For almost a year now I’ve been living at my parents home recovering from a painful divorce and an ongoing battle with alcohol addiction. If these two occurrences were characterized as wars I’d be losing both. Most mornings I wake up hating myself for being as useless as I feel, an unemployed father who can’t be there for his daughter. I feel like a leech attached to those I love, stealing from them just so I can slowly rot away with no purpose. Due to my inability to fully heal from my wife leaving me and change my drinking, my parents have decided it’s time for me to move onto whatever is next for me. I agree. I’ve been wanting to be on my own for a long time but didn’t trust myself to do the right thing. So I have two options: 1. Check myself into an in-house care facility or 2. Find my own place. I am fortunate that I have money saved up from my time as a Software Engineer that I could do either. As a result, because I’m just ready to move on, I bought a car and applied for an apartment closer to my daughter (who lives on the other side of the country). I’ll be driving out there soon and then I’ll try to find any job out there. Its the riskier option but I’m tired of feeling this way and the only real path I see to move on is to do what I want to do, not what other people want me to do. I’ve spent most of my life following directives from others. If it wasn’t my parents it was my wife. For the first time I can just do what I want.
That doesn’t mean living alone in a drunken stupor where I’m not directly impacting anyone, it means being self-sufficient and responsible for myself. I’ve been in therapy, psychiatric care, working with an addiction clinic, and attending Alcoholics Anonymous which are all useful tools for someone in my position and I encourage anyone who feels a similar powerlessness to use them. AA specifically is free and provides a lot of support and community for alcoholics and will be the one thing I continue with going forward. Once I’m in a better position I can be involved in my daughters life again, the only thing that’s been keeping me going. Despite friction between my wife and I, I’m determined to make sure I am a good father for the person I love most in this world. Right now I may need her more than she needs me but one day that will change and I will be able to proudly support her.
Bottom line I’m not in a good place but I can’t give up no matter how much I want to sometimes. I just need to keep moving forward.
I’m so exhausted from writing heartbreaking anecdotes, instead I’m going to write about something wholesome and happy. First off I’m no longer unemployed, it’s nothing grandiose but it’s a job. Onto today’s subject: I had the pleasure of my daughter spending a few months with my parents and I in Indiana last year through the new year.
My mom converted her craft room into a room for Zelda replete with her own bed, shelving, and a chest to store all of her clothes, books, and toys. Not long into her stay we went to a nearby second-hand store for children’s things and got some puzzles, books, and her first booster seat. It was fun watching Zelda run around and seeing what took her interest. She loved her booster seat which had the Paw Patrol as a motif, she loves dogs in general. There aren’t any in her home with her mom but my parents have two dogs and my sister who visits frequently has her own as well. Nearly every time we video chat with Zelda she wants to see everyone including the dogs. The group being together is important to her.
While here we would always spend our mornings in the living room where my parents watch the news everyday. Zelda would get her morning milk (chocolate milk if we had it) and we would draw, work on puzzles, play with toys or whatever she felt like doing that morning. If we drew she always wanted me to trace our hands next to each other on paper and tell me which was which. Baba hand and Dada (short for Zelda) hand. After my parents finished with the TV I would let her watch educational children’s programming like Numberblocks or Ms. Rachel for 30 minutes. I like to watch it with her so I know what she’s being exposed to, but would also take advantage of her distracted attention to prepare her breakfast. After breakfast I would always encourage her to go outside, though Indiana was quite cold at this time. She didn’t always want to and that’s ok. She did get to go sledding a few times and we even attempted her first snowman, though it was too cold for the snow to stick. We’d brush our teeth together every morning and she always wanted to imitate my brushing technique, then I’d help her finish. She did catch a cold and she and I developed a habit of taking our medicine in the morning. Baba medicine, supplements and anti-allergy pills, and Dada medicine, honey-based supplements for an immunity boost.
Her first snowman
Around this time, I would practice her numbers 0-20 with her and then her alphabet. By the time she left Indiana, she understood 0-20 and was even starting to draw them herself. Letters were a bit more difficult, but she did learn some. Then, it was time for her midday nap. However, she almost never napped during this time, I believe it was because the room didn’t have blackout curtains. Instead, this became unsupervised play time, which is ok as long as she seemed healthy. Pushing for midday naps isn’t always necessary. Sometimes, when I would check on her, which was every 15 minutes, she would look at me with a wolfish grin saying “No, no, no” because she wanted more time to herself. After her nap was more milk, followed by more playtime.
