He joined as an E3 and back then he was sending us $1600 each payday. He’s an E4 now and as of this month he’s sent only $1200. That was after a 6 month fight to increase it just so I could buy groceries after paying the bills here. He doesn’t give a fuck that one of the college loans defaulted because it’s in my name, not his. I shouldn’t have to choose between paying a bill and feeding the kids. And I sure as hell shouldn’t need to beg for food money.

I did finally get him to agree to give me the extra grocery money but today I have seen a steady trend of him slowly cutting it back $100 without a word. Like I’m not going to notice? You watch, he’ll claim that this is a bank error and not his fault.

This is on top of his threats to commit suicide. His supposed rights to my body as my husband. The constant playing around and cheating. Randomly draining the checkbook completely on me with zero explanation as to why but then has the balls to demand expense reports from me that I refuse to comply with. Multiple attempts to manipulate me into moving despite the standing custody and visitation I have in place with my first two children – that he knew about before he married me, never mind enlisting after we got married. Nonstop lying, attempts to gaslight me, and just ridiculous drama that won’t quit.

I’m so tired of this shit. Around here it takes $1500 in retainer fees to get the divorce process done. That doesn’t count the court fees and paperwork. That’s just the lawyer.

But at least once it’s done we can get our SSI, Medicaid, and Food Stamps back. As much as I hate the stigma that comes with all that, I really can’t go on like this.

There is just so much on my plate and so much to worry about. So many unknowns. My biggest concern is covering the gap between the divorce being final and getting the government aid. That paperwork isn’t instant, even if I’m familiar with it.

Doesn’t help knowing that he doesn’t want a divorce and the last time it was brought up he supposedly put himself in the hospital landing him a dysthymia diagnosis – two weeks after a staged suicide scare.

The scare involved me getting randomly messaged by a person on Facebook first thing in the morning that wasn’t on my friend list and wasn’t on my husband’s friend list at the time, asking if I knew where my husband was because he’s disappeared and thought maybe he might have said something to me. Now first off if he wasn’t on either of our friend lists at the time and these lists are not set to public, how the hell would he know to speak to me specifically?

Then I get a phone call 15 minutes later from someone claiming to be one of my husband’s commanding officers. I have no way of knowing if this person really is who he says he is or if he is just using the name. I pretty much get the same run down as the person gave me on Facebook did, but some extra info. Apparently, my husband was upset that we had discussed the possibility of a divorce. He was having suicidal thoughts and thoughts of self harm. His commanding officer got him to promise not to spend the weekend alone though. My husband was supposed to be with his gaming buddies this weekend. He failed to answer his cell phone this Monday at check in even though this Monday was a holiday. Now he wanted me to call and see if he would answer the phone. More or less I felt like I was being shamed for a topic I didn’t even bring up. My husband was the one that asked if I would be happier if we got divorced and I told him I didn’t know. Apparently that was the wrong answer. And of course he didn’t answer his cell phone. So I left the message that everyone thinks he’s dead and that he needs to call his commanding officer.

At the time we had each other’s passwords so I decided to see if I could find out where he was so I could call his commanding officer back with his location to check on him. That’s when I discovered he had opened a new email account and discovered he had a new girlfriend who invited him to a ménage à trois and a party that weekend. The chat conversation ended with her asking him that day where he put her charger and him responding that he put it on her husband’s side of the bed. So eventually my husband does call in the afternoon to tell me he isn’t dead and hangs up.

Later that evening he called back to tell me he wasn’t suicidal and he only had “passing thoughts” of self harm. He quickly went into grand speeches about how things will be better and get better and he was going to be better and I will be happier. I called him on it. Told him about the new email account, the girlfriend, and the chat log. His response? “You can’t prove I had sex with anyone.” I accused him of staging this entire thing while he was running around having fun to convince me to not have the divorce that at the time I wasn’t even thinking about. I told him congrats, now I want one. He told me he won’t let me. I informed him that due to the laws in the state we are residents of, all we need is to file “irreconcilable differences” and the court won’t stop it. He’s amped up the games with the money ever since.

