July 30, 2009

Today is my birthday and we are going out for dinner. In the car on the way out, I could tell she had been drinking. We had to wait for our table and she insisted on a drink while she waited. I got us each a cocktail. I had another with dinner. She decided that we needed to do a shot of tequila. So we each got a shot of Cuervo. As soon as we got home from dinner, she announced that she was tired and going to bed. It was eight thirty. She must have powered down her usual pint in the half hour from when she got back from work until we went out. No wonder she was ‘tired.’

I guess it was silly of me to think she might refrain on my birthday.

July 29, 2009

I had been really pissed at my wife from all the stupid fights the night before. I was upset all day and I finally realized that I just don’t want to feel this way any more. I resolved to tell her exactly how I felt, without any anger, just lay it out that I am done living like this.

So I get back from work and eventually start to make dinner. My wife is not home yet. My mother-in-law finds some mess in the little downstairs bathroom. Some of her makeup is in the sink. She immediately rounds up my son and asks him if he did this. He said no. Then she got my daughter and did the same with the same result. Now my mother-in-law starts going ballistic. She is going on and on about all these things keep happening and no one ever knows how they happen. I almost went and got involved, but I decided to just stay out of it. Of course, then she came to me and started bitching at me about it. I got mad and told her that I was tired of her accusing my kids of things that she doesn’t know if they did. I pointed out that in fact, she had recently accused them of five things, four of which we know they didn’t do. She got all pissed and stomped away and started yelling and crying. Then her sister stuck her nose in the whole mess, like it was any of her business and told me that I had a lot of nerve. That I shouldn’t be here. I said that she was right on that one.  I know my kids aren’t angels and I know they make messes, but she has accused them lately of breaking a shelf that it turned out that it fell down in the middle of the night because she or her husband put it up wrong. She accused them of causing the front door to warp so they couldn’t close it. I can’t imagine how they could have done that! She is apparently missing a broken necklace that she swears the kids had to take because she has had it hanging on her dresser for years and when she went to look for it, it was gone. She hasn’t seen the damn thing for months but she just knows my kids took it. I discipline my kids and I don’t let them get away with crap (not to much, anyway, I know where to draw the line), but I am not going to let them take the rap for everything that breaks around here. This house is a pile of crap and they have always gone the cheap route, hiring guys they know or using crappy materials and, big shock, stuff breaks or doesn’t work right. Unfortunately, my wife came back form work right in the middle of her mother crying and carrying on. Not the best time to start a serious talk.

After things had calmed down a bit, I sat her down and told her that I loved her and I didn’t want to spend my time fighting with her. I didn’t want to be one of those couples who stay married even though they seem to hate each other. I am just done feeling upset or mad all the time. Or that horrible deflated feeling I get when I realize she is drinking and getting nasty and irrational. I feel like a balloon that has had the air let out of it. I said that I don’t want to fight and argue all the time. That she used to be my best friend and now I feel like that is gone. That I either want it back or I am done. That I have told her this and talked until I am blue in the face and it never makes any difference and I can’t continue this way. She said there was still hope and she might quit and I told her that is fine, I wish she would, but if it happens sometime in the distant future, it is going to be to late. I told her that I have a job and I am making decent money and I will be able to leave her soon and if she doesn’t quit drinking, I will.

Of course, when she came to bed, I could smell the vodka on her breath.

July 27, 2009

Another drinking night. An argumentative night. We used to tell this joke about several of my relatives and friends – Instant asshole, just add alcohol. Well, my wife personifies this.

I was trying to watch Rescue Me, a very funny show with Denis Leary as an alcoholic New York fireman. My wife kept turning the sound down, because I wasn’t paying attention to her. She was trying to talk to me about the mold problem that is sprouting in the front entryway. Apparently, my in-laws’ toilet leaks and has dripped down onto the ceiling right inside the front door and now there is this nasty looking black stuff growing there and the ceiling is beginning to fall. My wife is bitching about this. According to her it has been a problem for thirty years, for as long as they have owned the house. This somehow turned into an argument about whose fault the leak and the resulting mold was. Then she told me that if we lived on a boat and there was mold on it, she would leave me immediately. I said, “Funny, I would just hit it with some bleach and try to fix the leak before I did anything that drastic.” She kept trying to drag me into an argument over the damn mold and I finally said that it wasn’t my house, it certainly is not my home, and I could really care less about it. She went ballistic and asked me if that meant our house in Florida was not our home either. I told her she was drunk and I wasn’t talking or fighting with her any more. Which went over like a lead balloon, too.

This was just typical of the stupid arguments she kept picking with me and when I finally told her I was done talking to her, she got majorly pissed. I finally just went to bed. She came to bed and kept jerking the covers off me. She woke me up that way and I told her to leave the fucking covers alone, god damn it. I wound up getting about three hours of sleep again before a long day of working on my feet.

