The Stray Is Gone.

Finally. His stuff is still there, but his person is gone. My husband is riddled with guilt. I've been trying to explain to him about enabling, but he just feels guilty. He wants his friend to get out of his parents' house. I agree that it would be very healthy for the Stray, who is 30, frequently drunk, and whose parents are prone to violence, to have a place of his own; however...not my bucket of shit. Not my husband's bucket of shit.

If living with the parents who are prone to violence hasn't encouraged him to get out on his own, and if he hasn't been able to save up enough money to get his own place while living with his folks, he certainly wasn't going to be motivated to get out while staying with us.

I feel a little guilty, too. I think the Stray wanted to find a way to stay with us permanently. He'd asked my husband if it was ok if he put posters up in the room he was staying in. He likes us, and he thinks we're cool. We are cool. But we're grown, and married. The Stray would get upset with my husband for wanting to hang out with me when I get home from work. "You're a totally different person when she's here than when she's not!" he'd whine, upset that he wouldn't go do graffiti with him or sit with him on the couch to watch movies or sit outside with him while he smoked. He wanted us to have something like a frat house.

My husband and I are very married. We kind of slobber all over each other all the time, or sit quietly in the same room, or make out or fight or cry...but when we're together, we're really, really together. It's nice, and it's happy a lot of the time, but there's no room in our codependent little love nest for a poor Stray.

So I'm glad he's gone. I hope he gets his shit together and gets his own place soon, before his mom stabs him. Poor kid.

Effects Of Heroin Addict Father Preconception.

I got this comment on my "Dissapointment of a failed search" post from last week, and I felt like I should respond:

I have been pondering whether or not to actually admit that I was the one who
was searching "effects of heroin addict father preconception". Well, it was me.
It is quite embarrassing after reading it but I bet you can understand after I
explain myself. I have been with my husband 9 yrs and have no children. He got
out of rehab in January but is still not living back at home with me. Mostly,
because I would swear on my life that he still using even though he denies it.
We both talk about wanting to have a family. I really do want to have a baby but
a million questions come rushing thru my head. For example, yes I do want a baby
but, should he be fathering it? If he is still using, would the baby be okay? If
I did get pregnant would it be the one thing that would make him want to quit?
Those are just a few. So, please think of me as just a girl wanting to have a
normal life again with her so-called recovering drug addict husband.

So, dear Google searcher:

Please write to me if you ever want to. I'd love to make friends. I'm betting that we have a lot in common. I want a baby, too, and I have a crazy-ass husband, and I'm scared. So I understand if you want to be anonymous, but if you ever feel like emailing, you always can at thejunkyswife@gmail.com.

I'm a crazy codependent who thinks she can save the world from the evils of heroin, so if you ever need anyone to cry or complain to, I'm (electronically) here for you.

The Nightingale And The Rose.

Oh read Oscar Wilde's The Nightingale And The Rose. Poor bird, pouring its heart out for nothing. I find something in the story compelling to me right now...

Maybe it's not nothing that the bird died for. The bird sacrificed itself for an ideal? Isn't that what artists do? Isn't that like what Jesus did or whatever? Maybe the bird is a Christ figure?

That doesn't seem very Wilde. He was probably talking about beauty and art and all those things. Or maybe he was critiquing the pedantic, boring cry of heteronormativity, and the little queer bird is sacrificing itself on tradition's altar, grasping at a romantic ideal that's no longer valid in the modern age.

Or maybe it's a codependent bird, maiming itself for the love of a couple that has absolute nothing to do with it, and that isn't even real love, anyway. The bird's description of the lover and his perfection rings marvelously true.

All I know is that I want a bird-blood rose.


http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/22974347/

Science Explains Why Codependents Act Like Asses

I stumbled upon an article from the Washington Post called "If It Feels Good To Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural." The article explains that researchers at the National Institutes of Health have been conducting tests in an effort to determine whether or not altruistic behavior has a positive response hard-wired into the brain. The article states that when volunteers were asked to think of scenarios involving either donating or keeping a large sum of money, those who thought of acting out of compassion showed increased activity in the primitive part of the brain that lights up in response to food or sex (or drugs, in the brain of an addict). The study suggsests that the suppression of base and selfish urges is hard-wired into the brain to give us a feeling of pleasure.

So, my fellow codependents, we're not really saints. We're altruism junkies.