Two weeks after that mess, I get the phone call from him saying he’s been hospitalized for attempted suicide. Since I don’t live where he is stationed, all I could do was verify the number he was calling from. I found that it is a protected number with a list of doctors associated with it. Only two types of facilities are like that ever. One is an abortion clinic. Not likely that he is calling from a patient phone from a place like that. The other is a mental and behavior health hospital. You don’t get to use their protected phones unless you are a patient. The question is whether or not he was actually admitted for attempted suicide. By law you can legally admit yourself for a minimum 3 day observation for almost any reason. Almost. In fact, some places require it for a proper diagnosis – not in the state I live in, but that’s not the point. The point is he called saying he was admitted because he was caught attempting to hang himself. He was kept for only 3 days and was diagnosed with dysthymia.No one else called me and because of HIPPA there is no way for me to verify the truth in anything of what he told me.

Why should it matter? It isn’t the first time he has cried wolf on suicide attempts or self harm when trying to get someone to take him back. The first time I encountered it was when we were dating and a mutual friend messaged me requesting a well-being check on him. Apparently he was sending her messages that he was still depressed over their breakup in high school and he was still cutting himself. She wanted to know if this was true and if he was okay. And no, it wasn’t true. There is not one scar on this man’s body. I have seen no evidence of cutting anywhere on his person. In the 7 years I have known him, not once has he been to ER either for a suicide attempt – but that was what he told her. And now that’s what he’s telling me.

Now my father said “That was a red flag right there, you should have known better.”

Yes and no. Understand this was in the beginning of the relationship. I didn’t know either parties well yet other than they were lovers in the past. Did I think this exchange of communication was odd as fuck? Yes. Did I have any idea who was the liar and why? No. Furthermore, I was hypomanic and had no idea I was Bipolar at the time. So of course everyone is grand – why would anyone on this planet be up to no good – and I easily dismissed it as just plain weird modern ex-boyfriend/girlfriend drama. And of course, there is also the underlying ever-present hope that a depressed person will get better. Again, I didn’t know I was Bipolar. I didn’t understand there was a reason my depression came and went like the weather or seasons. I assumed it was the same for everyone and that it was normal. I have since learned that this is an incorrect view of the world. Raising an Autistic son, learning about what is and isn’t “normal”, has opened my eyes to that.

My other concern in all this is I don’t think he’s been diagnosed correctly, especially given the fact his sister says their father was diagnosed with Bipolar in the past, refused to accept it, and refused treatment. @_@ Explains TONS about this family and explains A LOT about my youngest son. Either way, now my husband is telling me he is ditching his therapist and he’s complaining that either the Prozac makes him feel nothing or that it makes him feel happy all the time – and he made both complaints in the same day, in course of one conversation. *sigh* I call bullshit. Both complaints about the same med can’t be true. One or the other, but not both. Which means one of two things: he is seriously not stable, even on the med, and he is cycling all over the place OR he is making shit up, fishing for a reaction out of me.

I could sit down and list out all the reasons why I think dysthymia is the wrong diagnosis. I could sit down and list out why I think it might be either Bipolar Disorder or a personality disorder of some kind. But here’s the thing: I’m not an expert. This isn’t my field of expertise and I have a biased, tainted experience with this man. There is no way in hell that I can look at this objectively. I just know that other than the occasional bouts of self loathing, he doesn’t fit the description of dysthymia at all. And when I say self loathing, I mean LOATHING. Like the depths of hell – apocalyptic scale – verbal loathing. And I want to point that out here too. In all the years we have been together, what I have seen it’s always been verbal. Never any actions, no writing, no art, no behaviors other than verbal expression. And it’s always this extreme black and white form of expression. Nothing you say or do makes him feel better. If anything, it only makes it worse. Dysthymia isn’t documented for this kind of chronic cycling of behavior.

But I need to stop allowing myself to get dragged into this. I can’t stress enough how important it is that a care plan NEEDS to be patient centered. Even for my husband – especially for my husband. He leaves me holding the bag and I just take care of it. So in the end I just enable his shit. That’s not patient centered. He needs to sink or swim on his own and he never will so long as I’m involved holding the bag.

I can’t stay stable around someone who refuses treatment and makes a point to trigger instability – and not just in me but the boys too. Already my youngest son is starting to crank back up as we get closer to my husband’s upcoming visit in July and we haven’t even gotten him stabilized from the last visit. And even my older sons are starting to mimic some of my husband’s behaviors – worst of all that black and white expressive theatrics.

I can expect my husband to drag out any attempts at a divorce as long as possible even though we have nothing in the way of property. No land, no assets, nothing. And as far as I know the only debt we have are our college loans which have remained in our separate names. So really the only thing that we can fight over is our mutual son…. *sigh*

What a can of worms.