Love and Marriage

Everyday it becomes harder between me and my wife. We've never been the best at communicating with each other and now she's working her crappy minimum wage job from 3am until noon. So she's always in bed before the kids are and call me old fashioned but I really don't want to talk about all the difficult decisions in front of the kids. Partially because I don't want the them to know, but also things are bound to get heated and I really hate fighting in front of the kids. I mean, I totally recognize that knowing mom and dad fight isn't entirely bad. People fight and they work through it, and it set a good example. Our walls are paper thin, they don't need to see us fight to know we fight. More importantly, I'm not sure we are going to work through this.

My wife's been very passive aggressively dropping that hint. At least I think she is. Among other things she checked out a book from the library about trial separations. The heartache there is I've finally seen the error of my ways, on my own, but I'm not sure that she's ready to accept that.

So what is my ways? Well that takes me back fifteen years or so to High School. For reasons I've never full identified I was a very depressed kid. I was always the smallest kid in school, so I was picked on a lot. I had the second worst case of ADHD the evaluator had ever seen. The worst case ... my father. My parents relationship was always rocky. They did a good job of hiding it though except for the fact that one of my earliest childhood memories was of my Mother asking us kids if they split up who would we want to live with. One of several memories I repressed some time. Another fun filled repressed memory was some old guy trying (and failing) to molest me while I was on a family vacation. Actually, now that i see all this on paper, combined with the fact that I had an older half sister who I never knew existed until the summer she came to live with us actually does go along way to explaining my depression.

Anyway I won't bore you with the details but lets just say I cut myself often, I made a few week suicide attempts or plans. Only one was really serious and I remember standing on the overpass wondering if I live am I going to be so crippled I can't try again? The thought of living in a state where I couldn't even end it anymore was enough to talk myself out of it. So the point being I spent 7/8 of High School not planning on living much longer. I did finally shake the self destructive drive during my senior year but some how inside I still had the strong inclination that I wouldn't live very long. At one point I even had an exact date picked out. It wasn't so much a feeling of impending doom as much as it was don't waste a minute of your life on unimportant crap.

I continued to put my life back together, or together for the first time. And the date came and went and I didn't even realize it. But still live my life like I was on the clock. I'm really happy where my life wound up. I don't want there to be any mistake about that. I love my wife, I love my kids. I wouldn't do anything to change having them in my life. But that sense of being on the clock never really left me until recently.


I guess it can be best described in terms of Science Fiction. I feel like at some point in time I wound up on the wrong time line. I was supposed to have a miserable shot life, I was wired for it, and somehow I wound up with something else. I like where I am much better than where I thought I'd be, but that doesn't take away the feeling that it's some how not what the cosmos intended for me.

This ingrained short life span mentality permeated through everything I did. Why clean house when you'll be dead tomorrow? There's better ways to spend your time. Why watch what you eat because you'll be dead in a week anyway? Why save money for a rainy day when you may not live to see that rainy day. Why make friends when they'll only have to attend your funeral? Why share feelings if you won't be around tomorrow to do something about them.

That's what hurt our marriage long before the job loss. I was accused of being lazy but I wasn't I just didn't want to wash clothes I'd never have a chance to wear. My impulse buying ... why make money when you can't spend it? All of it every complain she's ever had comes back to this. And believe it or not missing that self imposed Halloween deadline to find a job hit me over the head to show me how fucked up this thinking was. Why do these things, because if I don't the people I love, my wife my kids, will have to, even if I do die tomorrow. Because thinking that the cosmos has some big set master plan for me that I somehow got off track from isn't fact and it isn't spirituality or faith. It's delusions of grandeur at best.

I've been with my wife for eleven years operating under a false assumption of my impending demise. And now I have to make it up to her. Now I have to fix a decades worth of damage before my wife's library books are due. So she won't decide to leave me, if she hasn't already. I'm hopeful and optimistic about fixing myself, but I know if she leaves even if under a trial separation, it'll be the crushing blow that puts me back on that ticking clock path. I don't need her to save me, I just need her not to throw another obstacle in my way. I want to change, I need to change and for the first time in my life I really mean that. I feel like a different person entirely. I've tried to change before, because I knew it was wrong. This time I don't need to try to change my mind set. That part is done. Trying to change the mindset is nearly impossible by shear force of effort. I had my epiphany, my new track is set and now it's just a matter of shaking old habits and repairing years of damage. I just hope it's not too late.

I can't tell her I'm changing, I've told her that before. My actions will speak louder than my words. But is she so used to seeing me as a lazy fat fuck up that she can't see me anymore as anything else? ... maybe. It seems that way. But I have to do this. The one thing that might save me is we're to poor to get divorced right now. The longer I go without a job the more time I have to fix it. Choose the job to save the marriage or choose unemployment to save the marriage. Arg!

This is my life now.