Thursday, November 3, 2016

Nov.3/2016

Yes Nick was on the dating website on Monday night. I stood in the hallway outside the downstairs bedroom where the computer is and watched him typing away while the picture woman in the red dress was smiling back at him on the screen. I didn't say anything, actually only because I couldn't think of anything to say. I have been trying to come up with a way to take a photo of him doing this without the click of the cell phone camera and I since I cannot figure out how to turn the sound off I have decided to record this on video instead. I can start the video out of his earshot and walk up to the doorway and stand there for as long as I want. He never seems to hear me, I have done this four or five times now. Then I can speak or cough as I enter the room, switching it off at the same moment or I can simply leave and switch it off where he can't hear it. I almost did this last night, but I was too lazy to get out of bed and go downstairs after I had settled into bed with the heating pad at my back and my laptop in front of me.

I woke up around 6am today and finally convinced myself to turn on the light and get out my computer around 7:30. I am going to try to wake up earlier in the mornings to write in my diary, it's the only way this is going to get done. I have been so stressed and depressed for the last two and a half years since the accusations started that I have been functioning at the minimal level, just getting myself to work and not doing much of anything else. But I am starting to feel better and I am starting to have an interest in accomplishing other things and pursuing some new projects, like this one. As I mentioned before I feel writing this diary is helping.

I have pain in my back most of the time and I have come to believe that it is not a tissue injury causing the pain, but tight and 'knotted' muscles as a result of stress. Pain medication helps somewhat but muscle relaxants seem to work better - and I take these to the max dose each day. I take over-the-counter ones because the stronger ones that need a prescription make me too drowsy to drive, even the next day. I know reiki (a pain relieving technique based on positive and negative energy flow) helps but it is not covered by insurance and I did have one session nearly a year ago. It was where I get my hair cut and I was embarrassed to death when Nick asked if he could join the practioner and myself and watch the session. The guy was very gracious and explained it was the kind of thing you required as few distractions as possible to do successfully. Afterwards he told me he had felt a lot of negative energy and energy blockages that in his experience were caused by conflict with a significant male in my life. I lied to him and said I had struggled with conflicts with my father, who is now passed away. I wasn't sure if patient confidentiality extended to reiki and I wasn't sure how much of my personal life I wanted discussed at the hair salon. We live in a very small rural community and Nick has told me that everyone for miles 'knows that I am running around with this Chris person' as well as with a few other guys, whose identities are suspected but not confirmed.
Massage is covered by my insurance and my daughters also gave me gift certificates for massages for Christmas last year but the massage therapist at the spa is only there on Fridays and Saturdays, and I work every Friday as well as three out of four Saturdays. When my Saturday off does roll around I usually have plans. I traded in one of the massages a couple of weeks ago for a pedicure.
Heat helps and I have a heating pad between my back and the pillow at this very moment. A hot shower goes a long way to loosen me up on work mornings and I have been getting up a few minutes earlier in order to enjoy the moist heat a little longer when I can.
A huge amount of stress evaporated the day I went on the internet at work and typed 'extremely jealous husband'. I dared not search this on my home computer for fear Nick was checking the history on my laptop while I was at work. This is the day I finally had an answer to the question burning up my life - why in the world was Nick acting the way he was? I read descriptions of morbid jealousy which described exactly what was happening in my life. I stared at disbelief at the screen as the words of Wiki and others melded and fused together into the image of the faceless person Nick had become to me. I had found the final piece of the puzzle and the relief this provided was immediate, and evaporated the emotional anguish of the unknown and the misunderstood that had clung to me like a cloak.

You know how it is said that the things you imagine when you don't know the truth are usually much worse than the actual truth and how it is said that the truth is often stranger than fiction - well it is like both of these statements apply at the same time, if that is even possible. Before I had a label for Nick's behavior I would sometimes wonder if he was having an affair himself and that was why he was accusing me and fabricating false evidence to back up his claims. I wondered if this was all part of a master scheme he was orchestrating - convincing me to buy a farm with all the trimmings while he contributed nothing (financially or otherwise) and then forcing a split where he would walk away with half of everything. Between the down payment on the property and the money I spent to set us up with the stuff we would need - five of the horses, twenty percent up front on the tractor, another 3K for extra attachments for it, a horse trailer and a trailer for hay and a truck to pull them, a sawmill, a generator, lumber to start the addition to the barn, firewood and hay for the first winter (and I have ended up paying for the winter hay all four years), new queen size beds for two of the bedrooms and a king for us, I have invested over half of my life savings into this farm - an amount of just over 200K. I am also now paying for all of our insurance (house and auto - five vehicles in total), our property taxes, the power bill, oats and sweet feed and food for the hens. We have sort of split the cable and internet and phone bills, but we recently cancelled the cable TV because it was nothing but a waste of time. Nick would go in to watch TV while he ate his breakfast of oatmeal and in addition to spilling coffee on the couch and leaving coffee rings on the coffee table and (I suspect) oatmeal on the carpet, he would spend an hour or two doing this every day instead of getting stuff done outside that was in desperate need of doing.

He had lied to me about how much he would receive each month as his pension from work, he said he was told the incorrect amount by the government retirement planning people because they forgot to take into account the fact that he had been married twice before, once for 15 or 16 years and again for 10 or 12, which reduced the amount that was his each month to less than half of the amount he had quoted me when I had asked for an estimate in the very beginning of the planning phase to sell our two houses in the city and purchase and move to a farm. The intension was to retiring there and live there as long as we were able to. I find it impossible to comprehend how he could not have known this himself. He knows everything else about divorce having been through two messy ones. When we worked out some figures on how much money we would have left to work with after the sale of our homes, I will admit we ended up with about 50K less between the two of us as the real estate market took a dip in prices and was sluggish that year, and so we also had to spend more in upgrades than we had expected in order to sell, but he was left with less than a thousand dollars after commissions, mortgage penalties and his line of credit had been paid. I actually even paid his credit card bill of 15K so we could start fresh and clear in our new life together. That was about three years ago now that my house sold and I received what wasn't going to the bank as the down payment on the farm.
Two weeks ago I finally got the courage to ask Nick how much he owed on his credit card as he had been complaining for awhile that he had maxed it out and couldn't afford anything until he got his cheque at the end of the month. In three years he has run his credit card up to 27K. Of course he says it is so high because he has had to replace the stuff stolen from him. I know something else is being done with that money, I know things can add up quickly, but give me a break. Now I will have to pay for absolutely everything - Nick was paying for the dog food and cat food and a few staples from Costco, and most of the stuff he bought there was olive oil, coconut oil, honey, protein powder, etc., that he used huge quantities of as part of his nutrition and supplement regimen. Lately he has been purchasing protein powder on line and he has always purchased stuff like books and other supplements on line - a parcel is waiting for him at the post office at least once a week and sometimes twice in the same week. Between this credit slam and the lady in red I feel I cannot salvage anything and should be running for my life at this point.