Mixed Feelings

While I feel that divorcing Ex was absolutely the best choice, there are still times when my emotions get the better of me.  Today is one of those times.  After weeks of little to no communication from Ex he suddenly started emailing me.  His written communication has always been difficult to read, understand, and follow.  These were particularly bad.  I'm starting to realize just how mentally ill he really is.  He hasn't called nor contacted anyone in his family.  His mom is understandably worried.

His sister and my sister work at a bank together.  I've been passing information to his family via that network...yes...I am a weasel, why do you ask?  My sister asked if they should file a missing persons report on him.  I told them when I'd last gotten an email from him.  I then emailed him and told him to call his mom or she was going to contact the police to file a missing persons report.  As far as I knew my email had no effect.

Yesterday he sent me six emails.  Part of it had to do with finding a renter for our old house.  Part of it had to do with his rants about his family trying to put him in prison.  "Why" I asked "do you think your family is trying to put you in prison?"  After much back and forth I realized it was because of what I'd told him about the missing persons report.

Part of me still wants to fix it...as I did for our entire 28 year marriage.  I wanted to go to him, reassure him and call his mom and make him talk to her.  I feel badly for the state he is in.  I want him to be "normal" again.

Another part of me wants to run away as fast as I can.  I remember that he looks like a homeless person, that he isn't bathing, and that just having him near grosses me out.  I often wondered why someone who was so paranoid would drive around a car that looked like he was living in it.  Why he'd engage in behaviors that caught police attention.  He was patted down multiple times and his car searched for drugs.  I've never had that happen and it never happened to him when I was around.  I lent an air of normalcy to him when we were together that he couldn't maintain when he was alone.

He never cared about anyone's appearance,  He never cared about the state of anyone's home.  He judged no one.  I liked that about him.  However he thought that everyone was like him and that his own appearance and the appearance of his home would matter to no one.

One of the worst things for me was that multiple times we got letters from the city or county about the state of our home.  It drove me nuts since it was always the piles of junk he had everywhere on our property that caused the complaints.  The worst thing was that the letters would increase his paranoia that "they" were out to get us.  Not once did any of our neighbors ever ask "Hey, do you plan on cleaning this up?"  If just one of them had come to him just once and let him know that the piles were not okay it would have made him aware of the social contract he was crossing.  Because not one of them was willing to ask him to clean it up face to face he didn't believe me when I told him how much they hated it.  He called me a liar.

I want to fix things but I know that this is beyond my capability.  I don't have the knowledge or training to deal with mental illness.  I've contacted a lawyer and have started the divorce ball rolling.  The separation needs to be complete because I cannot fix this.

Food can be clutter

When I moved out I only took the food with me that I knew the kids and I would eat.  That was a huge relief...Ex liked to haunt the sales.  He loved clearance stores, he'd buy 20 single serving bags of almonds for 5 or 10 cents each...all of them tasting stale.  He'd go crazy at Grocery Outlet buying whatever off brand item he thought we might eat.  He had a friend who was a district manager for a grocery store chain, she would give him milk carton crates full of food that were either past their expiration date or couldn't be sold for whatever reason.  

A family of four could’ve survived the zombie apocalypse for years on the food that was stored in our house.  As long as they were willing to eat food that tasted stale the day Ex bought it or was missing the label or was some sort of food never heard of in the US.  After filling our house with these stale and inedible foods he'd get mad at me for buying stuff at the grocery store.  "We have so much food already, why don't you use this stuff up first?"  Because Ex, I can't figure out what to do with frozen escargot, stale, off brand Ritz-like crackers and mystery jelly that the label fell off of.  I tried, honestly I did.  I got on that website where you enter the items you have and it'd come up with recipes for you.  Even that site said "Sorry, no can do."

He would eat anything, literally anything.  But there was never enough condiments no matter how much I put on.  Back in my Susie Homemaker days I would make his lunch every day for him to take to work.  Every day he wanted the same thing, tuna fish sandwich.  He wanted the tuna salad mixed up and put in a different container than the bread so the bread wouldn't get squishy.  Every day he said "That was great, maybe a bit more mayo and pickles next time?"  I was tempted to just put mayo with pickles mixed in to see if he'd notice the absence of tuna.

