I could have any at all when I went to bed after the movie.

June 25, 2009

So tonight she comes back to this place we live, and tells me Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett have died. Again, I am making dinner, so I don’t frisk her again as she scoots right downstairs. She tells me that she started crying in the car when she heard Michael Jackson was confirmed dead. I knew that she had to be drinking at that point but by the time I found her bottle, it was almost empty. Another pint down.

Fortunately, she never picked a fight with me or got stupid in any way that I had to notice. That is as close as it gets to a good drinking night, if there is such a thing. It still means that I am alone and have to watch what I say or do because I never know what will ignite the fuse to the powder keg that is my wife mixed with vodka. Goody.

June 24, 2009

Guess I am still a door mat. She came in while I was making dinner and I didn’t get to go over and frisk her or go through her purse. And of course, she had a bottle. Shortly after she got back from work, she came up and her mother started bitching at her because we had some left over cheesy mashed potatoes in the fridge. My wife decided to start in on me, demanding to know why I hadn’t fed the leftovers to the kids. I told her to either throw them away or eat or shut the hell up. Then I went downstairs and found her bottle and dumped it and took her car keys and the spares.

Unfortunately, I forgot about a bottle of vodka I had meant to throw away. She found it and drank almost a whole liter of vodka. I wondered why she wasn’t screaming about my throwing her booze away and taking her keys. My mistake. Later, she comes out and tells me that we missed the summer solstice. I told her, no I didn’t, and that I had told her about it. We used to throw parties on the solstice, back when my family still had a cottage on the shore and I had friends. Now I have shit and no one to invite and no where to invite them to. Nor do I want to have my wife  co-host a party with booze. It would just be an excuse for her to get trashed and it would either be embarrassing or ugly or both. Anyway,she is bitching at me about how we missed the solstice and wants me to come out and see that it is still light at nine thirty. Whoopee! I go out and she starts yelling at me about missing the solstice and then about her father breaking the wrought iron bench that had been in the back yard. I said that her parents probably blame the kids, because I am sure my father-in-law doesn’t remember breaking the damn thing. My wife looked at me and asked me how would her parents blame the kids for us missing the solstice? I told her she clearly was not making anything like sense and it was time for me to go in and stop talking to her. Another thing to yell at me about, but I just headed in and ignored her.

She passed out while I tucked the kids in bed and pulled all the covers over to her side. I took back just enough to cover myself and tried to sleep. Didn’t work. She kept waking up, muttering nasty shit at me and blowing her nose all over the place and coughing and trying to tug all the covers over onto her. I finally gave up and went to the couch, again. In the morning, she had completely pulled the bed spread up and wrapped it around herself. When she woke up, she informed me that she had lost her wedding ring. Again. I have looked and this time I can’t find it. Maybe this is a sign? (Not that I believe in that kind of stuff, but maybe there isn’t much point in spending a lot of time looking for a wedding band that I am not sure she’ll be wearing much longer any way.)

June 22, 2009

She was drinking and bitching about her job. Then she started bitching about all the crap that has piled up in her parents’ basement. A year or so ago, we filled up a construction dumpster with crap – and we could probably do another one. She wanted me to start just throwing things out. I tried to point out that while it needed to be gone through and organized and a lot of that crap did have to be just thrown away (how many old broken metal cheap bed frames do you need gathering dust anyway?), she wasn’t the one to do it. At least not drunk. I have pointed out many times in this blog how she has gotten manic and tired to over compensate for being a useless drunk by ‘cleaning’, which usually results in her throwing away and ruining parts of kids games and toys and papers that it turns out that the kids or I need. She did make an effort to not argue with me, but it was a struggle and she was definitely losing her grip on her temper. After the cleaning out the basement and throwing everything away rant, she informed me that she wanted to start or join a book club.

