My marriage, part nine

Disclaimer: Aah.. fuck it.

Okay, in the last part I told you I became suicidal, for, at that time, no apparent reason. Before continuing about that, I have to go back a few years. My depression didn't start off because I was worried about CartoonBoy or even because of the lay-offs 1995. Remember that big fight we had about her cleaning? That, how stupid it may seem, was the starting point.

Just recently, about a year ago, I realized that I since that fight, hadn't done half as much of all those chores at home as I did before the fight. Why? Well, I hope to be able to explain it but I'm actually not quite sure you'll understand without knowing me very well.

The essence of it was that I was disappointed with RedHead. I had worked so hard to get us back on track financially and when she started to work, I worked even harder. I held our home spotless to the extent that I wouldn't be ashamed to invite the Swedish Queen herself. Seeing RedHead happy, and knowing that she bragged about me at work, made me happy too, but it took just two measly weeks for her to turn our apartment into a dump. And I'm not picky on my surroundings.. For a while I tried to keep up but in the end I just stopped caring about it. This was one of the pieces to the puzzle.

The next piece are of course those lay-offs. I discovered that I actually mourned those people who got sacked. I worried about them, knowing that some of them recently started families and bought themselves a house.

Work itself had become dull since re-organizations meant that I was suddenly stripped from all responsibilities and was only supposed to help people judge if a defect was okay or not. Instead of working with quality issues and suggest preventive actions, I found myself standing on one spot, trying to educate people to think for themselves. Added to this is also the fact that we had no less than five different bosses to deal with. One stupid boss can be bad enough, but five of them??? And each of them knowing just about nothing about auto-glass or quality work?

Of course, the worries about CB was part of my depression too, but not as much as one would expect. After his birth we discussed what the hell we should do about contraceptives. Since we both seemed fertile enough to fill up those empty spaces in Sweden with our genes we just had to find a contraceptive that worked. Those mini-pills were no longer an option since we read about a couple of cases where women got stroke and cardiac arrest from them. Our midwife recommended a hormone shot.

It worked. Well, at least RedHead didn't get pregnant but the reason was not that the shot was preventing her from ovulating. Oh no. She lost all of her sex drive instead. Now, there's a very efficient contraceptive for you. The midwife had told us that RedHead "might get a little moody" the first month. First month? She was fucking moody for eight months! And if that wasn't enough, she gained weight like an elephant baby! A doctor later told us that RedHead had received the shot too soon after child birth. He recommended a coil, made out of copper.

At last, a contraceptive we could count on! We had discussed them before, but as RedHead already bleed a lot during her periods, we hesitated. But at this time, we didn't have much of a choice. RedHead would have to deal with Niagara Falls five to ten days every month. She already complained about those five days..

In the fall of 1999, two things happened, RedHead got work at a food processing plant and I got an offer about internet, a 10Mbit/s line. I had been using the internet from work but since my knowledge about modems and networking was zero, I hadn't dared to get it at home. It turned out to be much simpler than I thought. The offer came in spring but I didn't get the line until a few weeks before Christmas.

A whole new world opened up. Our ISP had a forum on which I soon became well-known as someone with strong opinions on almost everything. Every minute I had to spare was spent online. Friends to RedHead asked her if she wasn't bothered by it but she just smiled and said that it was better I was at the computer than out getting drunk.

In the meantime, I was feeling more and more miserable. I knew something was wrong but couldn't put my finger on it. The leader of our local union asked me to join the board because he knew I was pretty good at writing stuff. He was planning to start a small monthly magazine, consisting of two to four pages and wanted me to be in charge of it. I accepted and my depression seemed to lighten. It was great fun writing stuff and get paid for it.

The depression came back with a vengeance in the fall of 2000. One morning, as I was on my way to work, I started shaking and had to pull over. I just sat there, shaking for about half an hour, before I turned and went home and called in sick. I couldn't understand what the hell was wrong with me.