If the kids didn’t finish everything on their plate he’d eat it or put it in the fridge telling them “You can finish this later.”  They never would.  He would be appalled at any wasted food…the moldy fruit, he’d find the one spot that wasn’t moldy and eat that.  Same for bread and cheese.  I think the condiments were the secret to his success here.  I’d refuse to eat the cheese that he’d cut the mold off of because I could still taste the mold.  He’d insist it was my imagination.  He’d try to slip sandwiches into the kids’ lunches with bits of the bread pinched off to remove the mold spots.  Of course the kids could taste the mold and refused to eat it.  No wonder they decided that hot lunch was a better option.

He’d fill our refrigerator with all sorts of containers full of leftovers so that I couldn’t find anything at all that I’d put in there.  He NEVER labeled them, so every single one was a mystery.  Produce would go bad in the back of the fridge because I couldn’t find it and would assume that it’d been eaten.  All of this would make him crazier and his craziness escalated.

The pantry we had was so overloaded that I had a hard time finding anything.  All of my attempts to organize the food containers by type, or purpose were thwarted by his "throw everything into whatever spot I can find" methodology.  Things were always falling and spilling off the shelves so we usually had stuff a foot or two deep on the bottom.  It was useless to find anything I needed quickly.  With five people in the house who all could cook, how was I to know if that ingredient was used up or lost?  Was it worth my effort to look for?

I have a very small fridge now, leftovers are eaten or tossed.  My cabinets are organized and the pantry is nearly bare.  This feels so good!

Decluttering My Life

One of the things I gained by being the one who chose to leave was the freedom to decide what to take with me.  The kids, of course, were at the top of the list.  Next, what furniture did I want?  I left the king sized bed with the hard mattress on it and took the queen sized bed that my son had been sleeping on.  I bought him a new full sized bed.

I left the sofa and love seat that smelled of the mold that filled the studio apartment they'd been stored in.  My in-laws gave them to us, I hoped the smell would go away.  No go, they still stank to high heaven six years later.  I tried everything, trust me, there are things even Febreeze can't help.

All of the tchotchkes that were given to us by friends and family for our wedding or for birthdays and Christmases for the last 28 years...I went through those to see if there was really anything I wanted.  Most of the time the answer was no.  I took one set of dishes, one set of flatware, one set of mixing bowls, cake pans, cookware, and just the things in the pantry that would be used by the kids and I.

I took the furniture that I would actually use.  After living nearly 30 years with a hoarder to actually have empty space in my home feels so incredibly free.  I bought a sofa off of craigslist from a sweet 87 year old woman.  I went to a thrift store to find a couple of silk flower arrangements and a painting to put on my walls.  But after 10 years of not being able to use the left hand drawers in my dresser because there was furniture and piles of junk in the way it feels so good to be able to just vacuum my floors without having to move piles of stuff.

I have to admit here, that it isn't all his fault.  My depression and the pain caused by my fibromyalgia coupled with his hoarding made it nearly impossible for me to keep up with the stuff he brought in.  The kids were never taught to clean up after themselves, the mess grew daily and I hid from it.  I bought organizers, I tried cleaning one small area only to have it messed up before I finished the next. But when your house is overloaded with stuff, cleaning is next to impossible.  My house was a pig sty.  Flylady.net and aslobcomesclean.com were no match for this impossible task.  Especially when I'd say to Ex "Why don't we get rid of the moldy smelling loveseat to make a bit more room in the livingroom?" and he'd say "I don't smell anything and I like it."

Now I have my wide open spaces (well not in the kids' rooms, but everywhere else) and I can stay on top of it because I didn't bring everything that I didn't need.

Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay

When you've been married 27 years you don't just suddenly wake up one morning and decide to call it all off.  "Sorry dear, I'm tired of you.  Moving on!"

Nope.

You think...and think...and think some more.  You talk to your girlfriends, your mom, your sister...everyone besides the person you want to leave.  That's because you need to make a rational decision and if you talk to him, it'll get irrational real fast!  Not that I never talked to Ex, I told him I was unhappy.  I asked him to clean up all of his hoarded garbage.  I watched Hoarders: buried alive with the sick feeling that I was seeing my future.  I gave him a deadline.

The deadline passed.

While trolling the interwebs I discovered this book:  Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay.  It was amazing...except for the fact that I saw Ex and I in each and every chapter.  Each chapter outlines a couple and their issue.  The issue is discussed and how it affects the marriage.  Then you are given some questions to answer and then told how different people felt after they either left or stayed when they had this issue in their marriage.  I didn't even make it through to the end because every single chapter ended with me likely being happy if I left.

