Bad days and "good" ones too

One of the most difficult things for me has been handling the "good" days. That might sound weird, but here's what I mean:

There are so many "bad" days, where DH's logic doesn't make sense, where he gets upset when I question how he got $20 to go out to eat when he isn't working and I didn't give it to him, days where he decides that he has put me through too much and he is going to end it all....it really seems like there is always some kind of drama going on with us and I hate it. I'm not a dramatic person, but I do tend to worry. I hate the bad days. I never know what the right thing to do is.
If this was just a normal marriage where the husband was doing all this, I wouldn't have a problem just saying, "enough!" But it's not like that.

But as I was saying, the worst part is actually the "good" days. The days where he realizes that the spending is out of control, the days when he does something "manly" around the house like he used to do--cut the grass, fix the faucet, etc. He starts talking to me like the "old" husband, he starts acting like the "old" husband, he starts planning on what he is going to do to get the money problems taken care of, and I start thinking "ok! now things are getting better, we are going to be ok!" And then the next day, it's gone again and my hopes are dashed once more. That's what's so hard. He's here, then he's gone. And I've known him as "normal" for a lot longer than I've known him as "mentally ill", so I keep thinking that things will eventually go back to "normal". And the letdowns don't get any easier, no matter what I tell myself.

More ways to spend money than you ever thought...

Well, ever since about last summer, my DH has been on a nonstop spending spree (or ten) involving loans, credit cards, bad checks, etc. I truly did not know much about what happens when you spend money and can't or won't pay it back, I thought: "Well, credit cards are finite--they have a limit. When he reaches the limit, he'll be forced to stop spending."

Well, the next thing that happened, of course, when the credit cards got shut off, was that he started writing bad checks. This is the guy I married because he balanced his checkbook every single day, to the penny. I thought I could learn from him! Anyhow, he went on a check-writing spree to the point where, when they threatened to close his bank account, he decided that "they" were being unreasonable, so he opened another account at another bank, just a few days before the first account was closed for having a negative balance for 30+ days.

I thought that he would have learned something from all that. But as soon as possible, he got his new account into trouble, too. I figured, "once the checking accounts are closed, that's it." Ha Ha. Silly me.

The guy that plows our driveway in the winter, also runs an excavation business. Our driveway (dirt) had a lot of potholes in it, but it was not at the top of my priority list, when it was taking every penny I had to just keep the lights on....anyhow, DH happened to run into the snow-plowing guy, and asked him to bring in some dirt to fill in the potholes. "And while you're at it, could you bring in a load of dirt to level our our yard, too?" Argh. A $400 bill. And this guy is a neighbor, a friend. I paid it to save face.

Then I found out that the hardware stores in town allow people to "charge" things. Not with a credit card, but just with your good name. So lets say a pipe breaks and you need some parts and it's in between paychecks, you can "charge" your parts until you can afford to pay for them. I think that's very neighborly. DH, unfortunately discovered this, and the first time I found out, he had a $360 balance at one hardware store, and a $150 balance at the other. These balances were over three months old, and the storekeepers were starting to ask him "when are you going to pay off this balance?" DH seemed really worried about them, so I went and paid them off using my credit card (which used to have a balance of $0 before all this started). I was pretty angry, but I kept thinking that he wouldn't dare do that again, he put me in a bad spot.
About 2 weeks later, he got a bill, which I opened, just so I could feel good about it being paid off, and I saw that the very day after I had paid off that bill, he had charged $200 again!!!! He now owes that store about $540. I am trying very hard not to pay it. I do feel bad, though, because it is a small community and all, I really struggle with things like this.

Then there was the CO2 detector. It started going off one day, DH automatically, without even thinking to check the batteries, panicked and called the fire department, who found no CO2, just dead batteries. The bill for that visit was $350. I paid that also, because I don't want to have a REAL emergency and have the fire department say, "Well, sorry, yes, I know your house is burning down, but you owe us $350.00, so too bad." or something like that.

DH's therapist thinks that I am enabling DH by paying things like that, and I really struggle with it. First off, because we have always had a good reputation as hard-working honest people in our town. Secondly, because someday, I am still hoping, DH will be better again, and I know it is going to be very difficult even without him having to worry about looking our friends and neighbors in the eye. I am almost at the point where I feel like I should go to all of these people and say "Please don't let him buy anything at all without putting the cash in your hand right there", and even maybe telling people that there is mental illness involved, but to me that feels so very disrespectful, something I would never ever do as a wife, it's very hard for me to admit that I might have to do this.

Sage advice for overspenders

I think I mentioned that I enjoyed and still enjoy learning how to conserve on spending.

