Jealously

I've been watching a lot of the older episodes of The Big Bang Theory.  If you don't know the show, most of the characters are really, really smart.  The more I watch, the more jealous I become.  I find myself wishing that I had been born smart.  Oh, I'm smart in the general sense of speaking.  But I am terrible at math and I don't "get" things right away.  I am mechanically inept.  If I had been born smart like the characters on the TV show, my life might have turned out quite different.  I wouldn't be working at a dry cleaners, for example, developing six tumors at once.

Shawn has over the years developed a way of talking down to me, or taking out his frustrations on me when things aren't going his way.  I'll spare you the details but we recently had to work together and it started all over again.  The last time he became nasty with me for no apparent reason I wrote him a letter because it was the only way, I felt, that I'd be allowed to speak without being yelled at or interupted.  Let me put it this way, if he had treated me like this early on, I would have never married him. 

Shawn sometimes has a way of making me like the dumbest thing that ever lived and it makes me not only angry but also I feel about myself.  He refuses to drive if we're going together and yet criticizes my driving every step of the way and acts like I am the worst driver on the freaking planet.

Let me mention here that Shawn is absent minded, very forgetful and does dumb ALL THE TIME.  I don't treat him like a 2 year old for it by any means.  I'm the one that crosses the Ts and dots the Is.  It's what I do.  I took 2 days off from work--TWO--a Friday and a Monday.  Shawn was gone for most of Monday and when I got to work on Tuesday I was relieved.  I cannot tell you how many vacations I've taken and have been glad--SO GLAD--to go back to work.  And I really hate that fuckin' place.

It go to wondering if he's running some kind of internal experiment on how long I'll put up with this kind of stuff.  Go ahead, do it some more and just see long I'll take it.  Last time I pointed out to him that I am the only one on this earth that he treats this way.  Not only that, I am the only one of this earth that helps him so much.  A good part of my day--every day--is spent cleaning up after him, cooking for him and so on, but I help him with the business as well and no one in his family or circle of friends spends as much on this business as I do.  And so I get treated like a dumb 2 year old.

It got me to thinking this morning (not the first time) that if anything were to happen between us I'd be royally fucked.  I make $10.35 per hour which translates into $9.07 after taxes.  I can't pay the bills on my own.  I'd been thinking of what I could do (for the last 5 years) to get out of my job and thought maybe this time I'll actually speak to a college counselor and explain I have no skills, no money, little free time and I have no idea what to do.  I need to make more money.  I need to prepare for the day Shawn gets sick from inhaling plasma dust and paint fumes. 

I have to do something.  I continue to wish for something to happen because I feel stuck and honestly, I don't know what to do.  My skills are limited because I hate people and math.  I cannot sit in front of a computer for more than an hour before I start to ache all over and my head's about to explode.  I start thinking about the corners I've backed myself into and I give up and merely wish for something good to happen to me.

But I know it won't just fall out of the sky.  I have no rich relatives.  I rarely play the lottery because it's not meant for me to win.  And so I continue to wish I had been born smart, gone to college before I could legally work and set myself on a different path, one where I was self-sufficient and not dependent on a single soul.

Is this what was meant to be?  To be married to what has become a verbally abusive husband, stuck in this house and working a dead end job where the guy hired 4 years ago makes more than me?  Shawn had better not ever ask me to quit my job to work full time for him.  Either I'd feel so bad about myself that I'd commit suicide or I'd kill him.  Either outcome is bad.  I need a job that has more take home pay so I can get out of this hole.