Duality

When I went back to work after having the baby, it wasn’t some big, empowering decision. It wasn’t about finding myself or chasing a career. It was desperation.

Somewhere in those early months, I realized he wasn’t going to do it. The steady income wasn’t coming. The jobs were small, scattered, and unpredictable. And for the first time, there was no resistance from him when I said I was going back to work. That alone felt strange.

When we were in North Carolina, it had been almost understood that I would stay home. When I picked up a job down there, he was upset about it. That wasn’t the plan. I was supposed to be the stay-at-home mom. But now we were back, there was a baby, and there was no real income. And when I took the job at The Lou, there was no argument. No pushback. No frustration. Just… nothing.

It should have been a relief.

Instead, it felt off.

He still worked, technically. He’d take on kitchen remodels, build a deck, do small construction jobs here and there. And he was good. Really good. There wasn’t anyone better at what he did. Construction had always been his world.

But the jobs kept falling apart. They’d start normally, then something would go wrong. The homeowner was being patronizing. They were asking for something impossible. They wanted it done differently. The timeline changed. The budget changed. There was always some explanation, but rarely a clear one. More often than not, the job wouldn’t get finished. The homeowner would bring someone else in to complete it. Sometimes deposits had to be returned. Sometimes there just wasn’t any money at the end of it.

It didn’t make sense, because he was so talented. If anyone should have had a steady stream of work, it should have been him.

Meanwhile, I was making good money. Better money than I had ever made in my life. I had a salary, but most of what I brought home was cash from tips. Night after night, I’d come home with envelopes of money. And by the end of the month, it would be gone.

At first, I thought it was bad budgeting. Maybe we had more bills than I realized. Maybe I wasn’t tracking things correctly. But when I started looking closer, I saw the withdrawals.

Six hundred here.

Eight hundred there.

A thousand.

Another eight hundred.

Six hundred fifty.

Everything I was putting in the bank was coming right back out.

I’d ask him about it, and the explanations were always vague. He needed it for this. He had to pay someone back. A deposit had to be returned. Something went wrong on a job. And then, slowly, the conversations started turning.

Maybe you’re not making as much as you think.

Maybe you’re miscounting.

Maybe you’re just bad with money.

So I started keeping track. I quit depositing everything into the bank. Most of what I made was cash, so I got a little notebook and wrote down exactly what I brought home every night. I’d count it, log it, and put the money in the safe. The number in the safe was supposed to match the number in the book.

But even that started disappearing.

He’d tell me I must not be making what I thought I was. That I was remembering it wrong. That I was miscounting. There were moments when I honestly wondered if I was losing my mind.

Eventually, I stopped using the safe altogether. I started hiding cash in the pockets of old clothes hanging in my closet. Pants I didn’t wear anymore. Jackets buried in the back. I’d stuff money into the pockets just so I’d have something left at the end of the month to pay the bills.

I was making more money than I ever had in my life.

And we were still broke.

All the while, I was taking my little boy to his parents’ house three or four nights a week, letting them believe their son was off working like normal. He never asked me to lie for him. They just wanted so badly to believe in him that I didn’t have the heart to disappoint them. So I carried that part too.

At work, my life was expanding. I had responsibilities. I had a team. I had people who relied on me. The restaurant felt alive and electric, like a second home. But at home, none of that seemed to matter.

To my husband, I was just the bartender.

It didn’t matter that I was managing people, solving problems, running shifts, or holding the place together on busy nights. If I ever referred to “my staff,” he’d look at me like I was crazy.

“You’re the bartender,” he’d say, like that was the end of the conversation.

Maybe that made sense in his world. His job had always just been a job. He went to the site, did the work, and came home. The people around him weren’t part of his emotional life. His friends were the same group he’d known since high school. No one new really came into that circle.

My way was different. I had moved around. I didn’t even live in the same city I went to high school in. My friendships weren’t lifelong fixtures. I made them as I went, and almost all of them came through work. So when I found “The Lou”, those people became my people. Not just coworkers. Not just acquaintances. They became like family to me. I loved them. I mean that in every sense of the word. I loved those kids like they were my own.

And he couldn’t understand that.

My life split into two separate worlds. There was work, and there was the baby. That was it.

I stopped sharing much of anything with him about what was going on at the restaurant. Every time I tried, it got minimized. It was just a job. I cared too much. I was too invested. It didn’t matter. So I got quieter. And quieter. Until eventually, I just stopped talking about it at all.

