August 29, 2009

Another drinking night, but still no fighting or nastiness. Good thing.

August 27, 2009

My wife was drinking but she was otherwise okay. No fighting, no harm, no foul, I guess.

August 25, 2009

As I thought might happen, my brother wrote me a rather over the top email basically asking how I could dare to ask that he or my sisters quit drinking for thirty days. He then engaged in a variety of personal attacks on me and my wife culminating in blaming my wife’s drinking on me. At first I was not going to respond to him at all, not wishing to pointlessly prolong a nasty argument by email. I did however, make the mistake of showing my wife his email. So she got drunk, go figure, and then we got into a big nasty fight over how I should respond to my brother’s message and be just as nasty to him as he was to me. I refused and the fight just got worse.

After a couple of days, I decided that some response was required. I let him know that his tone was unacceptable and that anyone that threatened by the thought of not drinking for thirty days probably did have a problem with booze. That his personal attacks were not a valid response and that perhaps everything wasn’t quite what he imagined. No doubt he will be offended by this, too. And this post also. I considered publishing both his email and my response, but the purpose of this blog is mostly to document my wife’s drinking and drunken bad behavior and that is starting to venture to far off track.

August 24, 2009

It has been a hell of a week. My mother has had a drinking problem for about thirty years, since she found my father was cheating on her. She never got over it. Now she is elderly and an alcoholic. In the past couple of weeks, she has set her apartment on fire twice, been found wandering in a grocery store, confused, not aware of who she was and had wet herself. The police took her to the hospital and they put her in detox. But apparently she did not show withdrawal symptoms so they cut her loose, a day before the Medicare rules would have allowed her to go to rehab. Great. She then ‘disappeared’ and was found sitting on a bench a while later. We now know that she went to a bar. Then to top things off, Sunday she went to this bar that is close enough to her apartment that she can walk there, she drank double vodkas until she got hammered and dropped her pants in the bar. Or they fell off, or whatever. In any case, the cops came again, she blew a .23 for BAC! Back to the hospital. She is in detox, again, but again, they aren’t planning to hold her long enough to qualify for rehab. WTF!

My sisters got in a horrible phone fight because my sister who lives in Florida got drunk and accused my sister who lives near my mother of not doing enough to stop my mother from drinking. This apparently led to a screaming match between my sisters, which led to a fight between my sister and my brother-in-law, complete with my niece and nephew crying in the background and my brother-in-law threatening to call the cops on my sister.

I made the mistake of telling my wife about all this, so of course, she got drunk! Just what I needed! I got to listen to her yell at the computer for an hour and then scribble illegibly about how screwed up my family is – mostly because of booze. My wife suggests that they all prove that they are worthy of pointing fingers at my mother by stopping drinking for thirty days. Probably a good idea, but none of them could do it.

I have decided to completely quit drinking myself. I mostly had already, but after these latest displays of horrible drunken behavior by pretty much all the members of my original family, I am sick of booze. I am done with drinking and drinkers. And before I hear about it from any of them who might read this and are offended, prove you are worthy of bitching. Take my wife up on her challenge. Quit drinking (or anything else) for thirty days. Then come bitch at me, if you want to. If you can.

August 20, 2009

I had to take my son to the hospital for an X-ray. Turns out he broke his radius during practice on Tuesday. I called my wife at work and told her where I was and she was fine. They finally got to us and put a splint on my son’s arm. My wife called and asked what was going on. She was back at the house now and no longer sober. Joyous. Nothing trumps the damn vodka. Plus, I found out that my mother was found at the grocery store wandering and confused and not sure who she was, and of course, they caught a “whiff of booze”. A triple whammy tonight!

August 19, 2009

At lunch, I told my wife that I really needed to talk to her and could she please be sober when she got home. She laughed and said of course. When she got home, I started to talk to her. I started with the things my mother is going through. By the time I finished with that, I could tell that my wife was no longer sober. I guess I should have specified that I wanted her to stay sober all evening, or at least until we were done talking. I guess she thought I meant to show up sober and start drinking as soon as she could after that.

It was about time for dinner and she said she had twenty bucks (the kids were with their grandparents) and did I want to eat Chinese? I said sure, is your key in your purse? I went to go get her key and she blocked the door and ran and got it herself. (Unlike most women, she usually has no problem with me getting something out of her purse.)  Gee, I wonder where she was hiding her bottle? Then she glared at me and said, if you want to talk, let’s talk about our son quitting football. This was something she had no problem with when I talked to her on  the phone and she was sober. Now, drunk, she wanted to argue about it. I declined.

We had just started eating when the kids came back. For background, earlier we had told the kids we would go to Six Flags this weekend. Last night, my wife told me she didn’t think we should go. Money was tight and we have bills to pay and it is going to be wicked hot and crowded. I agreed. I told her that I would speak to the kids and tell them we would postpone the trip until we could afford it better and the weather would be better. After dinner, with the kids sitting right there,  my wife looks at me and says, “What are doing this weekend? Have you told them?”  So, instead of breaking the news gently in my own fashion, I had to do it that way. And as soon as I started saying that we had bills to pay, my wife starts arguing with me, telling me to blow off the bills, so I can be the bad guy. I told her we can’t do that, and then I had to scramble to explain things to the kids. Nice set up, I’ll give her credit where credit was due. But I think the kids saw through the drunken ranting.