One thing we had setup was a large box with windows and an opening for a door cut into it, with the folds taped for increased structural integrity. By the time she left it was covered in colors, words, and drawings. She’d dump her crayon bucket in there and just sift through the different colors, finding a favorite and scribbling into one of my notebooks. Or she he’d have me close the top flaps and jump out saying “BOO!”. Then she’d have a snack plate, play more, and have dinner with my parents. I’d allow her another 30 minutes of TV in the afternoon of whatever she wished. I think we watched Frosty the Snowman at least 30 times, eventually she had nearly all the dialogue memorized. Pokemon was a choice but she liked it too much and I didn’t want her to watch it after the first episode. She was going around saying “Pika, Pika!” for several days. Other things would be Bluey, Peppa Pig, nature documentaries, music videos, etc. I preferred music videos where she could see people playing their instruments.
A drawing
To go to bed she had to have all of her stuffed animals, she really likes animals, all lined up in her bed with her “cozy” blanket, as she called it. Getting her cozy was a ploy I used to increase her comfort making her self-soothing to sleep easier on both of us. Sometimes I let her sleep next to me, usually when she was sick or if she woke up too early. Though she always wanted to sleep next to me, it’s better for her development if she doesn’t.
Zelda even had the chance to meet one of my friends and his kids as well as his nephew and niece. I spent the whole two hours chasing kids, being hit with pillows, playing hide-and-seek, and whatever else they all wanted to do. We both had a lot of fun, and it was my first time seeing this friend in-person in a while. It was after this Zelda started to warm up to my parents more as well, like a seal on her social openness had been broken.
Light show
Leading up to Christmas, she would make cookies with my mom, and I allowed her one cookie a day, usually split up as a treat across her meals. I used sweets and berries as incentives for her to eat her vegetables every meal. She did have her first big Christmas with us all, and she got to open her stocking of candy and small road-trip toys as well as several presents. I made sure she got a present “from” everyone, including her mother, her mother’s parents, and Santa Claus. One of her big presents was an all-wood kitchen set. Another was a marble run which I set up, and she loved the little colored marbles. She loves bath time, so one of my themes for her was bath toys, so she got all different kinds as well as a hypo-allergenic bath ball and bubbles. Watching her open the presents was great. She had no restraint and was just opening them one after another with no regard. After Christmas, we had a road trip to Virginia to meet my brother and his family. This was the first time she and my older brother had met, much to chagrin, but I was glad it finally happened. In Virginia, we spent most of our days at Busch gardens, which she really enjoyed. There were light displays, musicals, different foods, and plenty more. It was my first time riding a roller coaster in probably a decade or more. She also rode some rides with me and alone. In the afternoons we went to the pool and I’ve never seen her so excited. Her little limbs flailing like the propellers on a helicopter. She would intentionally try to jump in somewhere out of reach because she always trusted me to catch her, and she would slide in on her belly headfirst from outside the pool like seal.
When it was time for her to go we all had ice-cream sundaes the night before. It was a special night so she got a special treat. This was her first sundae with all of the fixings, a cookie, sprinkles, chocolate syrup, banana, and whipped cream. It was 20 minutes of audible expressions of enjoyment. Just “Mmmm” in various pitches as she worked through it. She didn’t finish it which is probably for the best. We all had a great time. On our flight out we watched movies and TV together. We couldn’t both watch on the same screen so I lined up the timing on our TVs so we were watching more in parallel than anything, but seeing this little head with my big beats barely fitting was pretty great. I had the volume turned way down for her. All in all we both had a ton of fun.
Upon reflection I realize it may be obvious I have a lot of privilege, growing up in a middle-class family, and as much as I want to be relatable I won’t always be. I will not tailor my words for the sake of relatability but I will acknowledge that I am incredibly lucky as far as what struggles I have to undertake. If any part of The Collapse series has been depressing to read or paints me as a pitiful person know that it only gets worse from here. My intention is not to lionize myself or indict anyone, this is just how I think my story is best presented. Also as a point of clarification, I refer to my wife in the present tense as “my wife” because we are still married but the divorce is guaranteed and it’s just a matter of time until a judge signs for the dissolution.
Shortly after the Covid lockdowns started my wife and I moved back into her house close to Oakland. She wanted to invest in more rental properties but out of state, so we started planning to achieve that. However she, thinking that I should also have my own rental property, insisted I buy a home in Arizona. My father is and has been a home builder for some time, so I grew up around old homes, new homes, expensive homes, and run-down homes. This imparted a different understanding of home ownership because I had an understanding of what went into their maintenance which to me is just a headache. Not that I didn’t want to own my own home, I just didn’t want to own a home in another state that I’d have to maintain. I told X that I didn’t want to invest in a rental property. She insisted. I said no. This pattern persisted every day over months, until in frustration I said show me the numbers to make this make sense. Fast forward several weeks and I was going to buy a house in Arizona. The passive income is nice, in the winter at least when it covers the mortgage and utilities, but I still really wish I had kept with no, it’s such a pain dealing with maintenance, HOA’s, lawn care, utilities, management companies, local taxes, licensing, negative reviews, and extraneous expenses (like a new AC unit) for a house I see once a year at most.
