LIFE SUCKS

Could be worse, I guess

Let me start off that I married the love my life, knew her since second grade, but it took an awkward course to get to that point. I carried a torch for her for many years, even after she got pregnant and married another man. I always hoped the best for her. Well, she left the dork, and had partial custody to the kid. She slept around a bit (didn't know this till later).

She looked me up many years later and we got together, but her son and I never really got along well. The first day I met him, I made them a spaghetti dinner. When I was holding my plate of spaghetti and she was helping him to get something off the top of the fridge, he turned and spat right into my plate of spaghetti. At the moment, I wondered if I shouldn't have left just because of him. The spoiled little brat. I forgave him for it. Big deal kids can do that, and how many men did he see go through his mother's life. I was just another number to him.

Before were married, she cheated on me twice. One she admitted to, the other I guessed, but never confronted her. We did get married, and in our 15 years of marriage, I never had the suspicion that she cheated. At least, I hoped she didn't. I try to trust, but I always have that little nagging voice in the back of my head. I loved her, but it felt like she never ever really truly loved me back. Lately, it feels as if something "broke" inside of me, and it feels like I'm having a hard time loving her. Things changed she lost her good-paying job, and could never get back on her feet. My income wasn't enough to keep the house, and we lost in foreclosure, went through bankruptcy. I was convinced this would really tear us apart. Thankfully, it did not.

We had no choice but to move into her mother's basement. Her mother is a hoarder, and a very controlling woman. We transformed that basement into a home, but we have to walk through an cook in the upstairs. The smells, the cats and dogs, the piles of newspapers, a garage busting at the seams with crap! It has been a very difficult last two years.

Her son, whom I tried to raise as my own over the last year. I tried to be understanding, supportive, but also the one discipline him (she never seem to take much interest in that, she really wanted a man who would do that), but despite my best efforts, he dropped out of school, got involved in drugs and alcohol, couldn't hold a job, constantly picked up by police, committed an insurance fraud, destroyed his car, was caught with child porn (though claimed up and down he didn't know what it was--yeah, right), and now serves jail time for it. I guess the only upside is that he found religion in jail, but we'll see how long that lasts.

So, ultimately here, I feel a great distance between my wife and I. It has been two long years without any intimacy from her. It's like she's "tired of sex," but boy, she could put out in her younger days (but not to me).

I'm a cartoonist, but a failed cartoonist. I feel like I have lost any relevancy in my older age, that I'm a dime-a-dozen. I'm lost in a sea of wanna-be's. Everywhere I look there's another up-and-coming comic artist in a field that is already so over-ridden with already-bad comic art & writing, plus they're younger and better artists/writers. How could I ever possibly compete? I think my failure has disappointed her, that I've let her down, and that I won't ever amount to anything. The only good thing that has come out of this is my lovely daughters. They do dote on me. They don't have a great relationship with their mother.

We're trying to get a house currently, but the bankruptcy and foreclosure are too recent, so we can't a loan for three-to-five years, depending on how I clean up my credit history. However, in the time, I fear my wife will leave me. I know my daughters would stay with me, but then I don't know where I would go. I certainly am not staying at the mother's-in-law. I'm sick of the smell and the crap and her controlling ways.

Every friend I've known in my childhood lives faraway. I can't even afford the phone bills and talk to them, and besides, they don't even want to talk problems anymore. It's all rather superficial.

My own folks wouldn't want me living with them. I and my girls would disrupt their lives too much. They're set in their ways.

That's about it. Not as bad as some, but it brings me down.