It still took many more months, but it did help me start to make a plan.

It hasn't just been the last year, dear

I got an email yesterday from Ex.  I was surprised that he finally answered one of my myriad stabs into the dark.  He lost his cell phone and despite my many suggestions on how he can replace it (I'm stuck paying on it as part of my plan until June 2016, so he might as well use it) he hasn't lifted a finger to do anything.  He left the house and is staying somewhere, but I have no idea where that is, so at the moment I have no way to contact him.  Loving father that he is, he never asked about the kids or answered any of my emails asking if he wanted to see them over their Christmas break.

The email instead was a long run-on sentence full of mea culpas and how he handled the last year so poorly.  I decided not to respond.  At least not to HIM but instead to you, my loyal readers, all one of you.

Ex (he isn't dear!)

I didn't leave you for the way you acted in the last year.  I left you for the way you acted in the last 20 or so years.  Remember when I was pregnant with our first child and after dinner I wanted to go on a walk with you?  I wanted to spend some time together, talking.  I knew that once the baby entered our life our chances of being together would be far more limited.  You said no, you were tired and wanted to watch TV.

Remember during that same pregnancy when I complained about being uncomfortable and you said "I don't know what all the fuss is, women have babies on the side of the field and then go back to work."  Ex, do you personally know any such women?  I sure don't!

Then when I finally went into labor but it wasn't progressing, you wanted to leave me alone in the labor room with no phone (before cell phones people) and go home to get some sleep.

All of those said to me "I don't care about you, what you want or how you feel."

Do you remember when I started working nights and rather than be glad I finally got a job (you'd been badgering me for years) you were just mad that you had to take care of the kids and I didn't have a normal day job.  Even after I pointed out to you that in order to make it worth putting three kids in full time daycare I'd have to make over $60,000 a year?

When I moved to Oregon and you wouldn't even try to get a job up here leaving all of the parenting chores to me for nearly ten years.  When you did come up to visit you didn't even want to do anything with the kids.  When I needed to escape for a few hours after weeks of non-stop parenting, you'd pout because you wanted to spend time with me.

Even now you have no cell phone, no way for me to contact you if one of the kids should have an emergency.  I asked you (via email since it is all I have) if you wanted time with the kids for Thanksgiving or Christmas and I got no answer at all.  You haven't even given the kids any gifts for Christmas.

All of these said to me "I don't care about our kids, I think they are an inconvenience."

When you were mad at me for buying a new car, even though you sat next to me and signed the papers.  When you kept bringing home used cars that were ten miles away from dying.  When you left me in Oregon with unreliable transportation and living 20 miles away from civilization.

When you brought home used appliances that needed your constant attention to keep running, but then you'd leave and go back to California while your babies and I had to figure out how to live without a refrigerator or without a washing machine or without heat.

When you decided to cancel our garbage service but then refused to take the garbage to the dump until you "had a full load" and the pile just got bigger and stinkier...in August.

All of these said to me "I only care about money, not my family or their safety."

When you stopped cutting your hair and insisted I do it or it wouldn't get done.  Even when my hands hurt so much that I couldn't even write with a normal pen.

When you stopped shaving or showering unless I promised to have sex with you, even though your refusal to do so made you repellent.

When you kept "losing" the nice clothes I bought for you so whenever we wanted to go somewhere nice I either had to buy you new clothes or go out with you looking like a homeless person.

When you tried to go to the Paramount Theatre in Seattle Washington to see a Broadway play...wearing Scooby Doo pajama bottoms.

All of these said to me "I don't care how I look to you or to others and I don't care if I embarrass you."

When I bought a van at auction and wanted to drive it home myself rather than letting you take it to get more junk to hoard, you decided you'd never drive it.  Even when we were in the mountains and I was sleepy and my mom and step dad were in the back seat listening to you refuse to help me.

When you told my mom that if you didn't buy me that house in Oregon that I'd kill myself.

When you accused me of acting like your crazy selfish brother.

When you told my sister that I was making up my fibromyalgia diagnosis.

All of those said to me "I don't care about your feelings or how other people see you."

So you see Ex...those are just a few of the things you've said to me over the years.  You almost had me convinced that I deserved that, that you were the best I could ever hope to get, that you were the normal one, not me.  Recently though, I woke up and decided that living alone and raising three teenagers by myself and being celibate would be better than the hell I was living in.  THAT is why I left you.