Even before my husband started his spending spree(s), I was the "saver" in the marriage and he was the "spender" (I'm told that there is usually one of each in every marriage, LOL)

Anyhow, today I found an interesting blog called The Simple Dollar, where the author points out the following simple truth that REALLY struck home with me, so I wanted to share it with you all:

"Every time you buy anything, you sacrifice a bit of your dreams."

Now isn't that the truth? One of my big weaknesses is eating fast food. I justify it by telling myself "I'm too busy to eat at home, there's just too much going on in my life".

That's just an excuse, and I can see it clear as day, when I read what I wrote above. It's my way of comforting myself without working at it. But when I look at it in reality, I really did work at it. I spent 45 minutes working for that food. 3/4 of a hour's pay at my 2nd job, and if I was putting that towards bills, my dreams would be that much closer to reality and I might not be quite as stressed out financially all the time.

I do try to make good choices when I eat out, but still, in reality, that is one area I really need to work on for myself. Basically everything else is under control...except that.

I think it will be my new personal mantra:
Every time you buy anything, you sacrifice a bit of your dreams.

It's all so confusing...

Well, you are almost all caught up on the nutshell version of what has been going on in my marriage this past year. I’ve reread my posts and I was wondering to myself if it sounds like I’ve created this blog just to bash my husband for being sick. And then I wondered if some of you might think that way too, so I wanted to clarify a little.

In the last year, there has been more than a lifetime’s worth of “crap” happening to us via this illness. Most of it directly affects me, and I am, for the most part, and depending on who you ask (LOL), not mentally ill. So I react first to these things in a very human way.

When you think about that little story we all have in our heads about “what it will be like when someone truly loves me”, well, mine kind of goes like this:


1. Someone who loves me will discuss decisions before he makes them.
2. Someone who loves me will consider my thoughts, feelings, and suggestions when he acts.
3. Someone who loves me will be unselfish and share the same vision and dreams with me, or at least, if his dreams are somewhat different, he will respect mine too.
4. Someone who loves me will not steal from me.
5. Someone who loves me will not willingly contact other women for anything other than business reasons.
6. Someone who loves me will not lay around in bed all day, watching me work two jobs and take care of the household.
7. Someone who loves me will go out of his way to make sure that I have what I need.
8. Someone who loves me will accept my love and care willingly and with appreciation.

And so on.

I guess that what I’m trying to say is that being a mostly psychologically healthy yet very human person, sometimes it is very difficult for me to acknowledge the fact that I do know he loves me, yet he is being disrespectful on every level. Just because he is mentally ill doesn’t mean that I don’t feel disrespected when he does irresponsible things in the throes of his illness, I feel awful. And I think that’s very natural. And part of me says, “THAT’S IT!!! GET OUT NOW!!!! NOBODY WHO LOVES YOU WOULD TREAT YOU THIS WAY!!!”

But with mental illness, it’s not that easy.


I married him forever, not just when times were good. And I do love him very much, I really do. Before mental illness came into our marriage, we had a wonderful marriage, very respectful, compassionate, giving, on both sides. But sometimes it just doesn’t feel worth it, that’s all, and I know a lot of people might agree with that. But if he had cancer, and we had $40,000 in hospital bills, I wouldn’t think about leaving him….and if he had Alzheimers and forgot my name or started to hit on the nurses or something like that, I wouldn’t leave him either, so I have to work really hard to put it all in the perspective of the illness, and most of the time I can, but there is still resentment and anger, for sure.

And the fact is, that just when I start to come to terms with some aspect of his illness, and finding ways to cope, some other aspect that I never considered shows up, and I have to start it all over again. It’s all very frustrating and confusing, and I’ll try to write more about that in the future.

Whack-a-mole

Did you ever play that game in an arcade, where you have a hammer, and these little moles pop up, and you're supposed to hit them back into their hole, and then another one pops up, and you hit that one too, and then a different one pops up?

Well, the hospital staff also felt like my DH (dear husband) had severe depression and possibly post-traumatic stress disorder from something that had happened in his childhood, so he left the hospital on antidepressants. After a week or two, his depression started to lift and he started doing more than just sleeping all day, which was great, right?

Except that my non-drinking husband suddenly started drinking in bars every night, and lying to me about it. He also, unbeknownst to me, was buying rounds for "the house" and writing checks to cover the tab. He would tell me he was going to work, and instead he would go to a bar. In our entire marriage up to this point, he had been a virtual non-drinker. On New Years Eve, for example, we went to a local bar with the intent of having a "couple of drinks" and after 1/2 glass of champagne, he was done. So this was just another thing that was totally out of character for him.