We planned to start from my native Indiana, staying with my parents before going to Colorado then to Arizona. Initially we were supposed to stay in Indiana for at least a month but my wife has never gotten along with my parents which is a can of worms I don’t even want to look at. It was while we were there I bought my first car which would become our chariot thenceforth. So we left after only two weeks for Tennessee where she had found a rental, something I also didn’t want to do but I understood it was difficult for her being in Indiana.
So we stayed at an in-law unit at a rental in Tennessee which was basically just an office, a bathroom, and a bedroom. We were both working remotely at the time so day-to-day we just focused on work. Except my work team was going through a shift in focus and I had basically nothing to do for several months. I still diagnosed and fixed bugs, improved our testing, and wrote documentation but I was just finding work to justify my paycheck. I again became depressed and started drinking beer to pass the time. I became so stressed from my lack of work and the disorganization of my team I asked to be let go from my contract but they offered a raise to keep me on, which I accepted. X would go on to fly from Tennessee to Colorado where the first of her new rental homes was. I drove. It was a great drive, I think I cleared the whole ~1,300 mile trip by day four. I started out listening to music but after a couple of hours switched to an audiobook of The Lord of the Rings. I think I got halfway through The Fellowship of the Ring throughout the whole trip.
Colorado started out fine. We stayed in a rental for the first several months through winter waiting for her first rental to be ready. I even remember picking up a large sushi platter for New Year’s and celebrating with her. We were still having fun together.
Months later we eventually moved into her new home, we got furniture and lawn care setup before the heavy winter came in, resulting in our garage actually being completely full of cardboard. I mean floor-to-ceiling almost-spilling-out-when-the-garage-door-was-opened full. But it was here I started drinking more heavily. Same issues with work and feeling like I didn’t have a lot to do. It wasn’t really bad at first but all bad habits can start small. I remember thinking “If she’s going to do whatever she wants then so am I”. Obviously not a healthy thought. Almost every night I’d head to the den and stay up drinking and playing Super Smash Brothers Ultimate. We even started sleeping in separate rooms because we didn’t do much together and our schedules were too different.
It was in the second rental property in Colorado where things took a hard turn for the worse. Between the constant travel, setting up the homes, doing most of the cooking and cleaning, working, studying, practicing coding, looking for new work, and saving up for a down payment I started to drink even more. I kept up with all my responsibilities but we were both busy and she didn’t seem to really care about what I was going through so I drowned my feelings in a bottle of Jack Daniels every night. We were in Colorado so we did all the fun Colorado things outdoors. We even attempted some 14’ers, but I was too out-of-shape and overweight to finish one. My drinking gave rise to arguments between my wife and I, prompting her to request I attend therapy for anger issues, which I did. I’m not with the same therapist but I am still in therapy.
When my mom, sister and her partner visited us we went white water rafting for the first time too. Again tensions between my wife and mom existed making some moments uncomfortable. By the time they visited I realized I needed to cut back on drinking and had done so tremendously. It was also while we were in Colorado that I correctly deduced my wife was pregnant when she got light-headed and fell after standing up.
It wasn’t long after this we bought my house in Arizona, which was a great deal of stress for me and completely depleted all of my savings. We moved in and started the whole “setting up the rental” process. However I felt incredibly pressured by my wife to find a new job, complete with a pay raise, while doing everything else too. Groceries, cooking, cleaning, property maintenance, working, studying, and applying for new work. My telling her that I only had so much time and energy to get things done just pissed her off. When after months of hard work and I still had no new job, I became depressed again and told her as much, but it just pissed her off. Whereupon she shamed me for having these feelings. This is in my mind where the true cracks in our relationship became obvious. We were both going through a lot, especially her at the beginning of her pregnancy, and we had a hard time supporting each other in the ways we felt we needed. Neither of us was getting our emotional needs met. I did everything I believed I could do but every misstep or sign of weakness upset her. She also became depressed and was in her own dark place. Things didn’t stay this way but it was a portentous period, indicating what would happen if we were put into a similar situation again. My not-drinking was much better but there was a night I drank way too much, leaving her feeling overwhelmed. Eventually we moved back to California so she could deliver our daughter somewhere more stable, somwhere close to her first house.
