Yesterday, I believe I closed the door on leaving my husband. It feels like crap. It feels like giving up. You had to guess I'd tell you about it . . .
I decided to clean the TV/Rec room. It had developed an odor that is not funny at all. When I went in there it just smelled like body funk. My husband had been sleeping in there since December 2009 which isn't as bad as it sounds. Means something like 15 months. But that's another story.
I started one of my semi-annual (I think that means sometimes more than once a year) cleaning efforts where I go through the whole house top to bottom, cleaning windows, closets, under beds, you name it. Many times it's centered around the coming of winter and the coming of spring. I only do it once or twice a year, so it felt like a good time with school over. Anyway, back to the point. The room was a disaster. There was stuff piled everywhere. Clothes, shoes, dishes, magazines, receipts, papers and just stuff all over the place piled elbow high and hanging off of things. A suitcase from a trip in November still packed with winter clothes up against a leaning tower of crap. A basket of clean, folded sheets ready to be put in the closet that he couldn't manage to do. A pile of board games, including several card games and a metal tin of 15 dot dominoes was just spilled out onto the floor. I could have written my name in the cat hair and dust on everything.
I grabbed a small bin for the little stuff and started in on the room and then I got sad. Sad because this is the man I married. My husband. The one I decided 24 years ago I just couldn't live without. This is the man I married, left to himself for a year. The man I married on the verge of losing his wife and the life that he knows, living like a college student, or worse, like a rat, in a room with a gigantic TV and he was doing nothing to change it.
I cleaned the room about six months ago and it was the same story. Piles and piles of stuff he's too lazy to put away, wash, or throw out. Why does he have a problem walking from one end of the house to the other? Why?! Back then, I was just angry. I didn't care. Now I'm beat down, I'm tired and want it to be over, so I told him he could move back in the bedroom. I didn't tell him it was because I didn't want him wrecking another part of the house. I didn't tell him anything. I told him he was moving back into the bedroom. I'm sure he thinks he won. I'm sure he thinks he waited me out.
He didn't.
The truth is, I'm done. I'm going back to caring for the house and whatever else needs attention when it needs it, but the damage has been done here. A piece of me broke off when this mess began and I can't find it. I don't feel the same anymore. I can't overlook it anymore, I can't act like someday he will grow up and he will act like a man who owns a home and has a family. He has not tried to figure out what's going on. He says he's "trying". I don't understand how he could be trying when he hasn't asked me what to do. What I want. He has never asked me what was wrong. He's never come right out and asked me, in 24 years:
"What's wrong?"
I just blow up on him once every five years or so, and it's over. I wish it didn't have to be this way. I wish I could go on pretending I'm not married to a child, but I am. I'm married to a boy in a man's body. A selfish, lazy, immature boy. It's just a shame, but it is what it is.
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