Full Time Care

The last few days have been really crappy. I would’ve used a stronger term there, but I try not to swear unless there’s a real need. It has more effect that way when I actually do swear.

My lady’s drinking problem isn’t getting better. Three days in a row, one day off, drinking again this evening. Nearly three bottles of wine this time. And she was in a horrible mood because she hurt her back the other day - with no inhibitors on her frustration and pain, thanks to the alcohol, she spent several hours bitching about everything and verbally laying into me. Great.

Add to this her complete unwillingness to understand that our financial situation sucks, that having spent two hours walking today (for cat medicine and shopping) I was very tired and in a lot of pain and that I really don’t need to hear all about her asshole ex-boyfriends for the fortieth time, and you have a pretty good picture of how my evening was.

Yup, it sucked.

On the other hand, I found my DVDs of Stargate SG-1 season 10, which I never got around to watching. So I at least have that to look forward to while she sleeps off her hangover tomorrow. Though I do have to go collect the cat’s medicine (she has cystitis again), which means another ninety-minute walk. Such is life.

I also found some of my old encodings of CDs. Years ago, I converted a lot of them to MP3 format for simplicity and so I could listen while gaming. Among them was my catharsis song: The Kiss, by The Cure. It’s on the Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me album and is absolutely wonderful for blowing off steam. So I put my headphones on, jacked the volume up and let it scream through my head, blasting away all the bad stuff and leaving me feeling a lot better.

I haven’t said much about my partner’s alcohol problem over the last week or more. This isn’t because it’s magically gone away, but because I wanted to write about more pleasant things than the ongoing torment of seeing her slowly destroy herself.

On the contrary, her addiction is back in full force. For the past ten days or so, she’s been drinking every other day. There’s always a good reason, of course: anxiety over a possible voluntary job, anxiety over her analyst being annoyed at her inability to get out and do stuff, anxiety over her parents’ possible reaction to a single sentence in a letter she sent, anxiety over our cat’s cystitis problem… you get the idea.

Bizarrely, I’ve been less affected by this resurgence of inebriation than I would have imagined. I suppose it’s partly because a lot of my other stresses have diminished: we have a little money in the bank, our rent is paid for the month, the house is clean, we’re not being evicted, the benefits are all sorted out and my back has generally been a bit better. That said, I’m in a lot of pain as an aftermath of all the housework for today’s landlord visit, but that’ll pass.

She’s still very determined to reduce her wine intake, too. It’s not as if she just says “Sod it” and opens another bottle: she knows that she’s dependent, she knows it sucks and she’s desperate to break the two-day cycle. That’s our first goal over the coming days. If we can break the chain, like she did at the start of the year, we can slowly increase the number of days between bouts. One positive influence is that the housework and exercise she’s been doing has helped her lose some weight: this will probably be my main way of convincing her not to drink. The longer she can go without alcohol, the more chance her body has of throwing away all that fermented sugar and continuing the weight loss process.

Saturday will be the difficult day. If she can avoid drinking then, we’ll be on the way.

…an even darker lining. That’s how she’s thinking today. After a week or more of stressing whether her parents are going to come and visit unannounced, my lady has hit rock bottom. Depression, to add to the anxiety and alcohol.

She’s spent the entire day - and I mean the entire day - being utterly pessimistic about absolutely everything. For example, she had an application form for a volunteer position that’s interesting. I commented that there was a question about receiving government benefits: they ask if you’re getting any so that they can avoid affecting how much money you get. To me, that’s a nice thing. To her, it was massively negative that volunteering could affect the benefits.

The whole day has been like that. In about twelve hours of hanging out together, she’s said one positive thing - that she liked the drawing she did this evening. Absolutely every other comment has been negative.

So I’m going to go and eat something sweet to cheer me up, watch a bit of a film and go to sleep, in the hopes of not having crappy pessimistic dreams.

Good grief. I could quite easily just repost two of my previous entries today. My partner’s been in a bottle again, and it’s been one of those evenings: we had the drawing frenzy, the repetitive music and the overwhelming desire to scream “SHUT UP!” as she babbled on and on.

So I’m going to talk about good things instead! Today’s been a brilliant day for good news. First off, I spoke to a guy at the DWP’s call centre and kicked off my incapacity benefits claim again: I tend to have a really good time on the phone with them because - apart from the fact that I try to be nice to anyone with a crappy job - it helps that I used to work in the same branch of the government. They don’t have to go slowly through everything, but can skip and jump along, knowing that I understand and will stop them if I need clarification. It’s nice to think that at least one call in their very long day will make them smile.
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She’s been drinking again. I suppose it’s a reaction to letting the chance of a job go today, but my lady spent the better part of the evening getting drunk, even though it’s only two days since she last did that. A small part of me is disappointed, of course, but mostly I’m just glad she’s finally asleep.

