November 9, 2009

I found out that the kids had broken a wheel off the baby stroller that my in-laws keep around for when their youngest grandchildren come over. By having my mother-in-law look at the stroller and say “Oh, what happened to the stroller? I told them not to break it.” Shit. So I had to go ask the kids and at first they tried to tell me that the wheel just fell off while they were playing with it and that it was fixable. We had a ‘little chat’ about respecting other people’s property and telling me when they break things so that I could fix them before they become problems. The boy was supposed to go to a friend’s house and we went up to go and I looked at the stroller on the way out. It was not fixable and the wheel definitely did not just ‘fall off.’ So I cancelled the trip to his friend’s house and we went back downstairs. Now I was really bent. They broke the stroller by pushing my son around in it, even after they had been told not to do that any more. Then they lied to me about it. So I grounded them both, no TV, no electronics, and I made them clean up our little room. Then I told them they were going to get all the leaves raked up and into the street for pickup and they were grounded until that was done. I also made them go up and apologize to their grandmother.  (They did a really good job cleaning the basement apartment. I must have put the fear into them!)  I decided the whole thing was well and appropriately  handled. Then I called my wife to let her know so that she wouldn’t get blind sided by her mother when she got back from work. She seemed to think that I handled things well, too.

She was fine when she got back from work, but by the time I served dinner, she was too drunk to eat it. I made a Cobb salad and she couldn’t eat hers without throwing it all over herself. So she got mad and stopped eating. Great, another liquid dinner night with no food to slow it down. She was actually more or less okay until after I put the kids to bed. She was definitely drunk, and babbling and not making a whole lot of sense, but she wasn’t as obnoxious as she often is. But after I put the kids to bed she started in on me. She told me that I must have really yelled at the kids to get them to clean the room as well as they did. Actually, I hardly raised my voice and I didn’t yell at all. Then she kept getting confused and asking me over and over what they kids were going to do with the leaves. Finally I cut her off and went upstairs for a shower and to get ready for bed. That pissed her off and she started in with her “I’m tired, I’m done,” routine. I ignored her and went upstairs. When I got back down, she had passed out. But she slept like crap, moaning and thrashing around all night and ruining my sleep.

November 6, 2009

It wasn’t a bad night in spite of her drinking. The boy was spending the night at a friend’s house and our daughter went upstairs to read early so it was pretty stress free for us alone together. We had a nice time alone with each other, something that doesn’t happen often enough.

November 2 – 5, 2009

The little woman was drunk all week. I wasn’t up to kicking her out like I had threatened to do. And Monday she was a major drunk bitch, mean to the kids and nasty to me. Tuesday and Wednesday she was just a minor bitch and Thursday she was almost tolerable. I was sick as a dog all week and I just couldn’t deal with her and attempting to toss her out. I guess I wimped out. We shall see what tonight brings. (writing the sixth.)

October 30, 2009

It was a bad one tonight. She got pretty hammered and was obnoxious to the kids. Mostly she sat there, drunk on the couch with this snotty “I know better than you” look on her face and bitched at the kids about school, their homework and anything else she could think of. Fortunately, she passed out early. If that had been the end of things, it would have been more or less okay.

But she lay in bed, moaning and swearing. Then she started yelling that she was done, done with us, done with the kids, done with her job, and done with her parents. Then she actually got up and started yelling about the kids still being awake. It was 9:45 on a Friday night and they were watching Monk with me – a show she usually allows them to watch with no problem. So I got up and told her the kids were watching TV with me and would go to bed when this show was over and she should go back to bed and pass out again. So she started yelling at me and demanded a divorce. I told her she was being a drunken asshole and to just go back to sleep. The kids went upstairs, so I went up with them and put them to bed.

The next morning when she woke up, I tore into her. I told her that her behavior was absolutely unacceptable. That being a drunken nag was not a substitute for being a mother or a wife. That if I caught her drinking again, I was packing her stuff and throwing her out and I would deal with her parents about it afterwards. I didn’t want to hear any excuses, no ‘bad days at work’, no ‘girl’s night out’, no Happy Hours, no nothing. That she hadn’t made any attempt to quit drinking since we came back from North Carolina a year and a half ago and I was done with her drunken bullshit. If she brings home a bottle, or I smell booze on her, or she acts like a drunken bitch, I am packing her up and throwing her stuff in the driveway. I told her I loved her and I wanted her there as my wife but if that isn’t what she wants or if she can’t do that, then we are done.

I am writing this on Sunday night. The weekend has been pretty good. But I am afraid that tomorrow will be our last. I have no reason to believe that she will not pick up a bottle on the way home from work, no matter what I have said about it. And I am going to follow through on my promise to her. I have to.

October 26, 2009

After a quiet weekend, drunk bitch returned in full force. We had clam chowder for dinner and she took one bite and declared that there were to many potatoes in it and refused to eat any more. So basically, she drank her dinner.

After dinner, the kids and I went for a walk. When we got back, Heroes was on and I tried to settle down to watch it. My wife called me from her lounge, demanding that I come out there. I got up and went to see what she wanted. She had our daughter’s purse and notebook spread out on her table and said, “Look what I found in your daughter’s purse.” There was a movie ticket stub, the wrapper from a pair of 3D glasses, and some Trident gum wrappers along with ten dollars and fifty cents. I have no idea what the problem was, so I just said, “Yes?” She started going off about how she was not going to “lose our daughter.” Still, I had no idea what she was talking about, so I said I was going back to watch TV. She got pissed. A few minutes later she demanded that I come out and “talk to her.”

