Full Time Care

(And this is December 29th’s post… connection’s working now, though, so I should be back on schedule!)

 Yet another up-and-down day in the apparently never-ending cycle. My partner was up at 4:00 this morning, since she slept all day yesterday, but she waited until about 6:00 to wake me. She’d decided that she wanted to go into town to pick up a birthday present for me, so we prepared and confronted her anxiety at going out. This is never an easy thing to do: she’s socially phobic (i.e. scared of dealing with people) and only goes out very occasionally so has tendencies towards agoraphobia as well. Add to this the fact that she’s somewhat overweight at the moment and thus very self-conscious, and you have a pretty good idea of the amount of encouragement she needs to get out the front door and onto a bus.

We made it into town with the plan of going to one shoe shop (for her to spend her Christmas money from my mum) and wherever she needed to be for my present. I’d also planned on doing a bit of food shopping since we would be near the big supermarkets. Now, I dislike going to town with my lady: not because of spending time with her but because it generally deteriorates into a desperate bid to empty our bank accounts of every last penny. Yes, she loves to shop, which is not good when you’re as deeply in debt as we are.

Anyway, she found a pair of boots she liked (and which are very cool indeed) and we did all the other stuff, too. This was a major success for her. Rather than opening a bottle of wine, drinking and complaining all day, she’d managed to go out and do stuff.

Unfortunately, the evening was pretty much like a couple of days ago. Too much alcohol followed by anger, depression and all that lovely redirection of bad feeling onto the nearest person. In other words, me. I’m starting once again to get really sick of this cycle of self-destruction that she goes through. Not only does it upset and hurt me, but it destroys our life - both emotionally and financially. I’m really quite seriously afraid that this is going to end in one of those Alcoholics Anonymous stories everyone recounts, where the person loses their job, their home, ends up on the streets and all that other bad stuff - only in this case, she’s doing it to us both.