Present Tense - 1/6

So we have come to this again – Jessica says the house is making her sick and she has to leave.  This is a recurring theme when Jessica starts feeling worse, especially the needing to leave part (which the Past Tense entries have talked about some).  Jessica is convinced the house we are renting is making her sick.  Not physically sick, but mentally.  She says she received messages before we moved in that we shouldn’t, but she ignored them.  We moved into the house a little over a year ago.  The house is oldish – built in the 60s – but in pretty good shape; it has been kept up pretty well and the landlord does her best to keep working on upgrading things that need it. 

I think part of the reason Jessica blames the house is because it was about five months after moving in that she was hospitalized (the events covered in the continuing Past Tense entries).  She thinks she was mentally fine leading up to our move.  She wasn’t.  She was convinced that a huge destructive event was going to happen in March 2012 and that we were soon to be living in a semi-post apocalyptic world.  She spent months and over a thousand dollars buying supplies – much of which she tried to hide from me.  She even sold a ring of mine without telling me in order to get money to buy supplies.  She also made many tearful calls to her sister in Hawaii begging her to leave the island because she was sure in March 2012 it would be devastated by a tsunami. 

Obviously she was not well.  The thing is, she was never thrilled about moving into the house - she wanted us to move our family of five into a tiny duplex because it was a little cheaper and a lot newer. She says the house is old and junky (it is not junky and the kids love living in a real house like they used to before we had to sell ours), yet she will do nothing to make it better.  She won’t hang pictures.  She won’t decorate.  At the time when we were deciding where to move to, she was at a point where her mind was cloudy and she didn’t trust her judgment and she told me she would agree with what I thought was best.  While that worked at the time, I see that as she is becoming less well, my decision to move into the house has given her illness something to grab onto, something to use as a reason she has to leave.  She says I shouldn’t think of it as her leaving me or the kids, but as her leaving the house.   Rationally I know that if we were in the tiny duplex or had never moved, she’d have come up with some other reason she has to leave.  Sometimes it is hard to keep that in mind.

 I know this is her illness talking, but it is so hard to keep that thought present.  I find myself so angry at her, and if she does somehow find a way to leave (monetarily her illness has cost us everything so I have no idea how she could afford to leave), I don’t know how I will be able to keep my feelings about her and her illness separate.  I am afraid for the kids, especially Jason the youngest. 

I feel like I’m getting to the point where I can’t do anymore.  She won’t regularly take her meds, nor will she take the prescribed dosages.  If she does leave I’m not sure where that will leave me.  I’m not sure how I can subject the kids to her knowing she isn’t trying to help herself.  I’m not sure of anything.