Done

My chest feels like something heavy is pressing against it. It's the weight of grief. I've felt it before, when a beloved pup has passed, when my parents died, when my first husband destroyed himself. No one has died; I'm bracing myself for the end of a relationship, specifically, my marriage. Ultimately, it comes down to whether my spouse will choose sobriety or descend further into his alcoholism. We had a good sober run for years: when we first dated, when we got married, when we had our baby. I count at least a dozen plus years. But as soon as his parents declined and then passed, he slipped back into habits that I only knew about in stories.

It's been several years of an emotionally exhausting roller coaster ride that I don't want to participate in anymore. With my child posed to enter college next year, I dread the idea of being alone in the house with a person who transforms in a matter of hours from a reasonable, personable human being into a stumbling, slurring, foul-mouthed tantrum-throwing drunk. This doesn't happen every day but often enough. I wake in the middle of the night to find him throwing things across the bedroom because he can't find something, or he can't make his earbuds work. Broken plates in the kitchen, lost flatware in the trash, whole cases of dog food in the shrubs outside because why? He doesn't remember. 

I'm done. I'm not sure what the next step is but this is the first step: saying out loud that I'm done with this. He gets up and goes to work. We are barely talking to each other because there is very little to say. I get up and take my son to the school bus stop, then I go to the gym. Later, the dogs go to the park. My chest still hurts but I pedal the elliptical, not the full 35 minutes but enough to get me warmed up. I do two sets of pull-ups and all my core exercises. Temps will peak near 60F today but drop into the high 30s tonight. The sun feels good when I sit in the Bark Park. Later, I'll pick my son up from school and drive him to a craft store for costume-making materials. It's a bit late and I don't think anyone's going Trick or Treating since Halloween falls on a Monday this year. I've told him that Halloween is more fun at college... And he still has a kung fu class this evening.

27 October 2022
Thursday

Precor elliptical #1
Program 1
Time: 20 min + 5 min cd (4046)
Distance: 2.04
Cal: 227
Avg Hr: 144, 194 max

HGPU 23

Crunches 60
Piriformis/Hip/Pencil Stretch
60 Dead Bugs
Elbow Plank 60s
Quick Child’s Pose
Cat stretch 12x
Fire Hydrants 25 x 2
Bird Dogs 60s x 2
Child’s Pose
Push-Ups 25
Air Squats 25
Upper body stretch
Eye yoga x 3

HGPU 21