For the sake of levity (I hope) I will share that one day we came home to a crossbow bolt sticking into our front door. I’m not joking, someone had shot a crossbow through one of our windows, into the house, into the front door so that the head of the bolt was visible when approaching the door from outside with the shaft inside. This is funny because no one was hurt and we only had to replace a window and door. I have a suspect in mind but didn’t think either of us were in real danger so it wasn’t that big of a deal. I even told the police who I suspected but there’s not much they could’ve done.
My memory is fuzzy on some of the details, especially concerning time, so I will do my best to represent it all accurately. But somewhere in here my girlfriend and I had driven her car and a bunch of stuff from my native Indiana all the way to California. We turned this into a road trip passing through the northern tip of Texas on historic Route 66. This meant stopping in St. Louis, Missouri then Amarillo, Texas through Los Angeles, California ending somewhere just south of San Francisco, California. I hope I’m getting these details correct as she and I traveled a lot. It was here, close to San Francisco, where we stayed in another place with another couple and her mom who had come from China to visit. Obviously by this time her parents were aware of our relationship. This was a difficult summer for both of us, as I was unsuccessfully trying to break into the video game industry as a developer/engineer and she was saving up to buy a home. In the end this took too long for me. The games industry isn’t a very lucrative trade especially for those starting out and is not easy to break into. Money and timing pushed me to career pivot. She was already established and was ready to buy a home. I still hadn’t landed my first post-college job.
We moved into the home she bought and I prepared to instead become a Software Engineer, an option I kept in my pocket as a Plan B since college. Becoming a SWE (software engineer) is not easier than building games but it is certainly more lucrative. After many months I was able to land my first job at a company pretty close to where we lived, now in the East Bay close to Oakland. This interlude of no income made her and I both pretty unhappy and landing that first job meant a lot for both of us. This would’ve been sometime in 2017.
It was around 2017 but before my first job that she began asking about marriage. I didn’t want to propose yet as I didn’t feel comfortable doing so without more job stability and I wanted to do something grand and romantic. However she has a habit of ignoring what I say I want and pressuring for the answer she wants continuously. I don’t know how long it took but every night in bed she would ask when I’m going to propose and every night I would say when I have a stable career. Until one night I didn’t. I was so tired of hearing the question that one night out of frustration I said something like “You want to get married? Fine, let’s get married”. And that was my “grand romantic” proposal. So idiotic right? If I could’ve kept my cool it would’ve been a nice moment, instead now I regret proposing so foolishly. So one day we went to our local county clerk’s office and exchanged vows in front of a judge. This was also another moment I lost my cool as I was worried about my job security, as a co-worker was recently let go, but the whole process took much longer than expected and I grew irritated. It was unpleasant.
Later that year we had a formal ceremony at my parents which was a lot of fun and my first time back home in at least a year. Then later that year we had another formal ceremony in China with her family which was also great as my parents were able to visit China for the first time.
Finally we both had jobs, a home, and weren’t crushed by the stresses of post-graduation. This was a really good time with the inevitable hiccup here and there. It was also around this time I started collecting games, one of my main hobbies for a while and a focal point of this blog early on. Life seemed great and great things seemed to be coming our way. My job was close enough I could bike there, so I was exercising everyday, had hobbies, and disposable income. However there was a large gap in our incomes and this constant pressure to make as much as she did weighed heavily on me. This was one of the greatest stresses for me at the time, meaning I didn’t like taking unpaid time off and felt uncomfortable with large expenses. She loves to travel and not only do I not enjoy it as much as her, it ate into my savings and income after I ran out of PTO. So much so I stopped any of my own traveling, like visiting family back in Indiana, because I felt so pressured to make more money. Again the cracks in our foundation should be obvious here.
After roughly two years at my job I was let go as a part of restructuring. This would’ve been in October of 2019. We had moved into several successive rentals closer to her work at this time so her house could be rented full-time. Which meant while I was still at that job I would be commuting roughly an hour north in the mornings, something she had done going south previously. I lost my job and wouldn’t get another one for another eight months. These gaps of unemployment affected her greatly and continued to be a sore point for her, understandably. There is some blame to be levied at me but it’s not easy to change jobs as I’m sure many know.
All of the stress that I was experiencing, no job, no income, living with other renters (something that stresses me quite a bit), and pressure from her put me into a heavy depression. We had planned a trip to the northwest during this time but I backed out at the last minute feeling guilt over not being employed. This really pissed her off and I spent the two days she was gone crying alone in our bedroom. I didn’t know what to do. I felt trapped, unable to land a new position and provide for my wife.
Fortunately I was approached for a contract position at Google that I interviewed for and was accepted into, though it took a couple of months before I started in early 2020. After getting this job we hit our sweet spot of marriage. We were both doing well at work and had a healthy work-life balance. This all occurred before the Covid-19 lockdowns, which changed everything for everyone.
ooglykraken 