You see, she recently dug out some old IAM CDs - a French rap group. There are some very amusing tracks on them, as they were a pretty humorous bunch of guys, but being ‘asked’ (i.e. told) to listen to the same funny song five times in two hours is not something I enjoy. Even worse is getting her into bed at last and then having to spend another fifteen minutes listen to her singing loudly, making up her own words. Yes, she’s funny. Just not late at night and at high volume when we have neighbours who have kids.

It makes me want to pound her head to a pulp so that she’ll shut up. Coming from a pacifist who has and would never harm another person, you can imagine the level of annoyance.

Originally, I thought I’d use that title as a bit of a continued play on words over the last few days, but the evening’s events turned out rather more, er, “ketchuppy” than I expected.

I spent most of the afternoon hunting job opportunities for my lady: since I’m once again online for a while, all my regular emails arrived and, once I’d gone through three or four hundred of them, I checked through the appropriate jobs. there’s a couple of new opportunities there for her, which is great news. She was downstairs, revising for her interview again, but after a few hours her brain caved in and she decided to stop for the day.

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Hurrah, hurray! Although my Internet connection is still dead, some kind soul decided to start up a wifi hot spot within range of my house, so I am able to get online - albeit unreliably, insecurely and maybe just for today!

Since I last posted, it’s been a bit of a rough ride. My partner’s had a couple of periods where she was drinking every two days again, falling back into that self-destructive cycle of ‘get drunk, spend a day recovering, get drunk, spend a day recovering’. Mostly, this was due to her anxiety at the possibility of her parents arriving (which they didn’t), but it hasn’t been helped by crappy weather and some minor health problems.

She’s still on her diet, you see. This, in itself, isn’t a bad thing - it’s just that she has taken to eating a lot of vegetables. One of those is bean sprouts, which have a rather high fibre content… or at least, that’s what it seems, given her sudden need to, uh, spend a lot of time in the smallest room in the house, shall we say?

Me, I’m playing catch-up for the moment, trying to get through hundreds of emails, publish a couple of things I’ve written and make an entrance on my blogs. It’s going to be a day or two before I make much sense, at a guess, but it’s really good to be back online. Keep your fingers crossed for continued connectivity!

This evening was a nightmare. I was in town dealing with paperwork for benefits and picking up some shopping or a couple of hours this afternoon, but when I got back my lady was in fine form. OK, so she’d been drinking - she didn’t make the four day cutoff this time, since the anxiety from yesterday had made its mark - but she’d had a great session with her analyst and she was happy.

Unfortunately, I stupidly forgot one of my most important rules when she has her head in a bottle: do NOT try to have a conversation. I tend to reduce my vocal input into our discussions to a minimum, without being mute or rude, of course! This time, though, I was an idiot and opened my mouth.

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One of the most difficult subjects for me, as an English guy brought up by religious parents, is sex. The s-word is dirty, a sin, something to keep behind closed doors and not look at too closely. I’ve always been like that, even though I went to an all-boys secondary school where porn magazines were like a currency in the playground at lunchtime and could guarantee popularity. Hey, I was (and am) a geek: being a social reject, I had no need for popularity!

With my partner and I, sex is a matter of some dissent. We both have our problems for our own reasons (which I’m not going to go into because they’re rather private, thank you) but neither of us is particularly weird or celibate. Just a little reticent and nervous, even after so many years together. I wanted to write something about this because it’s a tough thing to cover and can affect a lot of couples with similar troubles to those we’re going through.

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Last night, I sat and watched Forrest Gump (again). I have a large number of films on VHS and DVD, but there are thirty or so that I watch a lot more than the others.

At the end, when he’s talking to Jenny’s grave, it suddenly occurred to me how living with someone who’s alcoholic is, in some ways, like losing them to death. There I was downstairs, while my partner was in bed asleep: I’m thinking stuff and talking to her in my head. We’re so close that we know what the other is thinking, almost without saying anything. We share everything. She’s not dead, so at least I get to see her pretty often, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like it.

“If you need anything, I won’t be far away,” says Forrest. I say the same to her, or at least something similar. She’s absent for a long time some days, either through sleep or through inebriation. It’s like living alone, with only the memories of the woman I love for company.

I miss her. I miss the walks, the chats, the warmth, the laughter. I miss her love.