Tuesday, October 18, 2016

Oct. 18/2016

I am not a writer. I can spell and I can make sentences that sound pretty good sometimes, but now that I am nearly sixty, I have long given up any illusions that I might someday be a writer.
So why am I writing this? Because everybody else is blogging? Well honestly maybe I did fantasize that I would create something that a lot of people would be interested in reading but I can quickly bring myself back to reality if I feel I'm going to plummet in that direction anyway.
I also know that the only way to get anywhere to take the first step so I figured out how to do this - I am not very tech savvy. I can check my email and post a few pictures on Facebook but I'm not even sure how to send a comment to someone that is private. So I started telling my story, mostly to myself and I decided that was OK. Nobody had to read it to validate it. It was a true account of what had happened/was happening to me and this way I wouldn't alienate or bore to death any of my co-workers or family.

And then after a few entries I started feeling much better about things. I am starting to care more about housework and keeping the house tidy. I had nearly given up on trying to keep it clean. I no longer had the floors vacuumed and mopped and then Nick would walk right in from the barn or from being in the garden and track manure or mud into every room in the house. He would walk into the bathroom by the back door on the white tiles and then into the kitchen and down the hall to the computer room and often upstairs into the bedroom. To be fair, he usually took his boots off at the door but he almost never took his shoes off, which he wore most of the time when there was no snow on the ground. The dogs seem to shed all the time and the wood furnace seems to dust the surfaces of everything with a fine mist as if someone is sanding a floor in another room.
I decided writing this diary was helping me sort things out and put them in order - chronologically if nothing else. I think a lot about each event as I record it and often something occurs to me that I hadn't thought of before. I gain new insights into the possible reasons for this nightmare, how I let it destroy my life and perhaps into a plausible way out of the dysfunction that is my marriage.
I realize now that I have gone through many stages of disbelief and acceptance. At the very beginning, I would beg Nick in tears, day after day, to stop acting the way he was. Then I would plead with him to tell me why. To tell me what I had done to make him so angry all the time.
I got angry. He was ruining my life. What right had he to take everything we had, almost the entirety of which I had paid for, and just let it crumble and rust and rot. And I mean literally. Fences were crumbling and rotting until horses got out, our sawmill was left out in the rain and snow with the cover blown off day after day until I tugged it back into place and secured it myself.

After the angry phase I entered the bargaining phase. Here I tried to fix our marriage. I stopped drinking. I thought this might have been a problem for Nick as he didn't drink when I met him and has never had a drink in the seven years we have been together but I do believe he had his own struggle with alcohol in the past. I won't say I struggled with it, I'll just say I enjoyed it a bit too much. (Isn't just like humans to minimize and rationalize our own shortcomings and to exaggerate those of others?)
I tried to think of other things I could do. I know I could be getting up at 5:30 am to go outside and help get the horses fed and out so Nick would have the whole day to do other things, but I'm not quite there yet. I feel he would just spend more time on the computer every day while I am hard at work. I know I have a bad attitude but I did this when we first moved to the farm - actually up until Nick retired I did this. I enjoyed getting out to the barn and being around the horses as the sun came up. But it was mostly Nick who kept me from the barn. I won't deny I enjoy the warm, cozy covers of the comfy king-sized bed we have however he was not pleasant to be around and definitely not the way to start your day. He still isn't pleasant to be around. He swears and bang things around, throws the plastic dishes around (the ones we portion out the horses grain into, each white plastic bowl has the horse's name on it) and calls the horses names I can't print here. Of course he never hits them but I know they can feel the negative energy he is emitting. I certainly can.