On sickness and health.

There’s a job that will take my husband away 5 days per week.  I think he’s going to accept it and I think I am not sorry.  I think I like the thought of him being gone 5 days a week.

I will admit that I am desperate to have an affair.  I will further admit that what I really want is for my kids to see their father on weekends and know that I have a nice guy who will change lightbulbs for me and maybe install a dishwasher when it breaks.  And then I want him to leave.  That is the height of using someone.  Believe me, I know that.  I admit this; I didn’t say I was proud of it.  Just that it is honest.

He says something is wrong with him.  But he has said this before.  I have listened to this for years.  I have supported him through his trials with anti-depressant medication.  He has an anxiety disorder.  He is incredibly overweight.  He smokes.  None of this contributes positively to someone’s overall health.  Of course I know this.  I have tried to help.  No, really.  I have.

I am sick too.  I have an incredibly disgusting skin disorder that I have had for many years.  Decades, really.  The kind of skin disorder where the only “treatment” is to cut skin away.  I have had three surgeries to remove this diseased, disgusting, horrifying skin.  None of them have gone well.  One landed me in the hospital because of a terrible infection.  I have no ACL anymore, so I deal with that. I deal with my illnesses.  He has helped me with some of those things and I mean it when I say I am grateful for that.

I am sick, and I am not like him.

He is “sick” (how?) and he is an apathetic, joyless, shell of a person.

I have persisted.  This has gone on for many years.  Pockets of good slathered with long stretches of bad.  Some of it has been intolerable.  If I counted the number of times I have said “I am past done” or “not another day”…I would be rich indeed.

My life becomes more joyless because I have no one to share joy with.  Oh, fuck off; I know about “happiness is a choice” and I don’t want to hear it.  It’s a tougher choice than people think.  I’m not going to write about that now, but at some point maybe I will.  It is nearly impossible for me to choose joy when I am saddled with a man who sucks the joy out of everything.  And I am not one of those who gets this incredible joy out of my children.  For the record, I have fantastic, amazing, totally unique children. I love that.  But they are not the center of my universe and they do not replace the intrinsic joy that comes from living a life with two people in love.

I am not in love with him anymore.  But that has been true for years.

But he says he is sick.  Somehow.  Too tired, too fat, too much smoking.  The list goes on.  He does nothing about it.  Fine.  Some of those things are hard to manage.  I get it.  So what do I do?

We swore “in sickness and in health” but what do you do when you’re not entirely sure that your spouse is truly “sick”, won’t do much about it, and life just goes on and on…the years tick by?  What do you do when your sex life is reduced to a token economy; where you exchange 30 minutes of sex (basically, a non-self-induced-orgasm) for the fishing outings he likes to go on?  Is this my life?  Is this where I am?

In the meantime, what do you do when you’ve become an only child because the family you had a year ago at this time is broken?

What do you do when you had a terrible week in your quantitative statistics class – so much so that you’re really pretty confident you’re fooling yourself with trying to earn a PhD?

I don’t know.  I don’t have the answers.  I wish I did but I don’t.