I walked out to hear what she had to say. She had some school papers out and asked me if I had seen them. I hadn’t. She got pissed at me for not having gone through my daughter’s notebook that day. Started yelling about how she wasn’t going to lose our daughter. Again. I said that there was nothing I could say to her right now. (My thought was that the only way she would “lose” our daughter was by drinking and being a drunken asshole, but I just didn’t think it would be productive to point that out.) She got all snotty and said she would talk to me tomorrow. Then I asked her why she had to do this during one of the only shows I watch on the idiot box and she got pissed about that, too. She was yelling at me that I cared more about TV then my daughter, that Heroes was boring, and other obnoxious stuff, so I walked out on her. (I can understand her not liking Heroes, especially since she usually gets so drunk when it is on that she either passes out or can’t follow even the simplest story lines.) Another night where she stayed as far away as possible.

October 22, 2009

She was drunk again. She was nasty to the kids and to me. She started badgering the boy about his spelling words. She kept demanding that he spell “microorganism” over and over again. He got it right and then she kept after him and he started getting flustered and would get the “ism” part mixed up. Then she would yell at him. When she spelled it wrong herself, I finally said, “Okay, this is enough. Why don’t we take a little break?” She went ballistic. Started yelling at me and demanded to know what I was doing. I told her she was going overboard and when she spelled the word wrong, it was enough and time to stop. She swore that she didn’t say it wrong (she did) and that I was an asshole. I told her she was drunk and to just cut it out. To leave the kids alone and stop talking. She stormed out to her smoking lounge. Then she spent the rest of the night avoiding me. She wouldn’t look at me and if she walked through the room where I was, she would look at the wall and push herself up against the wall and stayed as far away from me as physically possible.

October 20, 2009

She was drinking. Again. She started to try and pick a fight about my not having cut our son’s hair the night before. I pointed out that I would have except that she jumped in the bathroom and didn’t get out until 9:30 and it would have been after ten before our son’s hair had been cut and him showered and in bed. She shut up for a minute. Then she started telling me that I should just shave his head. She told me to give him a Mohawk and then shave it off later. I said that wasn’t happening and she got bent about that.

When I got to doing the boy’s hair, she staggered up and sat on the can and began criticizing. I asked her nicely, twice, to leave as I don’t work well with someone looking over my shoulder. She told me that we weren’t hair cutters. Then she continued to nag at me about the cut and I told her to leave. She tried to argue and I said I didn’t want her in there while I was doing this, especially not since she was drunk. That put her over the top. She started yelling at me that it had taken me two weeks to cut the boy’s hair. I pointed out that it had been seven years and she was STILL drinking. She stomped off downstairs and didn’t talk to me the rest of the night. In fact, she wouldn’t even look at me. Walked around the edges of the room, with her eyes anywhere but on me. I went to bed and read, and when she finally came to bed, she lay there muttering until she passed out.

Another fine drunken night.

October 19, 2009

Monday night so it’s back to the bottle. She nagged at me and the kids about cutting my son’s hair. I said I would do it after watching Heroes. My wife decided right as I was getting up to go cut my son’s hair that she needed to take a shower. Okay. No haircuts tonight. Other then talking strange and being mean to the kids and sabotaging the haircut with her sudden ‘need’ for a shower, it wasn’t to bad.

October 16, 2009

Drinking again. Her brother came over. Her mother is out of town for four days (she actually told us it would be a couple of days, but apparently she left on Friday and isn’t coming back until Monday. That isn’t “a couple”, in my book) and she wants us to keep an eye on my father-in-law. He is ill and falls a lot. He needs help getting back up, so we have to listen for unexplained thuds and then go help him if necessary. He is also diabetic and her mother insists that he has to eat before seven. That was why she invited my brother-in-law to come over last night. He brought dinner, but he got delayed and didn’t show up until about seven thirty. (Oops, that plan backfired!) While he was there, he let it be known that my other brother-in-law was coming over tonight. All this has been set up by my mother-in-law. My wife is convinced that it is because her mother doesn’t trust us to feed her father on time. And after her brother left last night, she went on a rant about it. I told her maybe that was true, but maybe it was also true that she had her sons come over and bring the grandchildren so that my father-in-law would have some entertainment beside the idiot box all weekend and some human contact. He has been rude and angry towards us, so we probably don’t really fit the bill and don’t spend much time with him. My wife went ballistic, again, and refused to consider that there was any ‘nice’ reason that her mother set up these visits by her brothers. She stomped off to her smoking lounge and all I could hear from her was profanity and “I’m done”. Again.

Also, while my brother-in-law was here with his family, my wife was drunk and playing with her niece and nephew. It only resulted in one accidental smack in the eye for the niece, and she got over it quickly, so I guess it could have been worse. My brother-in-law is an alcoholic who has quit drinking. He knows a bit of what my wife is going through, but he was able to quit and she apparently can’t, or won’t. I’m sure he knows my wife was drunk, it was pretty obvious, she talks funny and says inappropriate things and doesn’t really track the conversation going on around her.

October 15, 2009

Another drunk night. They are all starting to run together in my mind, they all seem the same. She drinks, is mean to the kids, and her IQ seems to drop about twenty points. Then she goes off on something, I don’t even remember what it was, but if I don’t agree with her, or, if I actually dare to disagree, she takes it completely personally. And if I then tell her that I don’t want to talk to her any more because she is drunk and not making any sense any more, she goes really ballistic, screaming and ranting that she is done with me, done with the kids, done with her parents, done with her job, and, oh yeah, she wants a divorce.

I will have to remember to write these every day, or at least by the day after because they are all starting to run together. Plus, I have decided to just not let her drunken, abusive behavior have the same hold on me that it has had for so many years. I guess I am finally learning to distance myself from her antics, can putting actual distance from her be to far behind?