Can you call it a marriage if you don’t live together?

You might’ve noticed in an earlier post that I said the kids and I moved to Oregon while their father (I've gotta come up with a good anonymous name for him) continued to live and work in California.  How did that come about?  Before moving to Oregon we were living in Silicon Valley at the height of the housing boom.  Our family of 5 had 524 square feet of tiny house in some of the most prime real estate in the country.  Yes, you read that right, 524 square feet.  It was a tiny house before tiny houses became a thing.  Only problem was that it didn't have ANY of the well thought out floor plans, storage solutions or loft bedrooms that you see in those adorable tiny houses.  My in-laws owned the house and wouldn't let us remodel it in any way because they couldn't afford the higher property taxes.

We’d been preapproved for a $400k mortgage.  I was wary of the adjustable rate interest loans, because it never seems like my income goes up, only my bills. So I knew we couldn't afford a 400k mortgage, besides that wouldn't even buy a two bedroom condo at that time.  We needed to leave the area.  One thing led to another and I soon found a three bedroom manufactured home on ½ an acre in a beautiful area of Oregon for $153,000.  I loved it and I was thrilled to be a homeowner

The minute our bid was accepted my ex started to look for places closer to home.  Why he started looking AFTER I found a house remains a mystery to this day.  He found falling down wrecks of homes in the central valley of California for $100k.  He kept complaining that the place I found wasn't a fixer upper.  The Ex is an amazing contractor and can build anything.  He's done amazing work in some of the nicest homes in Silicon Valley.  His mantra for his own family home is cheap or free.  He'll get it to work...but it'll be ugly.  I realize now I should've taken pictures of the work he did in his own home.  At the time I was too embarrassed and tried to hide it.  I still remember when he added a second shower head complete with PVC pipe and drips of purple pipe cement.  He said "Now we have a shower like the rich people do."  My sarcastic response fell on his deaf ears.  He continued to complain that I didn't buy a fixer, until his neglect meant that our house became a fixer.

We moved to our new home and he stayed behind with his parents with the understanding that he’d keep looking for a job in Oregon.  He didn't.  He SAID he did.  But when I checked his email accounts there were never any emails sent to prospective employers.  When I asked him later for a copy of his resume he didn't have one.  I asked him how he was applying for jobs, he said he kept looking on Craigslist but didn't see anything.  Later I told him I was seeing stuff on Craigslist and he said that his brother was looking for him and hadn't mentioned anything.

This went on for nine years.  I know, I’m a glutton for punishment.  Everyone who heard my story was amazed I put up with it so long.  In my own defense it was one day at a time.  Like sobriety, you don't set out to be sober for nine years, you set out to be sober for 24 hours.  I was essentially a single mom for nine years worth of 24 hour days.  In January of 2013 I told him that I’d had it.  I was filing for a legal separation and if he didn't find a job in Oregon, clean up the mess he’d made of our home (his hoarding will be another entry at another time) and start acting like a full member of our family then I’d make the separation a divorce.  By June he had a job here and by September that business folded.  He found another job shortly after that and then was laid off a few days before Christmas.  This lead to over a year of unemployment , with only an interruption of a couple of months of under-the-table work and he didn't even get paid everything he was owed.  The money worries seemed endless.

He stopped showering and shaving regularly, refused to cut his hair and wore the same clothes for days at a time.  He looked like a homeless person and even though he tried to clean up some for interviews he never managed to look like a normal person.   Not surprisingly our sex life was nonexistent.  All of our alcohol was disappearing, every time I bought a bottle of wine it'd be empty when I looked for it; he said he needed it to sleep.  He only moved from the couch to cook dinner in the evening or put together a lunch for me in the morning.   I found myself not only uninterested in him…but repelled.  

I realized he was depressed, but he wouldn't do anything about it.  I was working full time, taking care of our kids and commuting two hours a day.  I had nothing left to give him and he couldn’t help himself.  My deadline to clean up his mess passed in June and the mess was still there.  In September I started looking for a place for the kids and me nearer to my work and their schools.  Did I give up on him?  Yes, I did.  I know our marriage vows said “for better or for worse” and “In sickness and in health.”  I’m very aware of all of that and I know many people will fault me for leaving him when he is obviously depressed.  I’ll write more entries that I hope will help explain some of it, but in reality, there are two people in a marriage and no one else will ever totally understand it.