About a month after the move, he and I had a "serious talk" about how I needed to move my ass and get a job. Seems he didn't appreciate my "procrastinating". Never mind that I had sent out my resume all over the place. I told him that I was looking but I hadn't realized that we were having money issues. I was a little bitter that he had no problem taking two months before he started working with me paying for everything but we had barely been moved in a month and suddenly I am a freeloader.
I interviewed for a gig the next week. And got it. It came to be one of the best jobs I have ever had. There were issues with the hours. NY had wanted me to get a night job. One where I stayed with the kids during the day and asked "would you like fries with that?" during the evening. This job would be mostly 4pm-12am shifts on weeknights and then 8am to 12am shifts on Saturday and Sunday. That's right, sixteen hours. So, I had to get a sitter to cover the time between my leaving at 3pm and his getting home around 6pm. I always cooked dinner before I left and stuck it in the microwave/oven for him to heat up when he got home.
You would have thought that this would have been perfect, that my going back to work would have solved all of our money issues and we would have went back to Happy Land. I thought it was. I was happy. I worked hard and I made great money. My kids had everything they needed and a lot that they wanted. But, I was so busy that I didn't notice at first how much NY had pulled back. I had adjusted to his computer/games time. I knew he would be up half the night playing video games or chatting or whatever the hell he did and I just got used to spending the evenings I had at home either with the kids or by myself. I had a lot of alone time, so I wrote. I wrote in my journal, worked on my poetry, started new stories. My computer was in a box in the storage area since he had wanted his out and mine put up so I wrote on paper.
I never hid the things I wrote. I always put my journals and books in the closet in a box. I never felt like I had to hide them. Until he found them. He found my thoughts and my fantasies and my fictions and he spent an evening reading them while he drank and when I got home from work he spent the rest of the evening belittling me and my ideas. The writing which he had encouraged months before he now considered wrong. He demanded to know who I was writing about, thinking every male character in my stories was based on someone I was seeing behind his back. I was shocked.
He became more withdrawn. He would stay at work later, think of reasons to go in on the weekends and he started to go out with his friends more. Never once did he want to get a sitter so that we could go out. He always said I wouldn't have a good time with them or it was just the guys. I can only think of maybe one or two times that this really bothered me, mostly I was just happy that I could get on the phone with Tempest or The Cake Lady for a few hours without having him sit there and eavesdrop. We were growing further apart and neither of us was trying to fix it.
One afternoon I was checking my email on his computer when I found something. He and I both used the same Outlook Express to check our email. His email account was above mine just like this picture:
Anyway, I was sitting there reading my email and his popped up with a little (1) beside it and I clicked it. I don't know why, it hadn't been my intention to snoop. I could say that I just wanted to know what was going on in his world since it seemed so far removed from mine but that would just be an excuse. I snooped.
I clicked on his Inbox and saw that the email was from one of the people he worked with. I knew this because many months before he had been chatting with her on MSN messenger. Her name was like chattybubble18 or something idiotic like that. Anyway, I saw the email address and the subject line said something like "bad pics of me". I figured I would peek and see what she looked like. Well, she looked naked. There were two shots and neither showed her face.
My heart sped up because for the first time in the year that he and I had been together, I thought he was cheating on me. I did what any irrational chic would do and I called and confronted him. And he did what any cheater would do and lied to me. He told me that it was just an email from some porn site.
I packed up clothes and loaded the girls into my car (the boys were in New York with their mom for the Summer) and took off for the coast. I didn't tell him I was leaving and I didn't tell him where I was going or how long I would be gone. We stayed for one night. Tempest and I sat in a bar and drank margaritas while weird guys hit on us and I asked her what the hell I had done with my life. I was in a loveless relationship. Hell, I was practically in a relationshipless relationship. We were like roommates. Roommates who didn't really like each other. We practically needed our own rooms.
When I got home very late the next night I was locked out. I am standing outside at like one o'clock in the morning and he has deadbolted me out of the house. And he isn't waking up when I knock. I ended up having to jimmy open a window to get in.
At first he was defensive, he said I had no right to say anything since he had seen an email I had written to my friend James in England telling him how upset I was in my relationship. he said I gave my heart to someone else and that was worse than the pics. He accused me of cheating on him with someone I still to this day have not met in person.
Then he apologized. He admitted that the pics were from his secretary. And swore he wasn't sleeping with her and that the pictures had been a misunderstanding and that he had told her it was very inappropriate for her to send them and that I had seen them, blah blah blah. It was all lies. Maybe I believed him, maybe not. But I accepted it and we moved on. Actually, we moved no where. We stayed in the same stagnant pond of a relationship that we had been decaying in for a year.
next...
Labels: History Lesson