He had the chance to be part of our little world with our son and me, but most of the time he chose not to. He was either fighting through another job that wasn’t going to work out, or he was sleeping. The house felt heavy, like the air itself didn’t move.

Our son became my buffer.

On the nights he stayed at his grandparents’ house, I sometimes drove around the block five or six extra times before pulling into the driveway. I’d just circle the neighborhood, stalling. Because if my boy wasn’t there, I didn’t want to go home. I’d rather be anywhere else.

What little intimacy we had left felt obligatory. Something to check off a list. Not connection. Not closeness. Just something we were supposed to do. And that was a rare occasion.

I stopped reaching out to my own friends too. The isolation at home started to feel embarrassing. I didn’t want to explain it. I didn’t want to admit that everything was slowly falling apart.

When I finally understood where the money was going, the shame hit hard. I felt humiliated. Every once in a while, one of his friends would come into the bar and ask how he was doing. I’d tell them they should stop over and see him. I didn’t want to be the one to say it out loud. I figured if they saw it for themselves, they’d understand.

But nobody ever came.

There were nights I cried all the way to work. Sometimes I cried in the shower. Sometimes I cried in the middle of the night, just staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out how to fix something that he wasn’t trying to fix himself.

He wasn’t choosing us. Not in any real, daily way.

And somewhere in there, I started wondering if I even loved him anymore. I wasn’t sure I liked him. The sweet, calm moments we had when I was pregnant disappeared quickly once I went back to work. After that, there was just distance.

It didn’t feel like a marriage anymore. It felt like I was the one who made the money and took care of everything, and that was the extent of my role. I didn’t feel loved. I didn’t feel protected. I didn’t feel cared for.

I just felt lonely.

But I had my little boy. So I poured everything I had into him. All my love, all my attention, all my energy. He was my little shadow, my friend, my purpose.

The job and my son became my whole world.

My husband was living in constant pain. He had already gone through a trilumbar fusion, where they replaced discs with cadaver bone and inserted a titanium plate to fuse his lower vertebrae together. He had been told he needed another surgery in his neck. The kind of pain he lived with wasn’t the kind most of us ever experience.

The opioids masked the pain, but they were also destroying his body. His tolerance was so high that no doctor was going to prescribe enough to keep the pain fully under control. So what they didn’t prescribe, he found on his own.

That’s where the money was going.

One Sunday afternoon, everything came to a head. I was already dressed for work and was packing the diaper bag. My husband had just gotten out of the shower when he called my name from the bathroom. There was something in his voice that didn’t sound right. I walked in, and there he was, naked on the floor beside the tub, doubled over and clutching his chest, panic in his eyes.

“Call 911,” he said.

Within minutes, our quiet home was full of firefighters, paramedics, and police. We helped him into a chair in the dining room, and they ran an EKG right there at the table. I stood off to the side holding the baby, watching the parade of uniforms move through the house, my little boy’s eyes wide as saucers.

After all the tests, they said it wasn’t a heart attack. He hadn’t overdosed either. But they gave him a very stern warning. He had dangerous levels of opiates in his system.

And in that moment, everything finally lined up.

The missing money.

The unfinished jobs.

The strange moods.

The long days alone at home.

All of it suddenly made sense.

I told my boss what had happened. That was the first crack in the story I’d been telling at work. Up until then, no one knew what was really going on at home.

A day or two later, when I went to pick up the baby, I told my husbands’ parents. I had to. I couldn’t keep pretending everything was fine. I told them about the missing money, the jobs that never got finished, the sleeping all day, the isolation, and the lies. I hated saying the words out loud. But I couldn’t carry it anymore.

Not long after that, his father showed up at our house with his mother. They asked me to leave. I wasn’t part of the conversation. My son and I walked the neighborhood while they confronted him inside.

There was yelling. Raised voices. Years of tension finally surfacing.

Two hours later, I was allowed to come back. It had been decided that his mom was taking him to rehab.

Rehab number one.

His parents believed they had saved the day. They wanted so badly to believe that once he went to rehab, everything would be fixed. That the worst was behind us.

But it didn’t work the way they hoped.

After the weaning phase, he was put back on methadone and handed right back to me. The structure was gone. The supervision was gone. And before long, everything slipped back into the same patterns.

The lies got bigger. The isolation got deeper. He became a fixture on the couch. Days passed with nothing happening. No work. No plans. Just quiet, heavy, confusing days.

At work, my life was loud and alive.

At home, it was quiet, tense, and lonely.

And that was the life I was living when I met Paul.

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