Okay, a book club sounds cool to me. But then she started getting insulting. It had to be good books, not ‘the crap I read.’ A difference of opinion is alright with me, I don’t expect her tastes to be the same as mine, although we do enjoy many of the same authors, I really don’t expect her to enjoy history, economics, science, boat building, electronics or any of the other wide ranging interests I have. Then she said she wanted to start a real book club. Again, I said that sounds great. She said that I didn’t understand, that I didn’t know what a real book club was. I could see this conversation was going nowhere good, so I told her I was going to go up and tuck the kids into bed. She followed me up the stairs, telling me that I just didn’t understand. Then she followed that up with, “This is why I want a divorce, you just don’t get it.” At that point, I just looked at her and said, “Okay, I am done. I am not talking to you any more tonight.” Somehow, this did not make her very happy. She bitched at me all the way upstairs, which I refused to listen to or acknowledge. When I went to read to the kids, she said something snotty about not being able to do this anymore and stomped off back downstairs.

When I got done reading to the kids, she was nominally asleep. I went to bed. She kept waking up and muttering stuff at me, which I pretended not to hear. Called me a fat fuck. Told me to go. Started telling me that I wasn’t going to make her feel guilty any more. Complained that she had ‘to go to work in the morning,’ like it was my fault she sucked down a pint of vodka and was going to feel like crap the next day.  I ignored it all and finally dropped off to sleep.

She massively overslept, shocking. I woke her up about quarter to ten and asked her if she was going to work. She jumped up and started racing around getting dressed, saying she hadn’t realized what time it was. I watched her for a minute and I started getting pissed about all the crap she had thrown my way the night before. I tore into her and told her I was not putting up with this drunken shit any more. I was going to search her and her purse when she got home and if she had a bottle I was throwing it away. Then I was going to take her keys, her wallet and any money and if she didn’t like that she could kiss my ass. I told her if she got drunk before she came home, then she could sit out in her smoking lounge and do the crosswords or listen to her iPod (if she wasn’t to stupid drunk to work it) but she wasn’t monopolizing the TV and watching that mind rotting crap she likes when she is drinking. I told her I wouldn’t talk to her and she wasn’t going to bitch at the kids or talk to them, not while she was drunk. I asked her if she had any idea how heart breaking it had been to hear the kids ask me why Mommy was so mean, when the answer was that Mommy was just being a drunken asshole.  I went on for a while, I mean it. I will not be treated like shit and if she is going to come home drunk, she will not be allowed to nag or bitch at me or the kids. If I catch her drinking at home, I am throwing her booze away. I am done with this crap. This kind of behavior is not the way I want to behave, but being a nice guy has not accomplished anything except my having to sell all my crap and leave Florida and kill my programming career, all so she would be around her family and would quit drinking. Well, it hasn’t worked and maybe that was predictable, but what the hell, I tried. Now I am done being Mr. Nice Guy. No more door mat here.

June 18, 2009

Yet another drinking night. She was demanding with the kids, starting yelling at our son to go to bed at 8:30, on the night before the last day of school, when his bed time is usually 9:00.  And she wonders why the kids don’t listen to her or respect her. Even if she had an actual reason to send him to bed at that time, she didn’t follow through and make him go so of course they don’t listen to her. Plus they can tell she is drunk and they know it’s a free pass for them to ignore her. In the end, she will just bitch at me about it, not them, so I pay the price and they don’t have to. Another joy of living with an alcoholic.

Then we tried to watch a movie, The International. It just wasn’t happening. She was way to drunk to sit still or to follow the plot so we watched about half an hour of it and she finally said she didn’t know what was going on and actually stated that she couldn’t follow a movie like this while she was drunk. No kidding. I asked if she would like to try it again some other time and she agreed. So we put on TV and there were a couple of shows we like t watch on, so I tried to settle in and watch them. For two hours she sat there bitching about work. Okay, I can listen but really, her going on and on about the same old shit while I was trying to watch a show I like was getting annoying. Still, I tried to do my best to be the supporting husband and listen to her rant.

