Another drinking night. She complained about dinner and refused to eat more than a couple of bites. She said her chicken drumstick was underdone and she wouldn’t eat the coleslaw I made. (The drumstick could have cooked a few more minutes, but the meat was not red and the juices were clear.) That pretty much set the tone for the evening.

While I was helping my daughter with her pre-algebra homework (working with positive and negative exponents, which she claims the teacher did not explain, so I had to teach it to her), my wife started in with, “Don’t get pissed at her like you did with me.” Years ago, she took a pre-algebra course as a first step to go to nursing school. She didn’t finish the course and gave up on nursing school. While I was trying to teach our daughter, my wife kept saying, “That doesn’t make any sense to me. What you just said doesn’t mean anything to me. I told you I am no good with numbers.” I tried to tell her that as long as that was her attitude, it guaranteed that she would never ‘get numbers’, but she didn’t see my point and just kept telling me that she didn’t get numbers and I knew she didn’t get numbers. None of this was helping our daughter or helping me teach her exponents. She did seem to get it after a while though, although my wife was never convinced and kept bad mouthing my teaching and saying our daughter would never ‘get numbers’ either.

Then my wife went up and took a shower. Later, I went upstairs and found that she had cut her hair, while drunk and thrown away a bunch of stuff that she shouldn’t have. This is very typical behavior for her. I had to dig it out of the trash and put the bathroom back together again.

When she came down, she demanded that since she couldn’t afford a haircut, I needed to shave her head. I told her that I didn’t think it would be a good look for her. (I didn’t know at this point that she had been snipping away at her head while upstairs.)

Finally, she started bitching at my son for pretty much nothing. He asked me a question about the brand of tomato juice that was used in some commercial jingle. I asked him if he meant V-8 and he said yes. My wife jumped in and started yelling at him that he was never going to drink tomato juice so why did he need to know about V-8? The boy and I decided it was time for him to go upstairs and go to bed. The wife passed out when we left.

We went to a hotel for the night, mainly because my wife wanted a break from her family. I couldn’t really blame her, I could use one myself. We found one with an indoor pool so the kids would have a good time, too.

We brought the booze we had bought the night before Thanksgiving. Once we got to the hotel, I made myself a drink and asked my wife not to turn evil on me. She said she’d try not to, but it didn’t really work out. We went out for dinner, and by that time she had been hitting the bottle pretty hard. Everything was crowded and had a waiting list. As we drove around looking for a place, my wife kept picking fights with me and telling me which way to go, usually the wrong way, which just meant we had another thing to argue about.  She just kept getting meaner and nastier. We tried several places and finally found a Mexican restaurant and just ordered our food to go. My wife stood outside yelling at the other patrons that they should all go home and they were stupid for eating out. (I couldn’t help but wonder what that made us, but I didn’t bother pointing that out.)

When we got back to the room with our food, she basically wouldn’t eat what she ordered and passed out for a bit. When she came to, she got amorous, which was awkward since we only had the one room. I just wasn’t up for going for it in the bathroom, especially not since we had been arguing for the last couple of hours and I wasn’t really ‘in the mood’. She finally realized that it just wasn’t going to happen and passed out fairly soon after.

She was drinking again. Just before the liquor stores would close, she asked me to take her to get some vodka. I could see a fight brewing if I refused, so I took her. She would have just gone herself, and been pissed off at me, too, so I went along to get along. When we got back, she was already drunk enough to just pass out so she didn’t drink any more and we didn’t fight.

The next day, Thanksgiving, I told her that I wasn’t going to tell her not to drink, but I reminded her that when she was sober, she was able to tolerate her family better, so maybe if she could hold off on drinking until after dinner, or at least, mix her drinks (instead of guzzling her rotgut vodka straight out of the bottle, her usual method of consumption). She told me she wasn’t planning on drinking at all and she didn’t. Consequently, we had a pretty nice Thanksgiving.