July 26, 2009

I have been busy with my new job. Actually I have been to tired to get on line for a couple of days. My wife drank Thursday and Friday and I was just to tired to write about it. It was just the usual, no major fights but lots of little ones and just not having my wife there when it would have helped. Typical ‘life with an alcoholic’ stuff. The job is good, though. I am readjusting to being on my feet all day. That is taking a little time, but it is getting better every day.

Anyway, Sunday night she got hammered. It was her birthday on Thursday night and one of her dipshit co-workers (to be fair, I am sure the co-worker has no clue about my wife’s alcoholism) gave her a bottle of Skye Vodka. I could have thrown it out, but that seemed churlish and nasty and I just didn’t have the heart to trash her birthday present. So she saved it for today and killed just about the whole thing. Now it is time for me to go to bed, the kids are sleeping down here because we have air conditioning and it is hot as hell up in their bedroom. Now the little woman is drunk and passionate. (I wound up having to send the kids to bed upstairs and then only got three hours of sleep – Monday at work was a joy! Plus, half the time we were fighting – during sex! This was no fun at all. Okay, it was a little fun ,  but I would really like to kiss my wife without her reeking of vodka (although Skye isn’t nearly as bad as the rotgut she usually drinks) and I would like to be making love to the woman I married, not her drunken alter ego.)

July 22, 2009

She is drinking again tonight, although she seems to be taking it slow and isn’t fighting with me. Good, I am to tired to deal with her tonight.

July 21, 2009

Another bad night. She was drunk and argumentative. She was ready to fight about anything and everything. She went up to take a shower and came down with this evil grin on her face. She asked me where her grey toothbrush was. Apparently we left it in New York when we visited last. And, after two weeks, she realized it was missing (she has another one in the downstairs bathroom – I am not saying that she hasn’t brushed her teeth in two weeks!) and it was, of course, my fault that it got left behind. The whole night was like this. She told me twice that she was done with me and wanted me to get the fuck out of her life. I finally told her she was being a drunken asshole and to stop talking to me and picking fights with me. She got into me face about something else and I just told her to go away.

July 19, 2009

I got fooled today. My wife was going through the piles of paper and books and junk on her table out in her ‘lounge’. There were old pictures, papers from her rehabs, and scraps of writings she has done over her drinking career. She was getting agitated and upset and I thought it was because of the stuff she was going through. I got sucked in. I was trying to be sympathetic and was trying to talk to her and help her and generally cheer her up. But I started to notice that some of the things she was saying were a bit off. She wasn’t really tracking the conversation. She went upstairs for a minute and, amazingly enough, I found half a bottle of vodka. Must have been left from Friday night. My mistake, I should have checked, but as drunk as she had been Friday, I thought she had killed whatever booze she had. Guess not.

Later, I made dinner. It was Italian sausages and bruschetta. My wife asked me why the sausage wasn’t moving. “What?” I said. “Why aren’t the kids eating the sausage?” she asked. Then she went on to tell me we didn’t need the sausage and I could have just made the bruschetta. Then she started eating herself and was a complete slob about it. She was dripping tomatoes all down her shirt, wasn’t using a plate, and was generally disgusting. Then she got mad at me for not putting cheese in the bruschetta. Excuse me.

After we ate, she did a load of laundry and then realized that the dryer wasn’t working. She started shrieking at me, “Why doesn’t the dryer work? Why isn’t someone fixing it? Why aren’t you fixing it?” I told her to try putting in just one outfit so she would have something to go to work in and she couldn’t figure it out. I tried to help her, I just wanted her to pick out a pair of pants and a shirt and run just that in the drier and see if that would work. Then at least she would have clothes for work. She kept throwing in a bunch of clothes and I told her to stop. She told me I was being an asshole, so I told her she was being a drunk and to just find one outfit and see if we could get that to dry. Nope. Now I was a dick and an asshole and she threw all the clothes out of the dryer. I said, “Fuck this, you are on your own.”

Now to finish off the evening, she had to come out and try to use iTunes. She kept turning it off accidently and couldn’t figure out how to work it. And expecting me to fix it for her and make it do whatever she wanted it to. I helped her for a bit and then I finally gave up and just went to bed. I went to sleep before she did.

July 17, 2009

Tonight, she was an hour late coming home from work, so I called her to see if she was okay. She doesn’t answer the phone, but calls me back a few minutes later. She gives me this snotty tone of voice and asks me what I am doing. Like it is rude and presumptuous of me to be calling her to see when she’ll be home, especially considering that I am waiting dinner on her with two hungry kids. I ask her where she is and she tells me some BS story about how there were a bunch of birthdays at work and she went to Vito’s for ‘just a half a minute.’ Then she says that she is on her way home. Okay. I figure I’ll just wait until she gets home. Or talk to her tomorrow, since there is no point in saying anything to her when she is drunk.

