Milk, eggs, antacid, and helplessness

It's been a long time since I posted much. No idea why, but I guess I've just been pre-occupied: with work, with home, with drinking myself to sleep at nights, ... that sort of thing. But when I look at some of the stories I've been telling D in my letters to her, they would work perfectly here.

About three weeks ago, for instance -- just after I got back from the trip that included my eighteenth date with D -- Wife picked a fight with me. I don’t remember how it started or how she slid into it, nor can I do a very good job of recounting the sequence of ideas or themes. I think this is because there really were no ideas, just a succession of feelings -- all of them wounded, self-pitying, and self-absorbed. The gist seems to be that I am a beast who is trying to kill her because I didn’t buy milk before I left on this latest trip. Of course that’s not enough by itself -- in fact I "never" buy milk, and I "never" pay my share of it if she buys it, and her body weight is too low which means she needs a higher-protein diet than she can possibly get if I cook vegetarian which I "always" do these days so obviously I have failed to understand that it is "a matter of life and death" that she has to eat differently than I have been cooking, and if I "cared about her at all, even a tiny bit" I wouldn’t want her to die of malnutrition so I would start cooking differently, … and on and on and on. Any connection with the facts in all this was purely coincidental; and in fact most of the things she alleged as fact are simply not true. Nor was there the slightest suggestion that she might take any responsibility at all for her own well-being. I did finally suggest that I couldn’t take her ranting very seriously because … well gosh, she said this was all because I failed to buy milk? And she said she has to have milk regularly as a source of protein, because otherwise she’ll lose too much body mass and die? And yet … somehow not once in the whole week I was gone was it important enough for her to swing by the store on the way back from some other errand and pick up a bottle of milk? Have I got this right? There was a lot more drama before she decided to drive out to the store right then and there to buy some milk. That would prove me wrong, by golly! Still more drama, all the way out to the car. As she pulled away and I walked back inside, Son 2 said, "OK now, I just heard all of that and this family is fucking disintegrating. Over milk??"

After she got back from the store she tried to pick up the thread of the argument and to have the last word in it. Meanwhile I had made dinner and put it on the table. She continued to light into me at the table, until Son 2 interposed by demanding a moratorium on fighting until after dinner was over. After dinner I had a couple more shirts to iron; and when Wife came back into the back room I told her she cannot say anything more about any of this being an issue of life and death. "If you truly believe that the way I cook -- or staying in the marriage generally -- poses a risk to your life, then you have to get out: go to a shelter, call the police, call an attorney, file for divorce, but in any event don’t try to argue with me about it. On the other hand if you are not prepared to do those things, then you don’t really believe your life is at stake and so you have to stop saying it." Of course this just sparked more excuses and equivocations, but fortunately she was tired and fell quickly back to sleep.

Oh wait, I just remembered there was a whole stretch about how I was too controlling and made up too many rules she had to obey; also about how unfair it is that she can never make her budget balance when the "only" thing she buys outside of her share of normal household expenses is $10 a month of Diet Coke. There was somehow no mention of her car in this part of the discussion (a luxury car that is just hers so she pays for all its expenses), and only a glancing reference to all the "medical" marijuana she has been buying. And so it goes.

That was on a Sunday night. The next morning, Wife called me at work, on my cell phone, to ask “Why did you cross antacid tablets off the shopping list?” (I’m sure she figured she could work this up into a lather, kind of like last night’s tempest over buying milk.)

“Because we have lots of them.”

“Well the jar in my medicine cabinet is almost out, so I don’t know where you think they are.”

I sighed to myself. The next two jars of antacid tablets were in the cupboard in the hallway where we have always kept all that sort of thing -- shampoo, toothpaste, soap, and over-the-counter remedies -- and they were positioned obviously front and center. It would have been impossible to open the cupboard door and not see them. But this was so obvious and would have been so easy for anybody else to have found that I couldn’t make myself spit out the words. Instead I said, …

“Look around in the obvious places, and if you still can’t find them by the time I get home I’ll help you look.”

“OK.”

In case you were wondering, the antacid tablets were still there in the cupboard in the hallway last night, some eighteen days later.

Then that same Monday, over dinner in the evening, she complained that I hadn't bought sandwich meat. More specifically, she told me: first, that she had told her nutritionist she eats eggs every morning for breakfast (and he congratulated her because they will put weight on her); and then second, that of course she could have eggs for lunch since I hadn't bought sandwich meat, but they would be boring after having had them for breakfast. So I was amused to realize Tuesday morning (as I made breakfast for myself and Son 2) that I was looking at the very same carton of eggs we had bought before I left town, so that she cannot possibly have eaten a single egg in the preceding week and a half or longer, except for one hard-boiled egg I put into dinner a couple nights earlier. Not one. So where does all this talk about eggs come from? Your guess is as good as mine. I wonderrd, though, whether she realized that she was fabricating these stories?

A couple days later I raised the issue. I told her that I was uncomfortable with her actively pursuing nutritionists (as she has been doing recently), because she is lying about what she eats: so if they start prescribing something to put weight on her (she says she is at about 108 lbs right now) in the belief that she is already eating a good diet (such as all those mythical eggs) and she isn't, they will be mis-prescribing. I expected her to blow up the way she would have once upon a time, demanding to know how dare I question her veracity (even though I can count how many eggs we still have) etc etc. I was impressed that instead she said yes, that was right, she hadn't eaten any eggs recently. For a while she was in the habit of it and she must have been speaking out of habit when she told her nutritionist she was eating eggs rather than remembering what she had actually eaten recently. OK, that's still not good, but as answers go it is miles ahead of the angry, aggressive, psychotic craziness she used to bellow out before whenever she was caught in a flat-out untruth. Maybe her work with Counselor to improve how she talks to people is actually bearing fruit.

But the overt helplessness still concerns me.