Tales of the Crazy

by Charles L Cole

  Over the next few weeks, we had many talks about this incident. After listening to the tape a few more times, Jess finally admitted that she had said she was going to shoot herself. She said it was still my fault for not understanding that she was being sarcastic, and she continued to blame me. For the next couple of months, this incident came up repeatedly, and Jess kept pressuring me to admit I was wrong. There was no way I was going to submit to her will, and she only ramped up the verbal attacks and kept accusing me of never talking to her about this. This began a habitual pattern with her: either I submitted to her, or she would not let up and would come after me with continuous false accusations to get her way. She began calling me the controller in our marriage.

  Our relationship settled down a bit, but she was still having many issues. The stress at the store only added to her problems. One day Jess called me at work and said she had hurt herself. She was at home standing on a table in the basement and had stepped backward and fallen off the table. I asked if she was OK or if she needed to go to the hospital. She wasn’t sure about going to the hospital, but she wasn’t dizzy and was seeing clearly. I asked if she wanted me to come home right away to take her to the doctor. She said no.

  Little did we know that she had done more damage than we thought. She started having neck pain, and the doctors thought it was from whiplash. In addition to this, they said arthritis had set in from the damage to the C4 and C5 vertebrae. They didn’t know if a previous injury had added to the issue. The doctors started Jess on Vicodin and other pain meds.

  Once she started on those pills, her physical and mental health went downhill. Jess always was extremely physically sensitive and felt pain at a much higher level than most. Her mental issues were not being taken care of, and she began having panic and anxiety attacks multiple times a week.

  Jess started seeing a psychiatrist on a regular basis. The first one was Dr. Mendell. He was a very kind elderly man, but there was very little progress with improving her behavior. In August 2007, Jess asked what things I would like the doctor to help her with. Jess finally realized she had many problems, so it was a positive sign that she asked me. She asked me to put together a list of my concerns. I told her I would write up my thoughts and send her an e-mail that she could bring to the doctor if she wanted. She also asked if I wanted to go with her for a session with Mendell.

  I replied, “Of course I’ll go.” Jess started crying and went upstairs to soak in the bathtub.

  I spent the next few days putting together a list of issues that I thought were major issues Jess needed help with. This is an excerpt of the e-mail I sent her:

  Worry

  She is an extremely sensitive person and the little problems in life severely affect her well being. Even when these problems are solved, she holds on to the worry and emotional pain it caused her for months or years. She will not let go of the past problems of her life and the multitude of problems and worry builds up.

  Taking things personally

  If someone at the store or other places does something wrong, tries to rip her off, or is dishonest, Jess takes it extremely personally. She also can be very offended at what others will say, or how she perceives people thing about her. She will put herself into a very depressed state and ask why did they do this to her. I have tried to explain to her that some people are just jerks and that this is what they do. They will do this to the next store, situation, or person just because they are not a decent moral person and they will do anything to get an advantage or money. I tell her that these situations have nothing to do with who she is, but she cannot stop being hurt and holding on to the hurt for months.

  Planning.

  She is a very poor planner, does not keep a consistent schedule for herself, and is habitually late in both her personal and professional life. She forgets appointments and things she has to do. She will write things down on loose scraps of paper, but loses them. I have tried to get her to keep one book where she writes all things down, but she still resorts to the loose scraps of paper and loses them. She also will not keep one notebook of things that she wants me to do for the store. I have asked repeatedly for this, but she just keeps on with her way and still hits me with requests at odd times during the day when she has the impulse or idea.

  Self image and guilt.

  She feels bad about herself. Many times when I look at her she immediately looks down at herself and says I am looking at her because she is fat. She automatically assumes and accuses me of looking at her in a negative way because she is feeling guilty about herself some way. This can be about her weight, hair, not doing something right, or the many other faults she thinks she has. She also asks me many times if she is a bad person. Often she feels that people treat her bad because of something she might have done.

  Trying to please everyone.

  She tries to help and make everyone happy. This in itself is not wrong, but when people are not happy, she feels bad that she did something wrong.

  Treating her employees as her close friends.

  She treats her employees as her friends, then takes it personally and gets hurt when they do something wrong. She will call them and say, “ hello dear” and be overly sweet to them. I try to get her to separate herself from this and explain that the employees are there for the business, not for her personal friendships. She knows this, but will not stop trying to make them all her friends. The result is that she gets hurt often.

