Now, it is just the two of us, Bill with his drinking and me with my hopes of slowing him down, even stopping him, and making our lives better. It never occurred to me that I couldn’t do it, that he wouldn’t listen to me at all; refused to even consider the things I said to him no matter how much lip service he paid to it when sober. When drunk, he was a different person but he drank so much that the line between sober and drunk began to blur.

I’m not quite sure where to start here, so please bear with me. I’ll pick up where I left off, with the neighbors leaving the motel. We never saw them again. But the abusive patterns continued, and worsened over time. Allowed to stay home and write full time, I soon had several stories published but had not yet reached a livable income were I to live alone. He insisted that I use my time for writing. Sometimes I’d get so wrapped up in a project, household chores slipped by the wayside, but I would make it up by scrubbing the place spotless periodically. He really had no reason to complain but he always did, especially when drunk, which was every night and all day long on weekends. That pattern not only never changed, but worsened over time.

The nightly tirades were often personally aimed at me, not the world in general or things he didn’t like on the job. It was not unusual for him, the one who insisted that I could now write full time as we could afford to be a one income household, to bet drunk and then yell at me that I was worthless, that it was his money and I did nothing to contribute to the household. Or course, I did all the housework, did everything he needed done, including his personal errands. I dealt with people while he did nothing but complain. If HBO, free at the motel we lived in with the cable service, didn’t work, I was the one he demanded call the managers, or the cable company and gripe. I personally didn’t care whether the service was out for a while but I was the one he screamed at to make these calls, or to talk to the motel managers—usually late at night when he was shit-faced drunk. If I refused I was a useless bitch, a waste of space, a worthless piece of shit. He attacked my writing, saying it didn’t make him any money, that my books were garbage. Of course, he knew this as he’d never read anything I wrote. (Yes, this is very heavy on the sarcasm but I can’t help myself here. I’ve had glowing 4 and 5 star reviews of my work.) He often said it was his money, that everything belonged to him as he earned the money that paid for it.