A big long nasty stinky dump about my husband

My husband isn't a terrible person. He has some really good traits--a great, dark sense of humor; a real ability to connect with people, albeit on a shallow/surface level; a sense of loyalty to his job (which isn't so great when they treat him like shit, which they usually do, but still, the trait itself is admirable). He used to be pretty carefree and easygoing when he was younger.

I start my post with that because pretty much the rest of it is going to be a confession of all the things I think and share with my closest friends but don't really admit to anyone otherwise, and I think these things are part of the reason why our marriage is so....broken and cold.

I have lost respect for him.

The word that comes to mind, as cruel as it is, is "loser."

There were hints very early on. He didn't make great grades in high school, and just barely missed being accepted to the state university, so he went to community college for two years, got his A.A. degree, and transferred to the university where I was. There, he basically flunked out of school because his parents were stressing him out all the time by not coming through with the financial support they had promised and, well, because he skipped classes and if the class wasn't interesting he just didn't study.

As I prepared to graduate from college, we were in my dorm room discussing what we were going to do afterward. I suggested we move in together. He was agreeable to that. Then I said, "Well, we could just get married," and he said, "Okay." "Really?" I asked. "Sure," he answered. That was my "proposal."

He bought me a $300 one-fifth carat solitaire diamond ring. He saved his wages from his job at the dorm's foodservice for weeks to buy it. At the time I thought it was so romantic and sweet. Now it just seems kind of pathetic.

We spent the first year of our marriage dirt poor, getting help from my parents to pay the rent and buy groceries. He worked at Hardees, I worked at Jack's Discount Store, unable to figure out just what I was going to do with the English/journalism degree I had since I had recently discovered that I hated newspaper work. After a year of poverty, I got my ass in gear, bit the bullet and got a job at a small-town newspaper. The salary was a pittance, but so was the cost of living, so we made it okay. He got a job at the lumberyard, and later at another Hardees, in management this time. We moved around several times due to my "career," and he always followed me in good spirits, working wherever he could find a job: a fireplace factory, a window factory, a discount store warehouse, a music store. Finally, after I got a good job in a town we loved, we decided we were "settling down." I saw an ad for a bank teller; he applied and got the job, and worked his way up a few notches to the position he's in now. He still gets paid about $13,000 less per year than I do, and I don't make all that much.

He works his ass off for this place because he always thinks it's going to pay off in some big promotion. It never does, and yet he works late several times a week, signs up for bank-sponsored charity events on his time off, works on the afternoon that he's supposed to have off every week, goes in on his Saturdays off to "back up the tapes," whatever that means. He does all this extra stuff for this place even though on his salary, he can't afford to pay his share of the bills. And then he complains to me that I get more time to myself than he does. Yeah, because I don't WORK FOR FREE for five to 10 hours a week.

So....he basically gives me whatever he feels like when he gets paid, which lately is enough to pay the house payment and that's it. That means that I have to spend my entire check on bills, groceries, the car payment, etc. If he was paying his 43.5 percent of the bills (we figured it out when I got my own account), I should have an extra $600 a month for myself. As it is now, I am charging groceries at the end of the month because I'm short. And none of the "extra" bills--like doctor, dentist, etc.--are getting paid at all. I bought every single Christmas present for my entire family, our son, his nephew by his sister who I've been estranged from since his parents died, and the one we buy in remembrance of Hope every year (he didn't even go with me to do that--Tingle did, which was nice but still). We'd agreed that his present would be a used electric guitar he wanted, so I let him spend $150 on that instead of giving it to me for bills, and then I felt like he should have something to open on Christmas, so I got him some books on learning to play guitar, a trivia book, and an iTunes gift card. I didn't even get a token Christmas present, which still burns me. And he has picked up the guitar exactly twice.

This week, I asked if he could pick up a prescription for me, since there was an actual blizzard warning in effect and it was zero degrees out and I had Bubba by myself since I had taken him to the doctor for a cough so I didn't really want to drag him out into the storm again. J. hemmed and hawed and asked me how much it was going to cost. I didn't know if it would be a $10 or $25 copay. "Is that an issue for you?" I asked. "Well, yeah," he says. Fine. I dragged Bubba out to get it.

(This part is embarrassing because it shows you how much I've been smoking lately, but...as my blog says, OH WELL.) The next day he asks if he can bum some smokes from me because he "doesn't have time" to get a pack before work. "Fine, just buy me a pack after work to replace it," I say. He says he will but he doesn't, so the next morning I ask him to do it on the way to work. He does. The following day I tell him I'm going to the gas station to buy some more and he says, "I wouldn't be against it if you bought me a pack too." I did it, but it just infuriated me. I pay for fucking EVERYTHING, and I'm sick of it. I came home and went to bed at 6 p.m. because I was so fucking depressed about it all.

J. and I have been together for 21 years now, married for 14. I have a long list of resentments that play over and over in my head, things he's said or done that are just too hurtful to forget.

