Mercury Poisoning Part 4

 

                A couple years after my daughter is born a big, bouncing baby boy arrives. He is sweet and quiet

with my blue eyes and his father's dark hair and I am amazed and more than a little overwhelmed to have two

little ones counting on me now. Things have gone from bad to worse between me and my husband, and at this

point I find myself impersonating Miss Marple every other week in order to make his paycheck isn't smoked up

or pissed away. What little self esteem I have seems to disintegrate more and more with each call to one of his

drinking buddies who already think I'm a shrew, or even more pathetic, the calls to the barmaids at his regular

haunts who all are just as nice as can be and most likely, feel sorry for me. Sometimes I go looking for him.

This song and dance starts to come to an end one morning after he'd been MIA for a couple of days. Every so

often throughout our marriage he would go off on what he referred to as "camping" trips with some of his friends-

where he went, who he was with exactly, what was really going down, I never got a straight answer. I wasn't too

thrilled with the arrangement of course, but to be frank, it was sometimes just easier when he was gone at this

point. But this particular time was different. He was just missing. No one seems to know anything concerning his

whereabouts and he had just gotten paid and I have no money and two little babies and at first I am worried sick,

then just fuming by the time he comes through the door, but that anger soon dissipates when I get a look at him.

He's a mess and there's no paycheck left of course, but that turns out to be the least of our problems. He goes

right into the bathroom and as he turns the faucet on to draw himself a badly needed bath, I am shocked to see

needle marks on his arms. He looks up at me with the deadest eyes I have ever seen and my head is spinning

and it starts to hit me at that very moment there is no fixing this, no fixing him, no fixing us. I know drunk- I grew

up with drunk. This I know nothing about. His hardcore drug shit scares the holy hell out of me but in a way it's

a relief to finally see it with my own eyes. Things make a little more sense. This is officially the beginning of the

end and although there are a few attempts at rehab and we start marital counseling, it soon becomes obvious that

we just can't do this. The relief on his face is clear when I finally broach the subject of separating. The sad part is,

I was kind of bluffing. Guess he called it.


                So at this point it's me and my beautiful children and I focus on them and work a string of boring jobs

that quite frankly, I'm too smart to be settling for but I just don't seem to have the energy to care much. The wall

I've been constructing for many a year now gets bigger and stronger and my heart grows so cold it's a miracle it

beats. Life gets smaller and I get bigger. I get a little in child support and make enough to just barely pay the bills

and thanks to the pharmaceutical industry, I manage to keep my bouts with the blues in check, for the most part.

"Do you think you're better everyday? No, I just think I'm two steps nearer to my grave." Spoken like a true

depressive, Mr.(or should I say Dr.?) Brian May. But there is reason so many hop off the ProzacTrain: True,

you may not feel the soul crushing sadness that seems to sap all the color and light from the world, or worse

yet, those dark days of pure nothingness. Apathy is what can make suicide seem like such a scarily logical

solution, I've come to believe, and I've come close to feeling that nothingness, only by the grace of God did I

never quite reach that point- but at what cost? I used to love to write and draw and had fancied myself to be a

reasonably talented and creative person, but I just felt so empty inside, devoid of any kind of spark or creativity.

The Nineties were my Robot Years: Work, sleep, eat, clean- well okay, eat a fucking lot and clean as little as

possible. I convinced myself that I was alone by choice and was perfectly happy that way. I would say, in a

joking manner of course, that I hated men. Well, let me clarify that: straight men. Who needs them? The only

men I found myself even remotely attracted to in any fashion were gay. You don't need to be Freud to figure

out this bitch had some issues!