  Eating right.

  She has a terrible diet and does not eat balanced meals unless I prepare them for her or remind her. If left to herself, she will eat just meat, rice, or junk food. She is a snacker and will eat what she “feels” instead of a decent meal. She will binge on junk food like KFC, and then gets upset if I say something when her health is being affected and declines.

  She does not take the time to eat right in the morning or during the day. She does not get up early enough to eat breakfast. She gets busy (or says she forgot to eat) at the store and does not eat properly during the day. She has collapsed three times in the past 4 years and was taken to the hospital via ambulance twice due to poor diet. When she does not eat during the day, at night she gets very hungry and eats sweets or fruit late at night. This causes her to gain weight and she feels worse about herself. She knows what she has to do, but refuses to do it and comes up with multiple excuses to justify her bad habits. She will resort to blaming me when she is feeling very guilty about herself and accuses me of watching her eating and that I cause her to eat poorly.

  Her mood gets depressed and she gets headaches when she drinks diet soda with aspartame. She will still drink it and gives the excuse “I like it.” She will buy it by the case and it causes her great harm but she still will not stop.

  Taking sleeping medication.

  She knows that she has to stop at night and take the sleeping medication in bed and not do anything else. She repeatedly will not do this and will not stop even though she is tired. I have gotten with her a number of times because of this and get frustrated because she will not do what is right for herself. I have asked, and even pleaded with her probably 20 plus times on this one issue, but she will not do what she knows is right for her.

  Exaggeration of what I do.

  When she is mad, she uses terms like, “always” “every time” for my behavior. She feels that I really do this and can’t admit that she is wrong. If I present the facts, she becomes very angry and defensive and says it was my fault for misunderstanding her or not doing what she wanted.

  After I sent this to her in an e-mail, she made no mention of it again.

  We went to see Dr. Mendell together. During this session, Jess talked, and he only asked her how she was sleeping, if she was staying asleep, or if she felt anxious or upset. He wrote several prescriptions based on what Jess told him. There was no counseling and no attempt to address her behaviors or issues. The guy only gave her pills. I wasn’t happy about this at all and told Jess that handing out pills like candy without counsel
ing is not the answer. I asked if she would see a different psychiatrist and see a therapist, but she refused.

  Jess continued to see Mendell. Her issues went unresolved. Her anger ramped up, her pride increased, and her victim mentality got worse. She also became very jealous. Jess even cut Lucette’s picture out of the church directory. I had to refrain from mentioning female coworkers, or I could expect an interrogation from her. She was OK with only one woman at my work, Anna. Jess had met her a few years earlier.

  Anna was an incredibly brilliant woman. She was also a rabid atheist and a far-left liberal. People had thought we would battle it out due my being a conservative Christian, but I never pushed my faith on Anna and tried to live according to my faith. Anna respected that. Anna was single, and I had met her when I was single. But Jess had no jealous thoughts of her because of the first time she had met Anna, shortly after we were married.

  A few years earlier, when Jess had met Anna, Anna had been building a barn for her horses. She had ordered a bunch of rough sawn oak boards for the stalls. I added some wood on to her order since woodworking was a hobby of mine. The wood was delivered, and Jess and I went over to help Anna unload and to pick mine up. This was a working horse ranch on ten acres, so you had to dress accordingly: Carhartt jackets, gloves, boots, and other gear. It had rained the previous day, so the soil was muddy.

  Jess said hi to Anna. They chatted a bit during this first meeting, and then we got to work. The oak planks were freshly cut and very heavy from being wet. They were twelve feet long, ten inches wide, and an inch and a quarter thick. Jess and Anna could handle a board together; I carried one at a time. Then Anna told us about Phil, the new guy she had met online. He was an optometrist and was coming over to her house today. It was their first face-to-face meeting. There was one problem: Anna hadn’t told Phil he was going to be put to work to haul lumber for her new horse stalls.

  Phil showed up in his cute little Volvo. He was wearing a trendy Eddie Bauer fleece vest with clogs on his feet. Just from the first impression I had of Phil, I knew a dating relationship was not going to last with him and Anna. Anna immediately put him to work. We had to carry these boards across a muddy corral with scattered piles of horse manure into the barn. I felt sorry for Phil. He seemed the type who hadn’t done any hard physical labor in his life, and even though he was six inches taller and bigger than me, he really struggled carrying the heavy boards.