The boy had basketball practice, so we ate late. My daughter and I took him to practice and my wife was shit faced and mean when we got back. She sat there bitching about how she was starving. I had made dinner already, it was sitting on the stove waiting for our return from practice. I made a curried beef with a cucumber riata and some store-bought Naan. The little woman took one look at this and declared that the naan was doughy and disgusting. (She has eaten this before and raved about how good it was.) She spooned some of the meat onto her plate and a little of the riata and then tossed the riata into the salad I had made and threw her napkin on her plate. I guess she was done. Later, my son bit into a dried chile pepper in the beef and it was a bit much for him. My wife started bitching at me for putting the chiles in the curry, like I had hidden it deliberately to hurt the kids. I refused to answer her, as I couldn’t say anything that wouldn’t just lead to a fight with a drunk and I didn’t want to do that over dinner.

She had also ‘cleaned’ while we were gone. She did some vacuuming and left the vacuum in the middle of the floor, so her parents will be bitching about needing the vacuum and I will be carrying it back upstairs. She moved furniture around and managed to put the recliner in front of a pole so I can’t recline it and wedged some books underneath it. She also went through some magazines I was saving and left them lying on the floor, like she wants me to throw them away. I ignored all this too, and will restore the furniture and books and magazines while she is at work. Touching any of it would have meant another fight and I just don’t see the point.

I don’t want to fight and argue with a drunk any more. It isn’t that I am spineless, it simply is pointless. She won’t remember it the next  morning and I will have just gotten all worked up and angry and have scared the children for nothing. I don’t really even see the point in trying to talk to her when she is sober. She either just sits there staring at her table or the floor or she agrees with me that she has a problem. Then she says she will do something about it and she never does, at least not anything at all in the last two years and pretty little before that. One trip to rehab, which kept her sober for less than a month. She hates AA, and I can’t say that I blame her. For those that it helps, great, but the success rate is abysmal and the religious overtones are off-putting. When she tried AA, either she would show up drunk (like many others) or she would get drunk afterwards. It was just a way to get out of the house and hit the liquor store. Her last trip to AA was the night I brought the kids back from North Carolina two years ago and she killed her van by driving it into a tree. She says “black ice”, I say “vodka”. Since she had crumpled the front end enough to smash the radiator and apparently had no idea of the extent of the damage done, (she tried to drive it to work the next day), and had driven it back to the house after her accident, probably to avoid tickets and DUI’s, I think vodka was a pretty safe bet. She also doesn’t deny being drunk when I asked her about it.

I am just trying to keep things on as even a keel as I can until I can afford to take the kids somewhere safe without her. I am getting my family out of this mess. If she can leave the booze behind, she is welcome, if not, she isn’t.

Another work day, another drinking night. I tried to talk to her Saturday after she had let her daughter down by not being there for our girl to deal with her menstrual issues because of her being drunk and psychotic. She told me she would do better and show me that she cares, about our children and our marriage. But not tonight, I guess.

She wasn’t horrible, just drunk enough to be stupid and argumentative. We were watching Jeopardy and I (deliberately) mispronounced an answer, the Beatles. My wife looked at me and asked me (with this rather hopeful look on her face), if I were drunk. That was when I knew for  sure that she had been drinking. Then she complained about dinner and didn’t eat more than a mouthful. She does this a lot, I suspect she either doesn’t want to ruin a perfectly good buzz by eating or being drunk already, she just isn’t interested in food. I let that slide. Why not?

Later, she demanded that I cut our son’s fingernails. Okay, they needed it and to avoid a pointless drunken confrontation, I went to get the nail clippers and do the deed. But the clippers were gone. Turns out that my wife had gotten drunk a few nights ago and ‘cleaned’ out the shelves where we keep the clippers. At first she denied throwing away any clippers, of course she wouldn’t do such a thing, but then it came out that she didn’t like the clippers I liked and since they were useless to her, she threw them out. Now we have only one set of toenail clippers (and it has a curved cutter, I was always taught that one should cut one’s toenails straight across to avoid ingrown toenails, so this one is not as useful as the one she threw away, to me) and no fingernail clippers at all. And she got mad at me for this!

She then tore apart the little box I kept the clippers in, along with other odds and ends, including my wedding ring, which I no longer wear. She found it and got mad about that, too. There is a reason I don’t wear my ring. I am a machinist and machinists that wear jewelry often get the jewelry caught up by the powerful and swiftly rotating machinery we use and lose both the jewelry and whatever bits of our selves the jewelry was attached to. I have a number of friends who are minus not only their wedding rings but their ring fingers, too. I like my fingers and I have always promised myself that I would leave this job with the same number of body parts that I started with.

