My Life Collapses (continued...)

Continuing from my last post...

Anyway, my life with my wife seemed to be 'clearing up'. At least I thought so anyway. After we had that talk things seemed to be better between us. Our careers were still stinking though. I was still struggling through my project from hell and workink unbelievable hours. But, the tension and distance between me and my wife seem to dissipate. My golf league had ended so I wasn't hanging out at the bar much anymore. I pretty much worked. I had to get up at 6:20am in order to make it to work before 8:00am. Then I worked until 8:00pm and went home. My wife was never hungry, so I would make myself something to eat (in fact, the only food she ate at home for the last 6 months she lived there was peanutbutter and jam sandwiches). Then I would veg out and try to clear the stress from my mind as much as possible. Then repeat the process the next day. The project was going to be ending in a matter of weeks. All I had to do was keep pressing on until it was over.

My wife was still having the same problems at her work. She was still fighting with her boss and not doing what he was saying and was still getting repremanded every week for not covering her ass at work, and not balancing the books at their main troubled house. But she had started looking for other work and even got a job offer doing the same type of work for roughly the same pay. A little bit higher pay in fact. She just had to fill out all the visa paperwork and then wait the (roughly 6 weeks) for her visa to clear. (My job description was on the NAFTA free trade agreement, so it was a much faster and easier process for me to get a work visa.) Shortly after getting the job offer from the other company, she did get fired from her current employer. We knew it was only a matter of time before that happened. It did not matter though, she had another job ready to start as soon as she submitted the visa paperwork and waited for it to clear.

The night she got fired she went out with all her former coworkers. I got home from work and she called me to let me know she did get fired and was out. It was a Friday. I asked where she was so I could meet them there, but she told me she would rather I did not join them. This really upset me. I was sitting at home, but was upset by this and could not just sit at home by myself. So I went to that bar that I used to hang out at after golf. My idea was that I would call home every hour until my wife was home. Then I would go home to join her.

I did call home once, but then this pretty crazy dude named Bill showed up. We had met a year earlier and partied pretty hard for the weekend one time when my wife was in Chicago at a conference. I will talk about Crazy Bill in another note some time. After me and Bill started partying at the bar, I never bothered calling home again. This was bad, because about ten minutes after I called home last, my wife showed up at home to be with me. She had thought about what she had said to me, and felt bad. She decided that she did want to be with me that night. But I ended up going to an after hours party with Bill and never got home until 6:00am. Whoops.

This did not help our marriage. In fact, there was another incident that happened several months earlier before either of us were having any problems at work that it turns out made my wife think that I had cheated on her. Which I never did do, and never would do. I loved and cherished her and would never betray her. But I can see how she could think what she did. I had no idea that she was thinking that, and she never ever brought it up to me, but she was thinking it all along. This also contributed to the breakup of our marriage. It is actually kind of an amusing story. I will write about it in a separate note some time.

Anyway, it was a few days later that my wife told me that she was going to go to Toronto for a week or two to visit her friend. I thought that this was a good idea. It would give her a chance to clear her head and have a bit of a vacation and when she got back we could talk more about us, and about getting our lives back to something more normal. My project was ending in a matter of weeks, and I was going to be working even longer hours now to get it completed.

So she left for Toronto, three days after my 31st birthday (Oct. 13). We talked via email every two or three days. She left it pretty open-ended about when she was planning to come home. A week or so later, we were invited to a halloween party. So I emailed her and asked her if she was expecting to be back home for halloween. I needed to know if I should prepare a costume for her. She replied that she wasnt sure. Another week went by, and I was starting to really miss her. Work was still kicking my ass and there was some fall out from some corporate political stuff that had happened a few months earlier that made my manager at work take somewhat of a negative view towards me. I had thought we had worked that out and smoothed it over, but then I found out that he didnt think so. It was rather upsetting to me and I wanted my wife around me for support. I emailed her and let her know that I was missing her and asked when she was planning to come back home. She emailed me back and said that she had never ever intended to come back home. In fact, by now she had already gone back to Winnipeg, Manitoba to be with her sister. She had left me three weeks before I even knew that she was gone.

I know that it sounds niaive, but I thought all of our problems were work-related. I didnt even realize that our marriage was having problems. Looking back, I realize now that our marriage was having problems, but at the time I was so focussed on completing that project and getting out of that environment and back to a regular life, that I completely missed it.

Basically our marriage was so wonderfully good for so long, that I literally had no clue that it could ever end. I figured our love was strong and secure enough that we would be able to work through any issues. We had never had any issues in the eight years up to that point. Now she was gone and wouldnt even come home to talk about it.

I had even told her via email that I had no idea our marriage was even having problems. But she responded that that was bull-shit, and that we had talked about it several times. Which we didnt. Only in her head did she think we did. In fact, it was then that I found out that she was thinking all along that I had cheated on her, and that I was thinking and saying all these nasty things about her, and that I was hating her, and treating her terribly. But I wasnt doing any of those things, and she never ever told me what she was thinking, so I was oblivious to it. I was only trying to complete that project so that I could get back to my real life. I know that the Paxil had something to do with all the paranoid thoughts that she was having. It was amazing to me to hear all the things she was accusing me of thinking and doing the past several months. To this day, shes still convinced that I was doing and thinking all of those things. The only thing that I was ever thinking is that I had to complete that project and get out of that work environment. It was the only thing that had consumed my thoughts the past several months.

I desperately tried to get her to come back to Columbus so we could talk about it, and there is a little more story left, but its not very relevant. The bottom line is it would be four more years before we talked again...