Apocalypse

You’ve been spoiling for an argument for days.  I could feel it coming, I can always feel it brewing and building up.  I’m always so proud of myself for making it through those first few days, I feel as if I’ve outsmarted you.  I feel like a champion, overcoming the hurdles thrown my way.  I feel unfuckwithable.  I pride myself on how rock-solid and resilient I am, how I can not be baited.  But, you just don’t stop until you get a reaction, however long that takes.  That’s all it takes for you to make everything my fault and to completely absolve yourself of any personal responsibility for creating the conflict.  If you can get a reaction, I become the bad guy.  I know this, and I refuse to give you a reaction time and time and time again.  That puts your behavior squarely on your shoulders, you can’t pass it to me like a hot potato.  You just have to hold it…and burn.  The first night, you stumbled to bed drunk bringing up my past.  Rambling on about how you just don’t understand why I was a sex worker, and I’m asleep and I have to work the next day.  You don’t have to understand.  I don’t care if you approve.  It was before I ever met you, and I owe you no explanation.  We have discussed it at length anyway, I’m not sure what more you want or expect to hear from me.  But it’s not the time, so I go to sleep.  At some point, while asleep, out of old habit I put my hand on you.  You remove it and flip your back to me.  I do the same and fall back asleep.  The next night, I wake up to you doing that angry muttering between your teeth thing.  The thing you usually do right before you break something, snapping a pen in half or something like that.  I pretend I don’t hear you and I pretend to keep sleeping.  At some point in the night, I accidentally touch you again, and you throw my hand off of you.  I move to the edge of the bed and go back to sleep.  The next three nights, I don’t even try to touch you at all.  Why would I bother anymore?  You create your barriers, I’m tired of trying to cross them.  And why should I anyway, if I am so clearly unwanted?  Sleep by yourself then.  I won’t touch you.  I feel us drifting further and further apart, but I realize I just don’t care as much as I used to.  What is there left anymore to care about?  We find out my grandpa had a heart attack and might not make it.  I am quieter than usual.  I am thinking a lot.  I don’t feel like talking.  You are talking to me in the car, things that don’t require responses.  Telling me things I have heard, and I nod, but I have nothing to say.  Instead of having compassion, you make it about you (as usual) and pout because I’m not interacting with you.  It’s never my feelings that matter, it’s how my feelings make you feel.  Like if I was bleeding, you’d be demanding sympathy from me because you were traumatized by having to watch me bleed.  I don’t have the energy to give a shit, so I go about my day.  It gets to be about noon and while you have expressed sympathy for family members on facebook, you have yet to reach out to me to see how I’m doing or to let me know you care.  I send a few messages over the next 3 hours, and each time you respond with one word.  I know you’re still pouting about this morning, and I’m not going to keep putting forth effort if you’re not.  You don’t want to talk, I won’t talk.  Just one more door to close.  No sex, that’s been a while now.  My choice.  I won’t initiate.  If you want to, you will, and you haven’t, so whatever.  No touching, now no talking.  I wonder why we’re even still together.  I feel like this relationship is dead.  But still I stay, because we’re a family and my son has no other father and my family loves you and the kids and the business.  But not for me.  I don’t stay for me.  And it strikes me how sad that is, when I used to feel like the happiest, luckiest girl on the planet.  I don’t think that’s ever coming back.  I don’t think it was ever really real.  I really believed it was all my fault for a while, and I bent over backwards to change, to be what you needed me to be.  To say and do the right things.  But even then, you’d still get mad, only then you’d blame it on what I had done in the past.  So, you say it’s my behaviors that make you act this way, but I change the behaviors and you still act this way, claiming it’s because of my past behaviors.  What good was it to change, then?  I start to realize I was never to blame for your behavior, and I feel stupid for falling for it.  So then, it happens.  I’m talking to my son and you keep jumping in.  I told my son rather than throwing things or breaking things, he should use his words and talk about his feelings.  I was very proud of him when he did that to you, he told you that when he has two or more adults talking to him at the same time, he gets overwhelmed and it makes him feel like breaking things.  I applaud him for using his words instead of acting out.  Instead of showing respect for his feelings, though, you continue to join in to the conversations I am having with Tristan.  I am in the middle of a sentence and you interrupt, and in frustration I snap at you, “Hold ON”.  Yes, it was an irritated voice.  Because I was irritated.  After he leaves the room, I can almost see you salivating at the prospect of a juicy fight.  You begin baiting me, and at first I successfully ignore you.  “You didn’t MEAN to yell at me, right?”  You say.  I say nothing.  “Oh, well you DID then, I see how it is.  Okay.”  I still say nothing.  But you persist, and I decide that maybe if I calmly explain why I was upset, I can defuse this situation.  I am always so wrong for thinking that.  That’s where I went wrong.  I tell you, well, we did talk about how Tristan feels overwhelmed when grownups are ganging up on him.  You immediately become defensive and start bellowing about how you can do whatever you want, like a toddler throwing a tantrum.  You can talk whenever you want.  I calmly reply that no, in this case, you can not.  When I am speaking to my son, you will not interrupt me.  You go ballistic.  YOU put your chest up to MINE, trying to intimidate me.  It doesn’t work, I’m tired of your bullying.  I puff up my chest too.  I won’t back down, because I am not wrong.  Here we are, chest to chest, in each other’s faces.  You’re yelling about how you will interrupt me if you want to, you’re interrupting me right NOW, blah blah blah…I’m yelling about how you will NOT and yes I CAN tell you what to do when it comes to how you will treat me, I AM telling you what to do, and you will NOT interrupt me.  Stupid shit.  I almost laughed.  Anyway, then I put my palms on your chest and pushed you away.  Not hard, it wasn’t an aggressive move.  Of course you snatch that up like it’s candy, NOW I have given you something you can use against me.  You leave, as usual, always running away from your problems.  You hate it when you’re wrong.  You can’t stand it when you make mistakes.  You text me that I’m a destroyer, a sociopath, and something else.  I laugh.  It’s your script.  I used to believe it, because usually by the time you started spewing that predictable venom I had actually lost my cool and yelled, or insulted you, or made a mistake I felt guilty about.  But this time, I have nothing to be sorry for.  You call me crazy.  I think about what that must make you, because out of the two of us….but I know by now that I can prove no point with you, I can use no logic on you.  You are in the place where logic is broken.  You are regurgitating your script and I stop participating.  The other times this has happened, I have been more forgiving.  But I really don’t know what to think of a person who would do this, rather than be a pillar of comfort and support, during an emotionally trying time.  It feels like you are kicking me when I’m down.  I ask myself, why am I with someone who would do that?  Is this all I think I deserve?