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.