Living Nightmare on Main Street

CW: Domestic violence, murder

I’m getting impatient with my wife. I don’t want to keep doing it but I keep letting it happen. I can usually think back to proposing and “falling in love” with her and I tend to soften up a little. I married her for her personality, her sweetness, her desire to be a stay at home Mom who cooks and cleans. She married me for MY personality, my leadership, my desire to provide, my work ethic…

I need to work on myself, for her and for our little girl on the way. I always saw myself as a boy dad, but that isn’t in the cards right now. Being a girl dad seems like a hard job, but we’ll see how it goes. She’ll just be a mini of my wife and I love her, so how hard can it be? I’m sure it’ll be exciting and I’m looking forward to it. We just bought our first house, the only issue is the lights flicker randomly. It will be a great place to build our life together.

All my daughter does is cry, she did it as a 3-day old, 3-month old, and now as a 3-year old. She doesn’t listen to her mom, but my wife just tells me “It’s alright, she’ll grow out of it, we just need to be patient with her!” Apparently it’s just a couple years of the terrible twos. I’m getting sick of it. I work from home and it’s become virtually impossible for me to sit through meetings uninterrupted or get work done without distractions. My wife isn’t helping, I’m tired of it. Her only job is to parent our daughter and clean, it’s not hard. I’m actually working and I’m still having to parent. Hopefully she’ll stop crying soon.

I’m angry. My 13 year old stole the car, crashed it, and is now in the hospital for just a couple scrapes. How did I raise such an entitled spoiled brat? My wife and I picked her up from the hospital and we’ll get the insane check soon. On top of that, the moment we stepped through the front door my favorite painting fell off the wall. Just another thing to take care of. This is ridiculous. 

I accidentally hit my wife. We were arguing, she pissed me off, I couldn’t help it. She gasped and stepped back like she was scared of me, as if I was scary. The air got freezing, which was weird, since the heat was on, it being February. Oh well. The more pressing issue is I need to apologize. I say I’m sorry, which I am, she says she forgives me, that better be true. “It’ll never happen again”, I promised. 

It happened again, my wife broke another dish. Why is she so clumsy? There’s no way I can monetarily afford to keep buying new dishes, at the rate she’s “accidentally” dropping them. My daughter says “Dad, calm down, it’s not that big of a deal.” Yeah, sure, but she’s not paying for these things, or anything for that matter. I can’t stand these girls just mooching off me. They need to learn their lessons.

Lights flickering, random creaking, more things falling off walls, it’s an old house, I expect it. What I don’t appreciate is my daughter having friends over for a sleepover she didn’t ask permission to have. My wife says “I’m sorry, she asked me and I said yes.” Why does she think that’s okay to do in my house? She cries, says I scare her, and she doesn’t like it when I use my fists instead of my words. Why does she treat me like a baby? It’s so patronizing. Who does she think she married? She’s so impatient with me. 

One of these days I think I might have to kick my daughter out. She keeps getting in between me and my wife when we're arguing, saying "Dad, please calm down, Mom isn't your enemy in this." like we're at war or something. We're not in a war, we're just married. Sometimes married couples fight, there's nothing wrong with that. My child doesn't have the right or the life experience to insert herself into my marriage and try to tell me how to treat my wife. "She's my wife." I point out. "Stay out of it." "She's my mom." She rebuts, "Stop treating her like a punching bag!" Instead of hitting my wife, I hit my daughter. She literally asked for it.

My wife says maybe we should spend some time apart. It's been 3 years since our daughter moved out and we've been getting along mostly fine. I thought it would be better for us once she moved out and it was. We've been arguing less, laughing more, we watch shows together when I can convince her to get away from the dishes. She's usually a dutiful wife, but sometimes I have to force her to relax from the cleaning. She always wants to have everything spotless, says it's her pleasure to care for me and the house we live in.

My wife and I get along great, until the inevitable return of our daughter from college. I, of course, tell her that she should visit us, but it's never as exciting or easy as I think it'll be for her to be around us again. She wants to do everything her own way, and her friends at college are a bad influence. She always has a bad attitude toward me, wants to argue, and thinks she can come back into my house and tell me how to act. Some things never change. I'm impatient with her, but only because she deserves it. She's disrespectful.

I read in a newspaper “Second double-homicide in local home in 30 years”, with a subtitle, “Is the house next door haunted?” On the front page of the newspaper is a picture of the house. Obviously, it is familiar to me. It clicks for me, the house was definitely haunted, all the strange events fit now. I lay back on my bed in realization, the paper falling out of my hand. “Dude, was this you?!” My cellmate sounds scared.