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 knew I shouldn’t have said things were getting better. It’s always the kiss of death. As soon as I’d posted that entry a couple of days ago, I had a feeling something was going to happen, and it has.

Quite apart from being treated like crap yesterday evening during my partner’s most recent bout of drinking, I woke up feeling awful today. When i went to check how things were at the bank, I got the surprise I’d been expecting: suddenly, the balance has dropped. The worst thing is that I don’t know why: like with most banks, they’ll quite happily reduce the available balance in preparation for something being withdrawn, but don’t immediately post the details. They wait until the transaction’s gone through to actually display what’s happening.

So today, I’m suddenly a big chunk of money short and I don’t know why. It looks like the tax rebate cheque I had deposited late was refused, so I shall have to contact the Inland Revenue to find out how to get another, for beginners. But that doesn’t explain everything. There’s still a lot missing. I have no idea why, but I have this ominous foreboding that something bad has happened. I hope it’s not something like the identity theft I went through last year - that was a total nightmare.

I hate it when banks pretend they’re being helpful with Internet access to accounts and so on, then deal with it in a totally old-fashioned, give-us-your-money way. It’s so two-faced.

Well, so much for Interview Day. We were awake really early so that we’d have time for my partner to do a bit of final revision before heading off - not an easy thing for me this morning, as I was up til about 1:30 last night. The connection kept yo-yoing and I couldn’t get hold of a phone number to ask about some possible jobs, so I was stuck in front of the PC ’til it worked properly.

Anyhow, after a bit of a chat, my lady stated that she wasn’t really interested in this job, because it won’t make anything better. Since I’m not working now, any money she earns will basically reduce the amount of help we get from the government, so we’d actually be worse off. It’s simply not worth putting in hours of work for that. I had to agree, really - although the secondary effects are good (to be out working, socially active and so on), it hardly seems to make sense to pay train fares just so we can have less money.

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My Internet connection is doing a remarkably good impression of a yo-yo at the moment. I may not be around consistently for a while. Please bear with me while I deal with this technical difficulty…

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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Our Internet connection died again this week, which is why I was away for a couple of days. Being a geek, I tend to live online a lot of the time, so the loss of the connection hits me quite hard. Thankfully, the local library has PCs available and I maintain a subscription there for extended periods, but I didn’t have time to get there before the connection came back!

Yesterday was a bit of an odd day here. As you know, most of the posts here revolve around my partner’s problem with alcohol at the moment. However, she also suffers from anxiety disorder - in her case it manifests mostly as social phobia and panic attacks. It’s a condition that can be treated and, here in the UK, help is fairly easy to obtain. Due to our ongoing sleep deprivation courtesy of the cat, she was in a bit of a state. Not getting much shut-eye does strange things to the brain.

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I had all day yesterday to feel crappy about the events of New Year’s eve and, on reflection, figured that perhaps I needed to do more to help my partner in her struggle with alcohol. Not that I don’t already do a lot, practically speaking - the shopping, washing, cleaning and so on - but I mean on the support front.

With something like alcoholism, it’s very difficult to maintain any kind of balance in my emotional state. Once she starts drinking, it’s tempting to switch off as much as possible, to erect solid barriers to protect myself from the pain and upset she will inflict once she passes beyond the ‘tipsy’ stage. I remember when we were considering Alcoholics Anonymous. She decided she didn’t like the idea of going to AA meetings because they treat alcoholism as a disease rather than as a problem - not necessarily ‘wrong’, but just not the way she wants to deal with it. We are therefore aiming at a different service available locally.

Anyway, it reminded me of AA because they also run a group called AlAnon. It’s a sister meeting for the partners or family of alcoholics, in which they discuss the way it affects us, how we react and the traps to avoid so that we can be more helpful. I’ve never been to a meeting, but I have a basic grasp of psychology (thanks to my lady) and so it occurred to me that I need to be less detached. I need to protect myself less, put myself a little more at risk of pain so that I can help her through such a tough time.

Today’s been good. Despite being incredibly anxious, she managed to resist turning to the bottle for a reprieve. For my part, I tried to be bluntly honest on how the problem is destroying our life (which she took rather well, all things considered) and also more supportive. She’s not had anything to drink. Tomorrow will be more difficult, because she’ll be quite seriously in withdrawal, but I’m hoping we’ll get through it without any wine. Not very hopeful, to be honest, but we’ll see.

Things are also a complete mess on the money front, with this month’s rent being a serious problem. Two court cases hanging over me (eviction and local taxes) don’t help much, either. I can’t deal with any of that right now - it’s just too stressful. I know I have to sort it all out and find a way to pay everything, but it all seems so pointless when everything’s so dark and empty.

Keep your fingers crossed for tomorrow.

(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.

(This is actually 27 December’s post, but my connection’s been down… so here it is today!) 

Today was a bad day. I had to go off into town to check our bank account, since our connection at home wasn’t available, but unfortunately the library was closed and the bank was shut. This meant that I couldn’t transfer funds from our reserves into our current account, which we use to buy food and stuff. Thankfully, I’d had the foresight to put a fair amount in just before Christmas and the bank hadn’t siphoned any of it off for whatever reasons they invent.

Returning home with supplies, I realised I’d left my mobile phone in the house. This isn’t a major problem, but it does mean that as soon as I open the front door, my lady will start shouting at me because (a) she’s been drinking and (b) she is worried because she couldn’t reach me. As expected, the haranguing started at high volume. This was swiftly followed by more reproaches because she was trying to find me a little present for my birthday by phoning around some shops and her phone was out of credit. I explained the bank accounts situation and she put what credit we could on.

Of course, being drunk meant that she babbled on and on whenever she called anyone, so the remaining money wasn’t enough. I explained again that we couldn’t put any more on until I can transfer some funds, but this then turned into the expected two-hour-long insult marathon where it’s all my fault because I don’t understand how important it is, various accusations of being obsessed with money (fairly reasonable considering how I have to try to manage our funds while she gets blotted and spends cash wantonly) and orders for me to somehow find a way to sort the mobile credit out. Yeah, right.

I lent her my mobile and she used the credit up on that, then was suddenly violently ill (always intriguing to see vomit that is almost purely formed of alcoholic drinks… not) and went to bed. Still, the ordeal wasn’t over for me as she then decided she was hungry and I had to do the food thing. This always hurts me a lot, since she stays in bed and I have to make the trip up and down stairs half a dozen times (literally) with different foods and with my bad back screaming at me to stop walking so damned much. Add to that a healthy smattering of further accusations, random changes of subject to insults, demands and the whole “you don’t love me for who I am” crap and you can imagine how I feel.

Still no net connection here this evening, either, so I shall be reduced to eating something nice and watching a film in an attempt to calm myself down and convince myself that maybe I’m not the anti-christ after all. Some hope.

She drank again last night. After all that effort to make it through three full days before downing two bottles of wine on Thursday, she stopped fighting and gave in yesterday: after only two days. Of course, the evening was a nightmare for me, too, since she got all uppity with the alcohol in her body and spent several hours complaining and whining about everything, as is her wont. Thankfully she didn’t drink as much, so wasn’t as bad as usual.

The good thing is that I managed to cajole her into sitting down and watching a funny movie. At least that lets the time pass a little less aggressively and puts her in a better frame of mind. Make some dinner, enough to fill her stomach with something solid and let fatigue do the rest. Going to bed at 1 a.m. is still a cow, though, especially since it screws with our day today. Ye gods, it’s depressing.