Along with the drinking, there were the tattoos. My "normal" husband had always had just two tattoos, one on each shoulder. Both of his tattoos were deeply meaningful, and he had put huge amounts of thought into each of them--they each signified aspects of him, one was a bear. He had had his artistically talented brother draw the bear, then they worked together to revise it until it was just right, then he did research to see which tattoo artist could best duplicate it. The other one was a symbol of his heritage, interspersed with a symbol of his profession. This type of thoroughness was very typical before the illness reared its ugly head. After he started drinking, though, he came home with a tattoo that said "In God We Trust, all others pay cash". It was pretty lame, but he thought it was hilarious and was offended that I didn't see it. About a week later, he got a tattoo of scars on his forearm, to signify "scars that don't heal". Then about a week after that, he got a hatchet on one of his forearms "because it was cool". But during our entire marriage he had always said that he would never get a tattoo on his forearm, because it could affect what employers and others think of you, and a person might often have to keep it hidden. But that didn't seem to matter now.

So as he was drinking and getting tattoos, he was spending so much money that he wasn't paying any of his bills, even though he was still working full time. The bill collectors started calling. At first they were pretty polite, like "I'm not sure you realize it, but your payment is late". After a couple of months, though, they graduated to "if you don't send us money today, we are going to hand this over to our attorney". I researched bankruptcy and learned that in our state he could file separately, without affecting my credit. It was May of 2007 when he decided to file bankruptcy. As of today, September 30, he still hasn't done it.

He started to have these WILD mood swings, where he would be normal one minute, sad the next, and then a few minutes later, he would want to go to a bar and get in a fight. His mood was just all over the place. We could be having a normal conversation about our daughter having homework, and suddenly he would stop and venomously say "you know, I really hate her". Way, way out of character for him--we both love her very much. I guess I am lucky, though, that he did see fit to express his mood swings to me only, and that our daughter saw very little of them. He lost his temper a few times when it was out of proportion to what had happened, but I have to say, he never has said hurtful things to her just because he was having a mood swing, he has always had enough control to keep those thoughts to himself. To this day I don't think our daughter actually realizes how bad things are, she just thinks Daddy "sleeps a lot".

One day he told me that his ex-girlfriend had called him and told him that she still loved him, and did he have a happy marriage? He told me that he told her yes, he did have a happy marriage. He told her some lies to make her think he was doing better than he really was, then let her go. I didn't feel threatened about that at all, because I'm not a jealous person, and I have always known that our marriage was strong, very strong.....but when I got our cell phone bill, I discovered that he had been calling her, and she had called him numerous times. I told him flat-out that I was not comfortable with this and that I thought he should put a stop to it. He said he would.

Then one night, I was supposed to stay in the city where my job is, I called DH at about the time when he usually went to bed, and our daughter told me that he wasn't home. I called his cell phone, no answer. I called for three hours steady, could not get a hold of him, and I was really worried about our daughter being alone, so I drove home two hours. When I was 10 minutes away from home, he called my cell phone from his EX-GIRLFRIEND's cell phone to tell me he'd be home in an hour or two. When he got home, I really lit into him. I have never been so angry in my life, and this also was so out of character for him, that I was just beside myself. I don't THINK anything happened, but I'm not 100% sure. He says nothing happened, but there have also been countless times where he said that he wasn't drinking, and he was....

I didn't think I would ever be as close to calling it quits as I was that night. There's just so much a person can take! But I kept on telling myself "in sickness and in health" and that helped a little. Shortly after all this happened, he stopped going to work completely. So now he had no money (supposedly) and all the time in the world. We went to see his therapist together,and his therapist finally thought that maybe there was "some bipolar going on". So it took about a month, but he was put on Seroquel for the bipolar symptoms.

For the first time since it all started, I had a little hope. The Seroquel seemed to really tone down the mood swings, where, instead of having 5-6 mood swings every day, he might have 2-3 a week. Unfortunately, those 2-3 mood swings were always doozies--usually where he would get extremely angry over things that would make a normal person say "oh, bummer".... so I know the Seroquel was working, but it became clearer and clearer that it wasn't enough by any means.

So, to recap, we got rid of the depression, and he started lying and drinking. Then he started getting tattoos. Then the thing with his ex-girlfriend. And all the mood swings. It was just that "whack-a-mole" thing.

The roller coaster ride begins

My husband has always been very charismatic and good with people. He could practically walk down the street and have people offering him jobs. Normally, anyhow. He did find a job as a handyman, making about half of what he was making before, but it was different now, because every cent of his income had to go to pay his exorbitant amount of debt. So if you look back at our income from before he started spending to when he got his new job, we actually had less than half as much as before to pay our bills.

