Another Chapter

remember a while back when i was doing my 'i hate hubby' posts & mentioned theft? well, tonight is the night to go into why he's #6....a thief. he's my hubby, therefore, i consider all the money to be ours. not mine...not his....ours. he keeps a portion of his check in cash, the rest we do our daily living on, pay bills & just whatever comes up. i don't usually carry cash cos i have the debit card. my check is directly deposited into the account. back when we were first married we didn't have a bank account due to lack of money. we literally lived from paycheck to paycheck so we never had anything extra. we really didn't need it yet, so, we bought money orders for the bills. at one point i had 2 money orders in my purse for bills. specific bills that were in desperate need of being paid when all of a sudden one of them turned up missing. now, i keep a pretty close eye on my purse so, not a lot of people had access to it. hubby, sonny & myself were mostly the trusted ones. occasionally my mom might pick up my purse & go through it but, come on, mom might ask me to explain what some battery operated gizmo was i knew for a fact she'd never steal from me. she knew if she ever needed anything i could help her with all she had to do was ask. when the money order turned up missing the only people that had access to my purse were the 4 of us. when i mentioned the missing money order sonny said nothing. hubby mentioned a few other people that had been in the house. i really didn't know what to think. i chewed it over for a few weeks & didn't mention it but the whole time hubby kept coming up with scenarios that 'could have been'. he had more ideas about how it might have gotten stolen than i had ever even imagined. naturally, my subconscience told me that he was way too concerned over laying blame. you know the 'me thinks he doth protest too much' thing? the more what ifs he came up with the more i leaned toward suspecting him. one night i decided to clear the air & began on both he & sonny about how dirty it was for someone i trusted to steal from me. no matter who it was i just felt really disillusioned & vulnerable, hurt, cheated, exposed, unappreciated, worthless, let down, every feeling i could name. i tried everything to make someone confess. finally, hubby broke down on a drunk binge one night & admitted to taking the money order. he couldn't begin to explain why he took it or what he did with the money but take it he did. and this was after trying to lay it on sonny.
i had a friend that had hocked a 12 string accoustic martin guitar (worth about $1200.00) cos he needed money so bad. i got the guitar out of hock for him with the promise that when he came up with the $100.00 bucks i paid for it he could have it back. one day it disappeared. i asked hubby about it & he said he took it to his brother for new strings & a tune up. finally, after about 2 months i was on the phone with my b-i-l & asked about the guitar. he didn't have a fucking clue what i was talking about. when confronted, hubby admitted that he, yet again, hocked the guitar. again, he couldn't tell me what he did with the money. the topper!!!! yes this gets even better. i had several cd's that i had collected. xmas gift, birthday gifts, a few i had bought myself, but mostly gifts that meant something to me. i kept them in a cd case that held about 24 cd's. the damn thing was pitched around on a regular basis from car to car or room to room so i was in it often. one day a friend asked to borrow a tracy chapman cd & i went to get it. the cd case was just as heavy as it had always been when i picked it up. i opened it to find nothing but books packed in it. nothing but books where my most cherished cd's had always been kept. this all happened at the same time so we're talking some money by now. hubby confessed to this right away. there was nobody else in the house to blame it on.
he quit his 2 jobs shortly after we got married. i was kinda disappointed in this but he blew his car up & didn't really have transportation to get to either of them. he said he could find something closer to home & he could do it pretty quickly. that turned into about a year of looking. when he finally went to work it was for a drunk. or someone that didn't care if he drank while on the job. one of the guys he went to work for only drank on the job cos his wife insisted he wasn't allowed to drink at home. needless to say i didn't see alot of money from that, between him spending it before he got home & those that didn't ever pay him for some reason, never quite understood that one. it took everything i made to pay bills during this time. i mean we just barely ate to pay bills. so when he wasn't planning on working one day he volunteered to take care of the bills. remember we didn't have a checking account so it was cash or a money order. this time i didn't have money for the money order so it had to be cash.
when he didn't come home that night i worried. when i didn't hear from him the next day i panicked. i called his mother. she had heard from him & it wasn't good. apparently over the last few years he had gotten several dui's, had lost his license & was stopped that friday for another dui & was sitting in the county jail. when i went to visit him in jail he assured me he had paid all the bills before he went drinking but the car he had been driving was parked on a main street with parking meters so we really needed to get it home. when his mother & i finally found the car it had already collected several parking tickets. turned out this was his 3rd dui in 2 years.had enough yet? wondering why i'm still in this relationship? yeah, me too.
how many bills went unpaid, you ask. all of them. how many did he look me in the eyes & swear he paid? all of them. i tried to believe him but the disconnection notices spoke for themselves. he never did admit to that one. but i'm obviously self abusive cos i stayed thinking maybe this would stop his destrucive behavior. he comes from good, hard working people. he has a solid education & he's alot of fun when he's not drinking. he's far from stupid & his sense of humor mirrors mine almost exactly. like most couples we finish each others sentences & when one of us says something sometimes its in stereo. in my defense remember i was young. we were newlyweds. i didn't want to admit defeat. yet. over the years its been one thing after another. in looking back i realize i've put up with more shit out of this man than anything or anyone i've ever put up with in my life. to make matters worse i have absolutely no clue why. now. is it because i've gotten lazy? is it because i've killed so many brain cells? have i just accepted what i have as the best its gonna get? have i settled for a second best life? have i accepted defeat? am i defeated?
am i?
later