I’m back from my month away from home. Sadly, it wasn’t all vacation as I worked remotely for three of the weeks, but a good time nonetheless. Handsome made it for almost three of the weeks and was brilliant for about the first 12-14 days. Then the wheels started to get wobbly on his bus. I started to see the anger, venting, and frustration that were all too commonplace with the old Handsome. I’ve generally only had glimpses of that at home since April, but this was like a trip back in time. My response? No more cajoling him, trying to de-escalate him or placate him. I’m done with that. I simply told him that I wasn’t having it. No way am I going back to where that’s what I have to deal with every day. I think he got the picture because he made noticeable effort after that.
We arrived home to find that he had been scheduled for 56 hours of overtime this week. You read that correctly. That’s 56 hours of work in addition to his regular 40 hour week. To put it simply, I have issues with him and overtime. It’s a trigger for me. During the prior three years he would take every overtime he possibly could because it gave him an extra 8 hours a day to act out, and he’d get angry to the point of hostility with me if there was a family related reason why he couldn’t take an offered shift. Post DDays, he threw himself into work as an alternative to his sex addition, leading to his workaholism and the triggers it caused me becoming a source of contention. At present, our deal is that he can take overtime as long as it works for us (with our kids, activities, etc.) and it isn’t on his long weekends off or days off. He tried mightily to chuck that deal out the window this week, but I held my ground and he’s working “only” the 32 OT hours (plus his regular 40) that worked for us. He’s grumbling about it, but we’re sticking with our deal.
I was chugging along just fine till he called to tell me that he finally had a run-in with one of his skanks. I say “finally” because three of the skanks live where he works, and he hadn’t seen or run into any of them since early December. It was simply bound to happen sooner or later.
He was approaching an intersection with a 4-way stop, and saw Angel Baby in her car at one of the stop signs. He says he turned onto a side street and she took off through the intersection after him honking her horn repeatedly and flashing her lights and tailgating him, trying to get him to stop or to pull over. She continued this for a couple of blocks. He ignored her and just turned off the street calmly and deliberately at the next possible intersection. Then he called me.
I knew that call would come eventually – and I’m really grateful both that he followed through with what we previously discussed he should do in such circumstances, and that he called me right away. Nonetheless, I got cold chills up my spine and my stomach turned in knots. She still wants to have contact with my husband, even though he told her it would never happen again and was unwelcome and even though I expressed the same thing to her. Frankly, that scares the crap out of me. I’m sure she has by now convinced her crazy-ass self that he just didn’t see her car or hear her repeated honking. She has likely told herself that he certainly would have stopped if he knew it was her… because he absolutely would have done that before (and likely taken her out for an expensive meal and given her a wad of cash). I warned him that I believe he’ll hear from her again in the not too distant future. He is convinced that she gets the picture, but if she did she wouldn’t have tried to chase him down like she was auditioning for Angel Baby Driver. I’m well served to not underestimate the level of her devious intent… or her plain old stupidity.