Of course, she must have picked up a bottle on the way back because she is to hammered to eat. She starts telling me that when she finished her late shift, one of her (male) co-workers came out at the same time and she said to him, “What are you doing, honey?” And he asked her out for a drink with him. So of course, booze, so she had to go. And not call me or let me know she was going to be late. (Notice there is no mention of birthdays in this version of her story.) I told her I didn’t want to talk to her about it.

Later, she tries again. She is telling me that two of her male co-workers like me. (One of them being the one she went for a drink with.) I just said that’s nice, I think they are okay too. (I thought the shit heel that seduced her after Thanksgiving dinner was a friend of mine to, so either I am just a horrible judge of character or guys will fuck your wife whether they like you or not.) I then told her I was putting the kids to bed and left the room. She was passed out when I got back downstairs.

July 16, 2009

A bad one tonight. I start a job next week, and the kids are going to be here with their grandparents all day during the week. Not the best situation, but they will at least be safe and I need to take the job so there really isn’t much choice. My wife is drunk and working herself into a state about this. She keeps telling me what a problem it is, and I ask her what she wants me to do? We are running out of money, we need to save money so we can get out of her parents’ basement. I have to take this job, so what does she want me to do? Apparently, all she wanted was to piss and moan over and over about the situation. I tried several tacks with her, sympathizing, pointing out we don’t really have a choice, pointing out that at least the kids would be safe, if not as active as we would like, and that is going to have to be good enough for right now, but no matter what I said, she was drunk and just kept getting more upset or angry. Drunk and alternating between maudlin, anxious and angry is not fun to listen to or deal with so I eventually stopped trying.

Then she got mad at her parents and her aunt. Her aunt is going through her grandmother’s things. The woman is in a rehab facility and soon to be a permanent resident, although she does not realize that yet. So the stuff in her apartment has to be gone through and sorted out. My wife’s aunt is taking on that task. Now my wife is mad at her aunt (who is kind of an overbearing bitch) for stepping up and doing this. My wife kept saying that she should be doing it. I didn’t point out that nothing was stopping her from stepping up, but as drunk as she was, that would just have led to another pointless drunken argument, so I just let her rant, instead.

Then our power went out, we were hit by some powerful thunderstorms. The electric light show was pretty impressive as the lightning flashed around us and the thunder was crashing down right over our heads. This, of course, meant that the clocks lost time and then went on that blinking mode. Twice, after the power came back on, my wife would suddenly look at her blinking clock and yell at me that the power had gone out. Like it was something she didn’t remember. Then she would get mad because I hadn’t reset her clock. Then she kept asking me what would happen if the power went out and the kids were here without me being there. (Her parents would be here.)

The final act of the evening opened when she had to go upstairs to change her tampon. Menstruation and vodka are a potent mix. She is convinced that she is starting menopause. Maybe. But she is tired of monthly periods and, when she gets drunk enough, insists that she should have a hysterectomy.  We have had this discussion before and I know better then to argue with her. First she accuses me of not knowing what she is going through. Well, I am not physically equipped to know it first hand, but I try to be sympathetic and as understanding as a poor male can be. That just pisses her right the fuck off. So I encouraged her to look into it. She gets mad because she doesn’t have time to take off from work to have surgery performed. Then she gets maudlin because she wouldn’t be able to have babies any more. Then she gets mad because that makes her feel old. If act at all in sympathy with her, her anger turns towards me. If I argue with, obviously she gets mad at me. If I agree with her, she will suddenly take the opposite side of the argument, even if it directly contradicts what she just said, and gets mad at me.  She cycles through this emotional roller coaster a few times, yelling at me most of it like I made her have a menstrual cycle, and I finally get tired of it and tell her to just shut up and go to sleep.  She asks me what is that supposed to mean. I said it means stop talking, shut the fuck up and go to sleep. She muttered at me for a little while under her breath, but frankly that was better then getting yelled at and she finally did go to sleep

July 14, 2009

She got staggering drunk tonight. I avoided arguing with her and she passed out fairly early. But around midnight, I heard her get up and a minute later, I hear a crash as she fell into our closet. I asked her what the fuck was she doing and she told me she couldn’t find her way upstairs to go to the bathroom. Our closet is across the room from the stairs to the bathroom, she wasn’t even close. I got up to try and help her stand up, but she got mad at me for offering and refused any assistance. When she finally made it to her feet, I was worried that she would take a tumble down the stairs. I watched her stagger toward the stairs, bouncing off the furniture and the wall and then shakily making her way up to the bathroom. By now, I had to go too, so I waited at the foot of the stairs for her to come down, in case she needed catching. Fortunately, she didn’t.