This happened frequently during that year and into early spring the following year. And then, at one point, I got a severe back pain. As I told before, we have the right to stay sick at home for seven days before we have to visit a doctor. After a week, I did that. I was lucky, the female doctor immediately sensed that there was more to me than just back pain and a severe cold.

She did the one thing I needed to hear from a doctor. She asked me how I felt, really felt. I broke down, cried like a baby and just let it all out. She had caught me just at the time I was most vulnerable. An hour earlier or later I might not have told her anything but now I just spewed out everything about my suicidal thoughts. She immediately issued some anti-depressants and a remittance to a counsellor. She even wanted to have me hospitalized for a couple of days, just in case, but I felt that my salvation was in the kids.

Most of the time that followed is a blur. I went to my counsellor and I talked to my union representative. The company agreed to let me work part time. That didn't work out.

During that summer I met someone over the net and she was partly to become my saviour. I met her at the forum and we soon became good friends, having the same opinions and the same kind of humour. It turned out that she lived in the close by town and was a nurse. She and I had a lot of laughs over the net and at the same time learning new things. We helped each other out all the time and it took my mind off suicide. I was starting to look forward to chat with her as she came home from work. This was the first time, for a very long period of time, that I actually was looking forward to anything.

RedHead's and my relationship declined and the thought of divorcing her became more and more appealing. The most disturbing thing however, was that she would push me away physically if I tried to hug her, telling me she was not in the mood. At nights I would reach out to her for comfort and she just told me she was too tired from working. I told her that I wasn't horny, I just needed to hold her for a while. I'm not prone to jealousy but I started to wonder if she had an affair, but then again, where would she find time for that? I decided that the thought of divorce was just another symptom of my depression. I clinged on to that thought even though it got worse and worse.

The fact that I felt disloyal against my co-workers didn't help much. I tried to work part-time but that just made me feel even more miserable. To top it off, the summer of 2001 was a really good one but I fell sick with pneumonia and the medication forced me to stay indoors most of the time.

During spring 2002 my union representative asked me what I was going to do. Working part-time didn't seem to help. He suggested I'd try studying. I wouldn't lose much money and it might be that I needed new surroundings on my road to recovery. After an endless series of meetings it was decided that I was, with the help from the social insurance office, to start studying during spring. I started reading basic math and basic English and as summer vacations started to near, I took the decision to quit my job and start studying full-time.

It turned out that I wasn't all that bad at math so I chose the next level, comparable to senior high school. Since English always has come pretty easy to me, I did the same thing with that. And just for fun I took basic French and senior high school history.

RedHead didn't like all of this but had her own set of troubles. From the time CartoonBoy was born and up to the spring of 2002, we hadn't slept with each other for more than, at the most, 30 to 40 times, with months between. And then she had to replace the coil to one with hormones. She was always tired, started to get dizzy spells and gain weight. We suspected it might be diabetes but tests showed it was goitre. If our sex life had been bad, it now became almost non-existent, especially on my account.

To make matters worse she got rashes all over her body. Her skin seemed to dry out completely and was itching real bad. It's almost indescribable. Every morning her sheet was all bloody from her scratching during the night. She looked as if she got attacked by a big cat while asleep. The medication she got didn't seem to help at all.

With the help of internet I found some information about her rashes. She might be sensitive to some kinds of food, especially foods with red pigment. We tried to exclude those and it got somewhat better. I pleaded with her to cut down her consumption of coffee, since coffee dehydrates the body, and with a consumption of three to four litres a day there might not be enough water left in her. We excluded foods with wheat as much as possible, which also seemed to help.

I sat every evening and helped her apply oils and ointment all over. I would be sitting there, between her legs and smear salve on her privates. Now, had she been well, that would have been really arousing, but I just felt sorry for her. The problem was that she got horny and asked me to help her out, which I gladly did, but on those few occasions I asked for some "help", she would just utter the phrase I had become to hate;

-The one who waits for something good, doesn't mind waiting."

God, I hate that phrase.