I skipped my meeting last night, and that was a foolish thing for me to do. I skipped it because I am tired. I am tired because I am suffering from festering resentment syndrome. Going to a meeting might have helped me to process my festering resentments.Festering resentment syndrome is an ailment common amongst the wives of junkies. During the days, I'm happier than I've been in a long time. We wake up together, go to the clinic, stop to get coffee, and I drive him to work. I enjoy our early mornings...we make sure to get up with plenty of time to talk and laugh and hold each other before we get out of bed, and I like our long car ride with lots of time to talk. I go to work and enjoy my job, and he is working now, too. It's still not perfect...he's contributing nothing near his share yet. But, he's contributing. He's paying for his own treatment. He's engaged in the business of living again, engaging with me. It's progress.
We get home from working and cook together, play with our dogs, go to meetings if it's meeting night and watch a movie or television if it's not. We talk, a lot, and we talk a lot about Stuff, like the big Stuff that we need to talk about if we're going to make it to the other side of this crisis. Things are going in the right direction.
I am growing, too. I'm not harboring resentments the way I used to. I'm working on the things I need to work on to be able to let them go...or at least I think I am. Little things don't bother me like they used to, at least not until I lie down at night.
It's almost as if there's some resentment convection oven inside of me. I stuff and stuff all the resentments I think I'm letting go of deep inside it, and then, late at night...ping! The timer goes off. My resentments are ready!
Night before last, for instance, the resentment that woke me up at 2:30 in the morning was about a stolen camera. It wasn't an important camera. I never used it. It was an old film camera I'd had years ago, and he'd pawned it. I hadn't even missed the damn thing...he told me he stole it and pawned it in another of his great confessional moments. I don't care about the damn camera....or at least I don't think I care. But shit, at 2:30 a.m. last Wednesday night, I woke up absolutely enraged over the damned camera. Enraged. Crying. I had to get out of bed and go sit in the bathroom and sob and punch the wall.
Last night, it was an elaborate lie he told me last February. He was repairing a part of our sunroom, and I had paid for some of the parts. His repairing it himself was meant to save us money, but man, he'd sure needed to borrow and borrow and borrow and buy and buy and buy, and from what I could see, nothing was progressing on the project. It was before I'd found his needles, and so it was before I knew exactly what was going on with the money; however, I knew something wasn't right, and I told him I wasn't going to give him any more money. He freaked, and he called me at work, petulant and angry, reading off a long list of items that he HAD to buy to be able to FINISH the project, and didn't I WANT to have nice windows in our SUNROOM? Didn't I want to improve the VALUE of the HOUSE? He railed and railed at me so much that I figured I must have been being crazy. Surely, I had to have been behaving in some kind of crazy-ass way for him to get so upset at me. Surely, there must be some explanation for why our $200 project had turned into a $500 one, and there must be some reason why he needed another $100 to be able to finish it properly. Surely, I was being unfair.
I woke up last night, reliving every minute of it...angry with him for lying, and not just for lying, but for that crazy-making kind of lie that makes me doubt my own sanity. I woke up angry at myself for ever doubting my own sanity and my own management of my own goddamned money for even one fucking second.
I thought I was over it. He was using. I was in denial. It was before Nar-Anon. We're growing. Things are better now. I know what was going on. I know what is going on.
But apparently, I'm not over it. I'm not done with hurt and anger. I can keep myself away from it in the sunlight, in our sweet mornings together and in our sweet nights before the lights go out, but when they do...it's like these goblin resentments just drip from the walls, just rip from my insides and pour in from the outsides. I lie in the dark, enraged, frustrated, sad...counting resentments like sheep.
Oh, I want it gone. I want this stuff to be over. A friend of mine was struggling with the "entirely ready" language of Step 6...but boy, I'm not. I am absolutely, entirely ready to let this shit go. I am entirely ready for a full night's sleep. I am entirely ready to find the right path for healing myself from all this shit, for letting it all go. I love my husband. He's a good man, and he's doing the best he can right now to become a better man. I am ready.
