Our daughter’s birthday is tomorrow.

You have two options at this point.

They are both hard as fuck, but one is slightly easier, and much more devastating. That’s terrifying to me. You’re not known for choosing the harder path for yourself.

Path one is harder, and it’s actually facing what the fuck you’ve done. It’s cutting off the pity parade, the blame train, whatever the fuck. I am barely holding together what you broke, and it’s time to admit you fucking broke it, dude. It’s time to recognize what you’ve done to us.

You say you’re mad because I ‘harassed your friends’ into making you sign yourself in two days sooner than you planned?

I think it’s because I told them how you’d been hurting us. Our daughter’s birthday is tomorrow. She’s not asking if you’ll be there. She’s so scared of you, these days.

Do you have any idea how quickly we’d forgive you, help you, welcome you home if you just faced what you did and worked forward from there?

I am barely holding together what you broke. You aren’t helping. You’re in there, you’re getting your medicine, and you aren’t trying to make it more than that. You aren’t trying to get better at all, because getting better starts with facing the truth, and I don’t know if you are willing to face that.

Every time I talk to you it’s a series of stabs and whines and assertions, in every corner of vagueness, that all this was unnecessary. That I’m the one with a problem. That this was unfair to you, do I even care?

I think I’m about to get fired. My boss wants to do a phone call with me today. I love this job so much.

You were talking with me on the phone yesterday and it was almost normal. I got hopeful again. I can’t seem to stop doing that.

You asked some question that would’ve naturally led to me mentioning the job threat, and I hesitated. You pressed. I answered.

You snorted. “Well,” you snapped, “I guess that’s what you get for taking all these unplanned days off.”

You acted like I was being stupid, ridiculous, annoying when I started crying.

I worked so hard to get here. You’re destroying my life. You’re hurting us all, even from in there, so much.

It’s so much easier, I guess, to choose path two. To stay in self-pity and wife-blame and wallow and act the victim and none of this is in your control and I only just made it worse.

I gotta say, dude. You cannot come home if it’s gonna be like it was. And right now? I can’t see how it would be any different at all. I can’t see any hopeful change in you at all.

Path two drops a nuke on what I’m trying to hold together. It hurts all of us, you included. Because I know somewhere in there it’s you, the one I chose, the one I signed up for. And much as you try and stay victimized, it’s impossible to stay there forever.

Path two means our lives are ruined, but me and the kids? Eventually, we will get back up. We will stumble forward, bleeding from your loss, and everything that happens after this point will hurt more because of what you’ve done. Path two makes this pain permanent, and we will have to grow around it. We will.

I don’t think you’ll recover from path two, though.

I know that, eventually, it’ll catch up to you. I know that, eventually, you will have to face what you’ve done.

I know that, if you let it get that far? It will destroy you.

And that’ll knock us right back down.

Please please please please we love you don’tyou love us please please please please