I've had an epiphany--part 1

For the past few weeks I've been trying to figure out how I was going to go about sharing a few bad experiences I've had in my marriage. Trying to figure out a way to put into words how my marriage is not perfect and how unhappy I get from time to time with my marriage and my station in life and it all seemed as if I no fault in any of my problems although I never truly thought of it like that...not taking responsibility for some of the things I have done that have shaped my life to what it is now. I'm going to try and shape this into something coherent and in some kind of order so please bear with me...

I love my wife. I love my wife very much so that to be away from her for only 3 days feels like months and I get a good feeling as if I was denied being able to see her as punishment but on occasion I feel as if there are things she needs to work on and things she needs to recognize in order to fix herself and/or our marriage.

One of those things is her ability to make rash decisions when mad. I'm not saying that after an argument she has cheated on me although I'll never really know unless she tells me. One of her worst is keeping any number of things from me because she thinks that I'll get mad and she hold on to it until eventually it starts to eat away at her and only way for her to bring it up is through arguing. Another one of those decisions and it's a large one that she's made pretty much durout our entire marriage and before we got married is keeping contact with her ex-boyfriend. Early on in our relationship she asked me if it was OK to keep brief contact with her ex because she was with him for 2 years and was close to his family. Initially it did spark a negative reaction out of me but I decided what the hell. We've only been together for a few weeks and if we were to start getting serious down the road I'm sure it would fade away but as they say hindsight is always 20/20. She would occasionally send him an instant message asking how his family was doing and that was it. After we got married is when I first got into retail so it's been pretty non stop since then so it was either work or spending time with her. We'll get back to this later.

Now, our problems didn't really start until after the little one was born in May of 2002. I wasn't exactly a model father but then again, most new fathers aren't. Took me a while to start living up to my responsibilities as a father. I inherited a horrible spending habit from my mother and my wife's was just as bad from her mother. My mother simply spent a lot of money when she didn't make enough of it as it was and having to support me. Her mother usually ran her credits pretty high buying whatever she wanted and hiding the statements and purchases from her father which she still does to this day. Eventually I was able to beat that materialistic illness although I still get the urge to buy something...ANYTHING...whenever I had any amount of cash on me but I'm able to contain myself. It took my wife a few years but I think she has it under control. I was buying DVDs like crazy, eating out every night, buying games and needless amounts of crap when I should have been spending it on necessities like baby formula, diapers, food for us, gas, etc., etc.

One thing that ties into the bad father subject was my ability to hold down a job. I'll admit this is something I am in no way proud of. There has been only two reasons for this. A. Because I had an asshole manager(s) and just made any excuse to quit the job or B. Because I was fired because of my compulsion to steal. I've lost many jobs I've loved because of it and have lost great opportunities because of it. 1.) My job at Mars Music, the ultimate job for a musician. 2.) Blockbuster, my other obsession which is movies. 3.) Cobb Theatre, again with my movie obsession and I was a shift leader. No one knows this but I was almost arrested for what I did, it involved someone else's credit card, and would have gone down a bad road but lucky for me that someone else was very forgiving and understanding and did not press charges. 4.) Petco, worked long and hard as usual and my hard work had paid off because I was given a promotion. I was going to be a key holding team leader but because I had to go and steal things from a local Walmart I was arrested and when running a background check, which is a standard procedure for anyone moving up to management, the felony popped up and the promotion was taken away.


There's a lot more to be said but I need a break....stay tuned...