August 18, 2009

I got back from our son’s practice. I had already spoken to my wife and knew she was drinking. She complained that I made to much for dinner, again. All I made was grilled cheese sandwiches and canned clam chowder. I did put tomatoes and pesto on the grilled cheese, which she decided was just over the top.

Our son had hurt his arm at practice and my wife was getting all maudlin. He had told me earlier that he no longer wanted to play football. In fact, he said that he only tried it because he thought my wife and I were mad at him for quitting the guitar. I told him we weren’t mad and if he didn’t want to play, he didn’t have to. I didn’t want him to feel forced into doing stuff just to make us happy. I want him to find something he wants to do. I wanted to talk to my wife about his stopping football, but I couldn’t because she was drunk and I never know how things are going to go when she is drunk.

After dinner, the kids followed me upstairs to sit in the heat rather then stay down in the AC with my drunk wife. SHe followed us up and kept asking the kids why they were upstairs. I could see that she had figured it out when they couldn’t give her a good answer. This did not improve her mood.

Some show came on PBS about a family that went sail boat cruising for years. With one child that was two and a few month old baby. My wife told me that she would never live on a boat. Since that was what I had always planned to do and was quite up front about it with her, long before we were married, I figure this just about kills any chance of this marriage recovering. I know it is a different sort of life, but it was what I wanted. And she went as far as looking at some boats with me, earlier. She used our daughter as an excuse to not buy a boat when we had the money. Now I feel like this has all been a colossal waste of my time. My life, even.

Eventually she passed out. Fortunately without the drama that I often get. So I checked my email and found that my mother nearly burned her apartment down (You should not drink and cook!) and is not able to take care of herself the way she thinks she can, at least not while she is drinking. My sisters are scrambling to find some assisted living place for her. What a mess!

August 17, 2009

I talked to my wife while I was at the boy’s football practice. I could tell she had started hitting the bottle and was no longer her self. By the time I got back to the house, she was trashed. The kids and I went upstairs to make dinner. My wife comes up and looks at a fan that my in-laws have on the kitchen table. She announces that ‘they don’t use this, so I am going to take it downstairs.’ I told her that they do use it and she got all pissed off at me. She started to argue and then she just scrunched up her face and sulked.

A few minutes later, dinner was ready. My daughter and I made a chicken stir fry over rice. It was pretty tasty. We called everybody for supper and my wife began to complain that it was to hot to eat. Not the food (although I have done that before!), the kitchen was hot as hell. It had been a hot humid day. Of course, we were just serving ourselves in the kitchen. We eat down in the air conditioned basement. Then she complained that it was to late to eat. The boy has football practice from 6 to 8 and he can’t eat before that so we eat afterwards. It isn’t rocket science. Then she demanded that I just make sandwiches. (I refrained from pointing out that just because she had drunk her dinner, didn’t mean that everyone else wasn’t hungry.) I work all day and this is my only real chance to eat a meal and I am not going to eat a sandwich.  I asked her if she was going to eat, and she said yes and took a serving. Which she took downstairs, picked at and then didn’t eat. After all that bitching, she just pushed her food around on her plate. Not that I really want her to cook while drinking, but she could have made dinner while I was at practice with the boy and she didn’t. She chose to wait until I got back, so I really didn’t think she had much of a leg to stand on and complain at me about when we ate or what we ate, for that matter.

August 14, 2009

My wife went to a ‘pool party’ at a co-worker’s house. She told me she would call me around six and would be home early. She never called, but she was home by nine. I wasn’t thrilled by her going off to an event where drinking would be the primary activity, but what can I do? I decided to just put the best face on it, told her to have fun and call me if she was going to be late.

Apparently the only alcohol served was beer which my wife rarely drinks and doesn’t like. She complained that she was full. She wasn’t quite herself, but she wasn’t in full blown drunk bitch mode, either. So I guess all’s well that ends well. I really am only writing this to keep an accurate account of her drinking.

August 12, 2009

My wife called while I was at our son’s football practice and demanded that I help her with Facebook over the phone. I knew right away that she was drinking. When I got back from practice, she was plastered. The kids went to our neighbor’s house to swim and after a while my wife demanded that we go check on them because she couldn’t see lights on. I walked over and there were tiki torches and the father was watching the kids swim. My wife showed up, reeking of vodka and staggering all over the place. I can only imagine what my neighbor thought.

We went back to the house to eat and my wife refused. She was ‘done’, she said. She went to bed while the kids and I ate tamale pie. It was delicious, if I say so myself. Later, when I went to bed, I started to read myself to sleep, like I always do and my wife yelled at me to turn off the light and get some sleep. She told me I needed my rest. Then she started a loud and nasty rant about one of out other neighbors, whom my wife has decided is assisting the kids’ football league so that she can cheat on her husband with one of the coaches. No evidence of any sort about this, my wife just decided that must be what is going on. (Notice that she has now forgotten that I need to sleep…) Finally she quieted down and went to sleep so I could, too.