It was going okay, I guess, until she started bitching about some co-worker who is playing the company for all the paid time off she can manage. Apparently she has taken all the sick days she can without getting actually fired, then she got married, now she is pregnant and claiming to be ill too so they will have to give her more time off. My wife was going ballistic about how this girl is getting away with this. She said she wanted to confront the woman. I made the mistake of saying that the girl would probably just be offended, that people like that usually justify everything they are doing in their own minds or they are just total scumbags and will pretend to be offended. My wife then turned on me for ’supporting’ this other person. I didn’t, I didn’t say anything remotely like support for the scam artist but by venturing an opinion, I became the target. Now the ranting was directed at me. I went to bed. More bitching at me.

I finally said I didn’t want to talk to her anymore while she was drunk and I got slammed for that. She demanded to know why, and what I was talking about. I told her that she had just turned on me for supposedly supporting that other girl, and she couldn’t even remember what we had been talking about fifteen minutes before! At this point I turned off the light and just said good night as there was clearly no dealing with her. For that, I was a ‘big pussy’ and she stormed off into her smoking lounge for some more liquid consolation.

Then it was the drunken inability to operate her iPod. I had to listen to her alternate between drunken caterwauling and yelling at her iPod because she gets to stupid to work it when she drinks. Then, of course, there was a song she just had to have that used to be on her iPod but wasn’t any more. How she does this stuff, I have no idea. So she comes begging for me to fix it. Rather then argue and have to go through all that, I got up, turned on the computer and reloaded the songs she was looking for. All the while she was complaining that there were to many songs on her iPod, that instead of loading albums, I should just put on the songs she wants. Of course, she hasn’t told me exactly what those are, so there is no way for me to do it. I offered to show her, later when she might be sober enough to understand it, how to put just the songs she wants on her iPod.

Finally, at almost midnight, I got to go to bed and go to sleep this time. The joke is going to be on her, because she has an early morning conference call and has to be by nine, a time she rarely makes even though her schedule is supposed to be 8 – 4:30.

June 16, 2009

Another drinking night. I guess she hasn’t “fixed it” yet. And this time she was nasty to the kids. She kept bitching at our son, pretty much for nothing. And she wonders why the kids don’t respect her or listen to her.

After the kids went to bed, we started watching Rescue Me. At first she seemed okay, but then she couldn’t follow the plot and kept getting mad because she has missed the last couple of episodes (because she got drunk and passed out before she could watch them!) Then she got upset when they showed clips of Micky Mantle after he died, talking about being an alcoholic. First she yelled something about not looking up to us. I guess she meant our kids shouldn’t look up to us as heroes. Then she said she grew up with Mickey Mantle as a hero. That she only cared about him. Then she told me she didn’t care about my friend whose stepson died of a heroin overdose, she was mad at my sister for going to Texas to see a cousin of ours, and that she only cared about Mickey Mantle dying from liver cancer. Rather then fight with her I just let her rant and rave. She retreated to her ’smoking’ lounge and shut the door while she swilled more booze. Then she got to stupid to work her iPod and started yelling at that. She got mad at me because she had gotten drunk and smashed her headphones and now all we have are the ear buds that came with the iPod, which she finds uncomfortable. Like it was my fault she got drunk and broke the earphones I bought especially for her because I knew she wouldn’t like the ear buds.

Finally she passed out and I was able to go to bed and get some sleep.

June 15, 2009

After my getting mad at her this morning and telling her that I was tired of being treated like crap. I told her that I looked for work every day. That I left my job in Tallahassee where I was making twice the money that I have made here so that she wouldn’t “be able to drink like this in front of her family.” And it has all been for nothing. I told her it really pissed me off when she berated me for not having a job when I left mine, destroying my career, in order to help her and it hasn’t helped her at all. She told me she would “fix it”.

Apparently fixing it means buying a pint of vodka and guzzling it and going to bed without fighting with me first. Not what it meant to me….

