Bipolar? Borderline? Bring it on. Today I exploded and my marriage began to crumble.

Today was explosive.

The day started off completely wrong. We are learning from our counselors and therapists that D (my 16 year old step Daughter) needs strict rules and schedules if we have any chance of overcoming her Bipolar / Borderline Personality disorder. So how can we expect her to adhere to schedules if we can’t? That what started everything today. The plans were changed at the last minute, and even though they weren’t a big deal, the only reason they were changed was so that D would stop her obsessive screaming. Her entire life, people have given into her just to shut her up. She gets loud and when that doesn’t work, she gets physical.

J (my wife) and I fought all morning and by the afternoon, things were explosive. We were both saying some pretty nasty things and before I knew it, she had thrown a shoe at my brand new flat panel monitor. Crack! She then started to pull pictures off the wall and threw them on the ground. One shattered and glass flew everywhere. At this point, all i could do is react, so I grabbed her laptop and smashed it on the ground. It was her school laptop and I immediately regretted it. But it was all I could do. Everyone was in the red and she wouldn’t stop.

During all of this, D made her way upstairs and started to instigate. It’s what she does best. I’ll admit, I said some pretty nasty things to her, but none worse then what we’ve heard her say to us. The kind of person who tells her mother that she would laugh at her funeral and spit on her grave can handle being called a selfish, spoiled, cunt. But in our rage, D reacted and did exactly what she’s known to do her entire life: Divide and Conquer. She called her a third party to further escalate things. In this case, it was her grandmother, S.

At 16, D is a master of manipulation. She knows how to play both sides against the middle better than anyone I’ve ever seen, and until we all can get our shit together and start communicating like normal people, we are all going to go down in a firey blaze … which is exactly what she wants.

By the time S arrived at our house, she was furious. She stormed in and immediately got in my face for calling her granddaughter a cunt. Keep in mind that this is the same woman who had her granddaughter admitted to a residential mental health facility for beating her,  and, on two separate occasions, filed police charges against her for extreme assault. So why was she defending her granddaughter now? So what if I called her a name. Big deal. What about the terrible beatings and verbal abuse that she has plagued her entire family with?

What pisses me off the most about this is how J (my wife) is treated. Her mom is a manipulative person who’s only goal in life is to make people as miserable as she is. Her mother did it to her and she’s now trying to do it to her daughter. She constantly lies and tries to incite arguments between other people because she can’t stand to live outside of constant turmoil. But when it negatively impacts my life, and my wife, it’s a problem. So I told her.

I told S all the stories I had heard about how her grandmother became a completely different person when she was around. S waited on her hand and foot, so much so that her sisters couldn’t bear to watch it anymore and stopped coming around whenever S came to visit. She turned into a constant ball of depression and S’s only goal in life was to try and help her achieve some sort of happiness, which inevitably never came; and now she was trying to repeat the cycle with my wife. No way.

J was begging me to stop and i tried to walk away but S continued to get in my face. I told her she wasn’t welcomed and to leave my house, but at that point she threatened me. She said that I better pray that I don’t get D’s grandfather, T, involved!

B O O M.   I fucking lost it.

I told her what a miserable, depressed, self-loathing, retched woman she was and that the bottom line was that T would be too drunk to lay a finger on me. And where is he anyway? Why isn’t he around, especially considering that his other daughter, W, just gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. Well, even though he lives in North Carolina, he couldn’t come up to see his new grandchild because he had a gold tournament.

Suffice it to say, she didn’t life that either, so she began to leave… but i wasn’t finished. She had no business barging into my house, and if she wanted a fight, i was going to give it to her. So while we were on the subject of our T, our alcoholic hero, I wanted to point out a very important fact which we all know but for some reason are choosing to ignore.

T choose to leave his family about 10 years ago. He picked up and took his wife with him to North Carolina, away from his daughters, and most importantly, away from D, his granddaughter. T was the only stable male figure in her life and he abandoned her. Now here I am, having only been in the picture for 3 years, and I’m being told my numerous counselors and therapists what a low regard for men D has. Well I wonder why? Could it be that she was abandoned by every man in her life? Or could it be that S choose to finally leave T last year as a result of all of us witnessing  one of T’s drunken rages where he grabbed her by the throat and punched her. That’s right, he gave his wife a good beating for speaking out to him, right in front of his granddaughter.

So excuse me if I have no sympathy for this man. But he is still my wife’s Dad, and despite everything, she loves him. He’s never once said he’s proud of her and I’m sure he’s never once told her that he loves her.

It breaks my hear and it fills me with rage.

My wife is a good person. She is warm and has a huge heart, and is always willing to go our of her way for others. Yet she continues to fight a never ending battle to please two people that can no longer feel any type of joy.

So after all of that, S and D left. and J and I had a long talk. I’ve never cried like I did on this day. We were both pushed to the very core of our limits, and our marriage has finally started to crumble….

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