Yes, I'm Still Alive

There is so much I could have blogged since my last posting, whether from stuff pulled from online sources or depressing you with accounts of my personal life. I'm not giving up on this blog. I still have much to say.

Things are rather bad at the moment in my marriage. While I admit, and have admitted to my wife my bad actions, she is focusing on mine and ignoring hers. I have held my tongue about so much and tried to be a good husband and father during this dark time, but I don't think she has held back at all. She has been cruel, disrespectful, and ungrateful and has stopped bothering to be a wife or mother. Clearly she's depressed, but she's not handling it. I have no idea how many pills she popping for how many different symptoms at this point, but I have reason to believe she just decided to resume or up her dosage of antidepressant. Don't know if that will help. Based on the medications she has herself on alone, I don't expect her to live a long life. Add in some of her behavior (letting herself lose more and more weight, for example... she's starting to look like a concentration camp prisoner on the History Channel) which will also kill her young, and it is a double whammy.

Geez, there is so much I would go back and tell myself during the time I making plans to marry her...

...about how many medications and treatments she was on.
...about how we would not be able to rely on her family.
...about how she would never, ever get over the fact that I was not a virgin.
...about how her being a virgin has less to do with virtue than it does with libido (see "medications").
...about how her idea of being a stay-at-home-mom was going to be too literal too much of the time.
...about how I will never be allowed to screw up without her harping on it and lecturing me for hours when I should be getting sleep, insisting I get therapy, and equating my behavior with her mother's alcoholism.
...about how sacrificing my savings, professional dreams, personal freedom, social time, hobbies, etc. would be met not with thanks and ongoing appreciation but with contempt and a demand I sacrifice more.

In other words, I would have told myself not to get married. When a marriage-and-family minded, churchgoing, somewhat-conservative Christian can't, in good conscience, endorse marriage, then we're a doomed culture.

Oh, I know... it has to be with the right person. The problem is, she's the "rightest" person by far. I doubt there was anyone else out there more right for me as a wife, and while I do have my faults, I'm not difficult to live with or high-maintenance. She has so many good qualities. If it doesn't work between us, it can't work for all that many people.

She's now threatening to take the kids and leave me. You'd laugh if you found out what tipped off this latest round. I've apologized, I've suggested ways I can prevent it from happening again, and after hours of her harping, I have agreed that I will go to counseling for me (not couples, as we did for something like three sessions before she realized we didn't have the problem she thought we did.) Her reactions have less to do with me than they to do with her brain chemistry, apparently, and whatever she's carrying over from her childhood. I have no idea how ME going a counselor is going to help. It is appearing to me like she married me under false pretenses, but I'm not going to leave her, at least not as long as the kids are minors. We have a long way to go. So what... I'm going to go to a counselor and tell him that my wife is cruel to me, married me under false pretenses, and that I'm not going to leave her... then what? I refuse to be medicated for reacting normally to this. Actually, I'm not going to tell him the false pretenses part if there is any chance that will ever be passed along to her, even if only as him getting her in there with me and insisting I tell her that. I just won't do it. I know she can't take back the things she's said to me... I will never forget them. Being a man, however, I can still do my "marital duty" should this latest crap smooth over... there's no way she'll be able to do the same if I speak all of my mind, and I really don't want to further degrade the conditions my kids are living in.

Speaking of that, I suppose I could be using this time to clean up the mess that his place has become in the last several days. Or, maybe I could get married and my wife could take care of the home while I earn income? Oh, right, supposedly I already did that.


Hmmm. I had only planned to come here and write a short note, but I've unloaded a little, haven't I?