It was a lucky thing that I had been practicing all of those frugal habits, because now it wasn't a "because I need to learn them" any more, we really needed to pinch the pennies. I got a second job, too. We did have some savings, so that helped for the first few months of this situation, it's pretty much gone now.

It was about this time when the "back problems" started. He started to have such severe back pain that he was in the E.R. every single weekend for a shot of morphine or dilaudid or whatever, until we both started to know the E.R. doctors on a first-name basis, and I could tell they thought he was full of it. I don't remember how I found it, but I found some information on a Dr. Sarno, who believed that back pain wasn't a symptom of a physical problem, but was a symptom of "emotional problems". This got me to thinking that all of what was going on probably had to do with "emotional problems".

Anyhow, we spent a big (to us anyhow) amount of money to hire an attorney to appeal the unemployment decision, because a lot of the reasons he had quit were actually borderline illegal for his employers to do, and a number of those things were documented. In the meantime, my husband would just sleep and work and eat. If he was at home, he was sleeping. I didn't really understand how he was still managing to go out to eat, but I was still in the mode of "it's his business, so I'll stay out of it". He was getting more and more depressed and one day we had a big fight about why I should (according to him) be ok with him wanting to die. That was when I started looking things up on the internet and learning about bipolar. I convinced him to start seeing a therapist who determined that the overspending and depression were simply symptoms of severe depression, and started working on that angle. He was on Prozac. The thing is, that half the time my husband cancelled the appointments, so he really wasn't getting anything out of them. I tried to find a way for him to get evaluated for different meds, everyone kept saying "get him to the hospital". I thought he'd fight it, but he didn't at all. He went in voluntarily, and they immediately put a 72 hour hold on him, and he was ultimately hospitalized for three weeks. We both feel that he was not ready to leave the hospital when he did, and the psychiatrist at the hospital thought the same, but the insurance company refused to pay any more, so home we went. We did find out that his boss has some "emotional problems" too, and was very understanding of the whole situation.

I also did find out that when a person has a 72 hour hold put on them, that the county is notified automatically. We have been on a first-name basis with the county due to our daughter's special needs (she does receive some services). So when her caseworker called me before my husband was out of the hospital and asked me how he was doing, I lied, saying he was in the hospital for back pain again, because he didn't want anyone to know what he was really in the hospital for. And she said "Um...they notify us automatically, I guess you didn't know that?" And I felt really stupid, but she was very sympathetic. I really still tried to play it down, though, because I thought "well, he's in the hospital, but as soon as they find the right pill, he'll be fine". So I didn't want to have people thinking less of him for any reason, since I KNEW he was going to be fine! I had no idea what we were really in for, and I don't know if I do yet. This all took place in March of 2006.

Just an FYI, since that hospitalization, we have noticed that he has not needed the E.R. once for the "back pain".

Embarrassed is not the word.

My perfect husband had morphed into someone I didn’t know.
I told my friends about him “losing” his job, and that he got denied for unemployment benefits, but I didn’t know how to tell them what was going on financially. I stopped talking to some of my friends, especially the ones who were at a point in their lives where things were “really really good”, I just didn’t want to hear it, and I didn’t want them to ask me “what’s new with you?” or “how’s your husband doing, anyhow?” Or anything like that.

After years of the “perfect American dream”, I couldn’t bring myself to admit that my husband wasn’t apparently as perfect as I had thought. I thought that I had had my "rose colored glasses" on for about 8 years (counting the time we dated) and hadn't seen him for who he apparently was. At this time, though, the thought of it being a mental illness wasn’t even on the horizon. I just thought that my husband was turning into a horrible, disrespectful, selfish cad.

The beginning of a mental health epic

It was only a week and a half later that he stopped by on his way home from work and “picked up” a $7000 four-wheeler (ATV) (on credit, of course).

I got really scared and decided to use his SS# to look up his credit report. What I learned wasn’t pretty.

In addition to the Best Buy credit card with the laptop and the camera on it, and the four-wheeler, he had a credit card I didn’t know about, maxed out. He also had maxed out his overdraft protection on his checking account, and used his paid off truck for collateral for another loan. All in all, in the span of about a month’s time, his debt had gone from $0 to $35,000!! I did some math based on what I knew and what I got from the credit report, and figured out that if he made the minimum payments on everything, he would have to come up with $800/month. NO WAY could he do that and still help pay the mortgage, etc….I wasn’t sure how to bring this up to him, because I still felt like I was being sneaky by running his credit report like that. (Never mind that he was being sneaky with all that debt, that never occurred to me until later!) So I gave myself time to cool off, figuring I’d bring it up on the weekend or something.

Two days later, with $35,000 in debt, he quit his job.