Daily Archives: 28 March 2012

I’m very grateful to all the people who got in touch following my last two posts. There’s been various offers of help, physical and moral. Thank-you everyone!

They say at times like this you find out who your real friends are. I don’t want to be that restrictive. In today’s busy world, you find out which of your real friends have got your interests at heart and time to read your blog. I’ve really appreciated all the support I’ve received. I’m especially grateful to my Mum & Dad, who listened and calmed me. A special mention also goes to my pals Ian (in Cardiff), Charles (in Brighton) and the #LewesTweetup people. There have been others. I’ll not list them all here.

Over the last few days I lost all sense of perspective. I’ve piled pressure on my wife and unfairly blamed her when she couldn’t respond in a way that was helpful to me. We’ve been talking again this morning and I hope to see her this evening…

In the meantime, I’ve pressed on with the soul destroying work of rewiring my house. It has proved to be a gigantic task, no part of which was familiar to me. Today I decided I’d rebuild the garden path, having laid a steel wire armoured cable underneath it. In fact, relaying the steps was the first task my wife asked me to do when we first moved in, a little over a year ago. All sorts of other activities got in the way. As with everything else in this project, this was something I’ve never done before. Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t very good at it but it’s a step in the right direction.

That’s where I am right now. Been rewiring my own home for two and a half weeks. It’s been cold, filthy and difficult. Along the way I’ve had to struggle constantly with my own wife, to persuade her to take up various offers of accommodation so that she didn’t make my working life harder. She had been insisting that she would move back in even though the house is effectively decommissioned. There’s no hot water, no heating, no electricity except a builder’s supply, no insulation and filth and rubble everywhere. I find it difficult living in these conditions. She would not be able to maintain an even keel at all, with the pressure of having to go to work.

Over the last three days I’ve sunk into despair. Yesterday I begged her to come and see me but she “didn’t have time” because she’d made an arrangement to go and see some ex-friends of mine instead.

I cut them off six months ago because they refused to tackle their drug addictions. I did that after much discussion and asked them to get in touch again when they had cleaned up their act. Perhaps unsurprisingly they cleaned up when pregnancy came along but they didn’t get in touch with me. Instead they contacted my wife, who did not tell me the good news either.

In the last half year my wife has seen them twice and a third time last night. It seems that I am bottom of her list of priorities. To be fair, she did telephone three times yesterday but on each occasion she had neither the physical space nor time to speak to me. She’s offered to come and see me this evening. I fear my emotional decline is too rapid for that to be of much use.

I’m sure she loves me, in much the same way that people love their pets. If she doesn’t get emotional stability from me, she doesn’t want to know me. Of course, my problems are not her fault. I understand that perfectly well but I can’t understand why she cannot give me a little extra, especially now when I’m saving her thousands pounds and have been driven half mad by the exercise. She is my wife after all.

A handful of friends have been great. They’ve got in touch when they realised the wheels were coming off my existence. There have been offers of help. My parents too. Trouble is, I can’t see a long term solution to the problem of my wife only being able to engage with me emotionally when she has nothing else better to do. It has been ever thus. My options include running away for a short while, quitting this marriage altogether and suicide. Thanks to my Dad, that last option has shifted from the top of the list to the bottom. He urges me to see if I can have a rapprochement with my wife but let’s face it she’s a psychiatrist so she well understands the impact of refusing to engage with the suicidal. I intend to graft some more today. I hope my wife does come to see me this evening but only if she can demonstrate some patience and love beyond the superficial servings she’s dished out recently. I’ve had a belly full of them but am starving for meaningful emotional support.