June 14, 2009

Things were good most of the day. She stayed sober to play with her brother’s kids. But then she finally started in on the vodka she had. She told me she was going to make a drink. The bottle had been opened and about two ounces were missing. After she made her drink, there were maybe two ounces left. And before the evening was done, she killed that and moved on to the tequila that we had bought for her friend’s housewarming that we decided not to go to.

It started getting ugly when she told me we had been here to long. (No kidding.) Then she demanded to see the money. I refused. I was not getting into a discussion with her on our expenditures over the last five years while she was drunk. That just pissed her right off. From there we were off and running. Why don’t I have a job? Why aren’t we out of here? Why can’t we get an apartment? And those were the nice questions. From there she went into telling me that she had to get up and go to work in the morning. Like I am supposed to be sympathetic towards someone who deliberately guzzled most of a liter of vodka and then began doing slugs of tequila. Or it was a slam at me because I don’t have a job to go to in the morning. After a while she passed out and all I could hear was her muttering at me. “I’m done.” “Get out of my life.” “Go away.” And all the fun things she says to me when she is trashed. Eventually she faded away completely and I could get to sleep, too.

June 12, 2009

When she came back from work, she seemed okay. I went to get our son at a friend’s house and by the time I got back she had that look about her. Started asking me if I wanted to go to a party the next night and did we need to get some tequila for it. She wanted to go out and get some right now. I could see she must have had a stash somewhere, as she was either in some wicked addict craving stage or she was drunk already. I took her to the liquor store. When we got back here, she had one mixed drink, kept crawling in my lap and finally went to sleep. I know she was drinking more then what I bought her.  But I guess it was not a horrible night, all things considered.

I just hate to see her with that addict glaze in her eyes and the transparent lies she tells so I’ll let her go get booze. It’s like her brain shrivels up so she can only concentrate on one thing, getting a bottle. It is sad to see her like that.

June 11, 2009

An ugly one. She had been drinking but maintaining control. Then she went upstairs and her mother talked to her. I should have known it would be a disaster. Apparently her mother told her that she had a problem. My wife’s smoking is costing her a hundred dollars on her home owner’s insurance. My wife went ballistic. By the time she came back downstairs she was in full psychotic shrieking mode. Listening to her scream about her mother just sucked the life out of me because I knew the rest of the evening was going to suck. And did it.

My wife saw me deflate and assumed that I was supporting her mother. She tore into me, yelling that I didn’t support her, how could I support her mother, her mother pisses me off, why couldn’t it piss her off, too? The sick thing was that I think her mother is a stingy, cheap bitch and a nag, and even though I guess she does have a point, I didn’t have a problem with my wife being annoyed or even angry. But she was insane and just acting crazy and that was getting to me. She gets this shrill shriek going and it sets my teeth on edge. There is no reasoning with her, even talking to her is dangerous.  It always reminds me of the first time I saw her like that, screeching about how my brother accused her of stealing his tequila, when he did no such thing. She twists things around to support whatever paranoid insanity has taken charge. The first night, she wound up smashing things all over our house. Now she usually just berates me.

Next she started in on how she has to worry about her parents and why we can’t take care of her parents and my mother. That we are supposed to do this and we don’t have the money to. That led naturally into how I don’t have a job and how she has to go to work tomorrow. Then on about not being able to take care of her parents ‘like we are supposed to’ . Then somehow she decided it was all my long dead father’s fault. Then she started in on my alcoholic mother. I asked her what the hell did my dead father or my alcoholic mother have to do with her mother being a cheap bitch? She had gone into her ’smoking lounge’ and I just shut the door and walked away. I went up and tucked the kids into bed and read to them for a while.

When I got downstairs, she had passed out. So I went to bed. She came to and started in on me about not having a job. Never mind that I have been looking for months and was only able to get a temp job with the Census Bureau which has run out. She started yelling at me to go to a place that I have already applied to twice because they still have a sign up. I refused. She asked why. I said I have already been there twice, at some point it becomes humiliating since they have made it clear they aren’t going to hire me. She started shrieking again, so I got up, told her I look for work every single day and to just shut the fuck up.

Another night on the couch for me!