Little Bits of Pixie Dust

Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate in one hand, martini in the other, body thourougly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO, what a ride!!"

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Coming Clean- Part One

I realize that I have never provided an actual explanation here as to why my husband and I are currently separated.  Like everything, it was a build up of a lot of stuff, but I can pretty much pinpoint when things started to go downhill.
My husband hated his job and knew that a lay off was imminate, so we made the decision for him to accept it and go on unemployment; while he was receiving benefits, he could go back to school and get a degree, as well as stay home with C. while I was at work, saving us on baby-sitting. And God love him, A* took the bull by the horns and went back to school, though I have never met a person that hates school and all the work it entitles more than him.  But he sucked it up and went, and completed it.  And then he had this degree and absolutely nothing to do with it.  He hadn't realized that to really do anything in the field he had chosen he would at least need a bachelor's degree, and if he wanted to do especially well he would have to get something higher than that.  All that time, he felt, was completely wasted, all the work and the way he had sweated over that computer keyboard as he laboriously pumped out papers and forced himself to stay awake after we were all sleeping, propping himself up in our uncomfortable computer chair while the house was silent around him; all of that time and effort had been for nothing.
This is the point in time when my husband became a complete stranger.  I know this wasn't possible, but I swear it felt like one morning I woke up and there was another person laying next to me.  He did a total 360 degree personality change, stopped sleeping, was mean, stopped caring about how he looked (and this was someone that used to iron his JEANS)... everything that I loved about A* seemed to disappear.  I confronted him and told him that I thought he was depressed, which he pretty much blew off.  He told me everyone gets down sometimes, but he didn't need any kind of help, he was fine.  He told me that he was applying for temp agencies and had a good lead on a job.  And because A* has always been the rock, the one who has held me up all these years, I chose to overlook all these signs and believed him, because I wanted to believe him and I didn't want to see.  He told me that he got the job with the temp agency, and I believed that too.  He continued to not sleep; any time that I got up in the night I would find him in the living room, texting furiously.  He started erasing messages that came through on our shared phone.  And then one day I had to call his mom for something, and the tower of lies came crashing down.  His mom was supposedly watching C. while both of us for work, and I think I was going to be late some morning or something, so I called her to let her know.  She said in a quiet voice, "D, he hasn't been here in two months.  I haven't seen or spoken to A*."  I don't even know what really went through my head; so many things were rushing around in there... where had he been taking my son all day, was the most important one.  I immediately got a hold of A* and told him to bring my son to me, right now.  I just had to make sure he was safe, I had this unreasonable fear that he wasn't safe and I needed to see him.  When I got in the car, I was sobbing and A* came clean; he said that he hadn't had a job all this time, but he hadn't wanted to tell me.  I couldn't believe that he would lie to me about something that big, and I also couldn't believe that I could be so dumb.  All of these things started making sense, little tidbits that hadn't added up but that I had once again chosen to ignore.  I asked him where he had been getting money, and he said that he would rather not say.  I didn't know what the hell that meant, but was still focusing on this huge lie.
Before I could even catch my breath from this, and wonder why my husband had chosen to deceive me in this way, we found out that our landlord had decided to sell the house we were renting, and that we had to get out of there right away.  Obviously now that I knew only one of us had a job, I also knew that we didn't have the money to move right then.  I was so confused and beaten down, and I didn't know what to do about anything... our life, our marriage, our living situation, the way that I didn't know my husband anymore.  I was scared and exhausted.  With no where else to turn, we made the fateful decision to move in with my parents for a while while we got our finances in order.
And little did we know, our life would come crashing down even harder around us.

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