Tired (but wide-awake)

I am barely sleeping these days. It's 3am now and I've been in and out of sleep, clenching my jaw. The particular cruelty of my ex taunting me about finding a place to live has jolted me awake.

It was his recklessness that put us in this situation. And yet his family bought him a bigger brand new home to live in right next to the kids school. No one else missed the irony of that. Why does he get a new house next to the school when you are the one driving the kids 45-minutes to school each way?

That doesn't bother me so much as his taunting me about it whenever we get into an argument. He is not a well person.

Here he is, with all the money in the world at his disposal, and he won't even pay his child support. And I know he will read this and taunt me about that too, which is partly why I don't bother to write about it anymore. But why should I let him bully me about it? It's true. His dad is always bailing him out. Perhaps he adds it to the debt he supposedly "owes" him, but for as far as I can remember, he's always owed him, and the only time I can remember that he ever paid him back was when we were married and I insisted that we roll the current debt into our mortgage. What a fool I was. There would always be a debt. There would always be another rehab. There would always be reckless spending on drugs, booze, clothes and high-end luxuries and hotels on his part. I'm just paying for it now. He never has to pay.

I don't know where we will live. I don't want to find a place to live here. I have a place to live: in Norway with my soon-husband. We can live well there without any drama. The kids can have a kind step dad who actually acts like a father and wants to be a father and knows how to be a father already. The kids can go to good schools, without my ex constantly being late on his huge overcommitment on their current private school.

I'm tired of the stress of dealing with him. That he can't understand why I hate him so much when he keeps doing the same things over and over again. I'm tired of waiting for him to screw up big. I know it's coming. It always does. The signs are already there. The verbal abuse that escalates; the lying.

I'm tired of wishing that the 13 years left til the kids are grown were just over and done with instead of just enjoying this time completely with my kids. It's not being a single mother that it is exhausting to me. It's dealing with him. That I keep having to tell him over and over not to call me. That I want to change my phone number but I'm always worried about an emergency.

I'm tired of him taunting me to just leave my kids with him to move to Norway. As if that would ever happen. As if I would ever leave my kids. As if he were remotely capable of raising his kids on his own. As if I could ever trust him.

Even when I'm in Norway, the kids end up with my mother nearly every night, always at the last minute. Always with no consideration for her. My mother, who does everything for him too, who he also mocks for losing her keys and other "infractions". But my ex can't even acknowledge that this is true. He can't even acknowledge that he was gone for months and months at a time throughout our kids lives. He can't acknowledge the kind of father he has or hasn't been. He doesn't see it. He won't see it.

I am tired of always being the one who makes the compromises, when I am not the one who caused all the problems. I'm tired of his mental illness, which doesn't allow him to see that this is the case. His version of reality is more and more distorted with time. I'm tired of this story too. I'm tired because so many women are in this same place and the story isn't ever much different and there aren't better programs to help us know what to do.