Walking on Eggshells

The following is indicative of how things have been going lately. Everything from conversations to the general vibe that he seems to be giving off. I warn you now, it’s a hellishly long entry. You may want to grab a cuppa and a bickie.

The Husband: …see you think every time I mention that I'm going to bed it means that you have to stop what your doing and go to bed as well.

The back story to this is that when we were arguing one day, maybe a month or so ago, I don’t really remember, he’s said this a few times, so I’m not exactly sure when the latest time was, that he doesn’t like going to bed without me. His words at one point were that I’m like a bit of a security blanket for him, he falls asleep quicker and has a better nights sleep when I’m there. In some regards that’s actually quite sweet. From my perspective though, his way of expressing this feeling is just frustrating, annoying and mentally draining.

He has said on countless occasions, as I mentioned, that he hates going to bed alone and I never go to bed with him, I always sit up and either watch TV, muck around on the computer or at the moment, I’m studying a lot. I have insomnia, going to sleep for me is really hard and then waking up can be even harder when I finally do fall asleep. I often choose not to go to bed because I know that I'm going to lie there wide awake for hours on end and then it feels like it’s even harder to fall asleep then if I just sat in the lounge or on the computer until I felt ‘tired’.  There are definitely times when I don’t want to go to bed because I don’t want to be near him or because I’m having one of my ‘dark times’ (as I call them) and the thought of having to wake up again to another horrible feeling day just about kills me, so I stay awake, in the silence, and hope the next day won’t arrive. Consequently, he ends up going to bed by himself on most of these occasions.

What he’ll do though is lie awake for a while then call out, “Are you coming to bed soon?”, “How much longer do you think you’ll be?”, “Can’t that wait until tomorrow?”, “You can watch that show in bed”, “Why don’t you just go to bed and see if you can fall asleep?”. Or he’ll deliberately keep himself awake and get up and down repeatedly, getting a drink, going to the toilet, having a smoke, coming to sit on the lounge. The other night he went to bed, got back about 15 minutes later and then bought his pillow out and lied down on the lounge. Now I know that he doesn’t like going to bed alone, I do understand what he’s telling me. 95% of the time I’m not staying up just to piss him off or avoid him, which I’m fairly sure he thinks is what is happening.

All these questions and the lying on the lounge and the getting up and down with an obvious attitude of annoyance, from where I sit, are all designed to make me feel shitty for not going to bed when he says he’s going to. I’m not sure I’ve explained this all very well, but do you see what I’m saying here? Am I right in thinking that what he’s doing is his way of saying “See, because you won’t go to bed when I do, I can’t sleep properly, so I’m going to keep asking you questions and getting up and down or lying on the lounge, so that you know I’m having a hard time and that I’m pissed off.” The questions he asks I’m sure he already knows the answers too. He asks me during the day, “What do you need to do on the computer?” So I tell him. “What work have you got to do today, is there much, will it take long?” So I explain it all to him. Yet he asks those questions (which I wrote about above) and aren’t they the same questions that he’s asked me during the day?

Knowing that he’ll get pissed that I’m not going to be going to bed when he does I try and make sure that I tell him, fairly early on in the night or the day, if I’m going to need to stay up and study so that I don’t get behind in things, that way he is forewarned and can make the choice if he wants to sit with me or go to bed. But he’ll still ask when night time rolls around.

Now when he made that comment, which I opened this post with, I didn’t say anything. Deliberately. I didn’t want to start an argument, I just didn’t want to talk to him at all. He’s been walking around this house like he’s in the worst place on earth. He has a way of being in a bad mood that has me convinced that I’ve done something I just don’t know about or I should know about but don’t care enough to realise. I’ve said this to him and he says that it’s just me, that I take his moods to personally, that it doesn’t always have to do with me. He’s probably right in some respects. But then when I can finally what’s wrong with him out, he’ll something incredibly cryptic and leave me again feeling like it’s something I’ve done. Some of that is definitely on me. I’m happy to admit that. But not all of it. No freaking way is it all on me. He’s doing it on purpose, I know he is.

I’m making the effort. I really am. I’m trying to be more affectionate. I’m trying to talk more to him, about all sorts of things. I’m trying to keep him up to date on what I’m doing with school. We aren’t having as much sex as he’d like but I just don’t want to. Part of me does but a bigger portion just doesn’t want to, not even a little bit. The days of walking around on eggshells, never knowing if I’ve done something really gets to me. To then turn around at night and say “Hey, how about it?” just isn’t in my vocab at the moment. I can’t drum up the mental capacity to do that. It’s not fair on him I know, but neither is the fact that I walk around all the fucking time thinking I’ve done something terrible yet never know what!

Sometimes, he’ll wait two or three days and then tell me. Completely out of the blue. I’ll tell him I’m sick of his mood (as if I’m one to talk) and that he can’t expect me to be all open and honest if he can’t do the same, it’s not fair. So out will come a whole diatribe of stuff that I’ve apparently done over the last week or more, half, if not more, of which I can’t remember doing. Half of what I can remember he’s taken completely the wrong way and twisted it all around to mean something it didn’t or probably what I find to be the worse, is he’ll only take a portion of what I say and then argue with me about that, leaving off the most important point that I made as if it didn’t exist. For example, I’ll make an example point of something, something real that he’s done or said recently, like in the last day or two and then I’ll go on to explain how he goes about doing something is the problem, not what he’s doing. He’ll ignore the how and then blame me or turn it around so he can blame me for the what. It’s so damm frustrating! I try and have a rational discussion most of the time but he just carries on like a child and starts yelling, so I start yelling and then it just descends in stupidity from both of us.

I do love him. I honestly, absolutely do love him. I’m trying to fix the things that I do that aren’t fair, where I can see his point of view and understand it. But when I feel like I’m the only one taking any responsibility for anything that is wrong with this marriage it puts me off wanting to fix it. There are a thousand things wrong with our relationship. We’re both to blame. Yet I feel like I’m more in the right so to speak. If we were to both draw up a list of problems, mine would be more realistic I think. Then again, who doesn’t think that when they are having a discussion or an argument?

I don’t know, I’m just so sick of walking around on eggshells all the time. I’m sick of trying to mediate for everyone else in the household because he can be so irrational most of the time. I’m just tired of it all. I won’t do anything about it know though. I’m not in a position mentally, emotionally, physically or financially to do anything. One day I will be. I know I will. When that day comes I don’t have a clue, not even a little one, but it will come. If that means we can fix things and possibly be happy together then I’ll be overjoyed with that, if not, I’ll get over it, one day.