The time he said he was "afraid of catching something" by having sex with me when I was dealing with the vulva stuff. Like I would ever have sex with him if things were not okay down there...and like I didn't already feel like a disgusting freak for having an abscess on my fucking vulva. Gee, thanks for the confidence boost there, J.! Frankly, I think that was an excuse anyway because his mouth hasn't gone lower than my bellybutton since before we were married.

The time we went to do karaoke with our friends Tingle and her husband, and, as usual, we were going through a hard time, and I got up on the stage and sang the Eagles' "Best of My Love" to him and he never looked up from his videogame.

The time after we had Bubba and I was going through horrible postpartum depression and he said "After the way you grieved for Hope, I thought you would be a better mother than this."

The time last year when I was wearing a new sundress, all white and frilly and showing a little skin, and I was feeling a little sexy and pretty, and he asked me if I was going to "change into something a little more appropriate" before we went out to eat.

The time he really pressured me to go to a "Family Fun Day" bank function a month after losing Hope. I practically begged not to go because I knew it would be excruciating. He got mad at me so I went, and saw about 8 million pregnant women milling about amongst the other 8 million happy families with small children, and ended up sobbing outside of a football stadium for 15 minutes before he came looking for me and took me home.

The time last fall when I wrote and sent him a love letter and he just never got around to reading it, and even said that he didn't consider it a gift because "it wasn't like it was wrapped up with a bow on it or anything."

And then there are all the disappointments. All the things he'll say he'll do but doesn't.

My 71-year-old father on a ladder, cleaning out our gutters, because J. never did it, or mowing our lawn because J. didn't do it, or taking back our recycling because J. didn't do it.

Christmas three years ago (I think, can't quite remember which year) when he presented me with a small, nicely-wrapped package "from Bubba" for Christmas...which turned out to be a box of drugstore chocolates that he had obviously bought that morning when nothing else was open. Or how about my Mother's Day gift, that infamous air popper? One more about gifts (and really, I'm not a materialistic person at all, people who know me in real life will attest to that). J. always bemoaned my small diamond even though I was always gracious about it and never even had an issue with it. "Just buy me something good for our 10th anniversary," I told him. This was during our 5th or 6th year of marriage. I said, half-joking, half-serious, "I'm telling you now, I want something good for our 10th anniversary, so start saving or putting something on layaway." We ended up spending our 10th anniversary in the hospital after having Bubba....and no anniversary gift (or even some "thanks for pushing my son out of your vagina" flowers) materialized. Ever.

All the times he's picked me up late from work, often when I'm waiting with Bubba, so I have to kill 30, 45 minutes in an empty building with an impatient toddler.

All the times he's fallen asleep in the emergency room when I was shaking with fear about whatever it was that I was in there for.

How he refuses to keep the car, which basically only he uses, in any kind of order, so that means that when I do have it, I have to lift my 37-pound son over a huge pile of crap in order to get him into his carseat in the middle of the backseat. I can really barely do it, but Bubba can't walk over the foot-deep pile of crap on the floor, so I have to. Oh, and he rarely fills it up with gas either--another thing I not only have to pay for, but have to do during -5 degree weather.

I came home tonight and made dinner for Bubba while J. fiddled with the VCR trying to get it functional to tape "Lost." (We've only had the VCR --which I bought him when the old one died--for about three months now, but he never got around to figuring out how to use it until roughly 45 minutes before the show). Then I gave Bubba a bath, and then I put Bubba to sleep--twice, because the first time, he was just about there when J. popped his head in the door to tell me he was taking my niece home, waking him up completely so I had to start all over again. Um, hello, ever hear of WRITING A NOTE? Jesus. So later on, after Bubba was in bed, I came out into the living room and just sat there with my cup of coffee. No TV on, no book, nothing. Just sat there in silence. J. came in from having a smoke and sat down and started reading his book. Never said one thing to me, even though I've told him so many times lately that it bothers me that we never have time to talk and that I have a lot of mental shit going on that I want to talk about but there isn't ever time. After half an hour I asked if he was ignoring me on purpose. "I just figured you were grumpy so I was giving you some space," he said. Another short silence before I just said, "I'm miserable." "Why?" he asked. And the thought of trying to even explain it to him for the millionth time overwhelmed me. "I just am," I said. And then J. went downstairs to wash his work clothes for tomorrow, and that was the end of the discussion.

My therapist would probably advise me at this point to write another post, listing all of J.'s good qualities, all the ways he hasn't disappointed me. Fuck it. He's always been better at disappointing me than loving me. I suspect J. is only putting off the inevitable divorce because he feels he can't afford it on his own (in fact, when we last discussed divorce, he said "I don't think either one of us can afford to live by ourselves." Well, newsflash, I can make it work and if I can't, I have a family who will help. He doesn't.)

All I've ever wanted is love. I never knew it would be so fucking hard to have it.