Another drunk night. She comes down all weepy looking and I ask what is wrong. Our daughter (just turned thirteen) is having her period and hasn’t talked to my wife about it. My wife was all upset that our daughter won’t talk to her about this. It is supposed to be “her thing,” she said to me. I could see she was drunk and I just said that, “I don’t know what to tell you about that, honey.” I could have said that your daughter needs you and you are too drunk to deal with her problems, but other than giving me a nasty sort of cheap shot, what would that accomplish?

So I went up to see my daughter and she was crying, too. My wife had upset her. I sat with her and put my arm around her and let her cry for a minute. Then I asked her what was up. No answer. I asked her if she were having her period. She nodded. I asked if she still was. Yes. Did she have pads? No. I said I would go get her some and in the future, she needed to tell me when she ran out. Not when she was having her period, simply when she had run out of her supply. I asked her if she had cramps or anything. No. That is a good thing, apparently my wife had horrible cramps when she was young. Did right up until I knocked her up, too. So my wife has a lot of issues about menstruation.

So, I prepare for a trek out to get my girl some pads, and I tell my wife that she should go upstairs and just sit with our daughter. Put her arm around her, and not say a damn thing. Her response? “It is my job to nag at our kids.” So I said to just forget it. And off I went.

Later, before she passed out, my wife insisted that I get her a bag of ice to make her red, puffy eyes look better. I do it. Shortly after that, she goes down for the count. Another fine night, courtesy of my wife and the fine distillers of Dubra Vodka.

She was drinking all week again. Not bad the first three nights, but tonight was. Out son had his first basketball practice and he was nervous about it. He said he wanted to eat afterwards and I asked my wife and she agreed. He and I did the practice, he did pretty well and got over most of the nervousness.

When we got back, I finished making dinner. I made burritos, a meal that has been one of my favorites and one I have made almost every week since I have been with my wife. This is twenty-one years of living together. I must be closing in on making burritos about a thousand times. Tonight, my very drunk wife, took one look at her burrito, dumped the filling onto her plate, said this is gross and announced that she does not like burritos and never has. Then she started bitching at me for not making nachos, for no reason I could make out. She pointed at her plate and demanded to know “Where is the crunch?” WTF? (As an aside, Monday night she broke her tooth on a piece of something in a pre-made burger patty. I have avoided hard or crunchy foods since then, as a courtesy.) Then she kept bitching at me because she was “starving”. I said, “Fuck you” and walked away.

Full disclosure. I had gotten a bottle of vodka for myself. And I had two beers left over from the previous weekend. But our son had gotten invited to a friend’s house to watch wrestling (he is really into it, which becomes relevant later) and I had to drive so I only had the two beers. My wife insisted that I make her a dirty martini and I made her one. But she must have had her own stash because she got quite drunk and got nasty.

Our boy wants very badly to go to Wrestlemania in Phoenix next year. I have told him how expensive it is and how unlikely it is that we can afford to do this. But he is trying to save money and make it happen. Maybe it is unrealistic and I have told him not to get his heart set on it, but at the same time if he wants to try, I am not going to stop him or tell him that there is no way it could happen. My drunk wife, however, wants to squash his dreams and we got into a big argument about it after she got drunk. I think it will be a valuable lesson for him to understand about money and dreams. She thinks it will only lead to heartbreak and disappointment and wants to stop it now. And reasonable people could disagree about this and if she had been sober, we could have discussed it. Instead, I get argumentative, nasty, negative drunk bitch attacking me and crying and carrying on about it in her drunken hopeless, negative way. So I bowed out of the argument and pointed out that I was not arguing with her while she was drunk. This never goes over well and I had to walk away rather than get in a yelling match with her.

It was our daughter’s birthday. My sister-in-law was coming over with their kids so we could have a birthday celebration. Usually when she shows up, my wife gets hammered and stays downstairs and is anti-social. Tonight, she was sober while her sister was here and that part of the evening was okay. She didn’t get drunk and obnoxious until after her sister left. The kids were in bed by this point, so I was the only one who got treated to the arrival of her drunken persona. Better then usual, I guess.

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.