  His pretty clogs were useless for trudging through mud and horse manure. I lost count of how many times the clogs got pulled off his feet. I still remember the sucking sound they made when Phil had to balance on one foot, slip the other foot back into the clog, and pull it out of the mud. It was hilarious watching a pampered yuppie in this foreign and harsh environment as he tried to look competent for Anna. His soft fleece vest was shredded from the rough oak planks and looked like a pincushion filled with splinters.

  Then the day got even more intriguing with drama. (This is pretty much a given with Anna.) Earlier in the day, Anna thought we might need more help, so she called her ex-boyfriend to come over to lend a hand. He still had feelings for Anna and came over with high hopes of getting back together. It was hilarious watching this interaction between the two guys. Here were the ex-boyfriend and the new boyfriend working together for Anna, hauling planks through mud and horse manure. We finished unloading the planks, and Anna ordered pizza for lunch. Phil said he couldn’t stay and left. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand why he left.

  Jess had no idea why this drama had unfolded before her and could not understand why the two men were acting very weird toward each other. She also didn’t understand why Phil had been dressed like that, so I briefed her on this bizarre situation.

  Jess’s eyes opened in amazement, and she said, “That was Phil’s first date with Anna?”

  “Yes, dear,” I said with a laugh.

  “Did Phil know what we would be doing?”

  “No, dear.”

  “She invited over her ex, too?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “That’s just Anna, dear.”

  We burst out laughing. I asked Jess what would have happened if I had had her haul lumber on our first date. She looked at me and said, “There would not be a second.”

  It was due to this experience that Jess never felt any jealousy toward Anna, even if I went over to her place alone to help with the barn. Jess knew I would never have any romantic attraction toward Anna.

  When the previous situation with Jess being put in the psych ward calmed down, she brought up the subject of getting some Yorkies again. I was more open to this now and agreed, but I had her sign an agreement that the dogs would be spayed and that she was completely responsible for their care and training. Even my mom said that a little dog might help Jess, as she needed more love in her life since we could not have children. We got two Yorkie puppies, and Jess named them both. The first one was Diva, and we picked her up in January of 2007. Then we got the second one, Sasi, a few months later. Jess took them both to the store with her, and almost all the women and girls who came in loved to see the two Yorkies with bows in their hair.

  I have to admit that Diva stole my heart—she was a real daddy’s girl. She had a rough-and-tumble personality and was not the typical fragile little lapdog. Jess was a bit jealous about how Diva bonded to me. It’s because Diva loved to play rough, but Jess wanted Diva to calmly stay on her lap. It was not in Diva’s character to stay calm on a lap, but it was Sasi’s, and Sasi always stayed right next to Jess.

  However, if Diva got hurt or was feeling sick, she would go to Jess over me. There was one incident when Diva and I were running around playing. I ran out of the room, and Diva chased me. Diva collided with a door and let out a little yelp. She immediately ran back to Jess, jumped on her lap for comfort, and looked back at me with a dirty look.

  Jess petted Diva, laughed at me, and said, “What did Daddy do to you?”

  We remembered and laughed about this incident for many years.

  Six

  End of the Store

  I spent a lot of time building a website for the business, but working with Jess on this was extremely frustrating. She wanted to control everything but knew nothing about website programming. We spent many hours together going over fonts, colors, and format for the site, and I designed it with a style Jess really liked.

  The day it was supposed to go live on the Internet, Jess changed her mind about how it was going to look. These last-minute major changes she wanted were out of the question. I told her no—we had agreed on this and couldn’t make these major changes now. We could make tweaks to it while the website was up, but the website had to go up ASAP to generate business for the store.

  Jess still would not relent. She asked me to teach her how to change it, and I tried to convince her to let me be the nerd. I explained to her that as the store owner and manager, it wasn’t her job to get into the inner workings of website programming and that she did not have the time to learn this. Jess would not relent and then demanded I give her the base code so that she could modify it. This request was completely unreasonable, and I told her no. Jess had no clue how the website worked or about the HTML coding required.

  She was not happy with my refusal. She called me a control freak and said I wouldn’t even let her try. I tried to explain to her that she could not do everything and had to trust others, especially with a job like this, where she had no fundamental understanding of coding. Jess still wanted to try, but I would not give in to her, knowing that she would completely screw things up and cause me more aggravation in fixing what she broke.

  With the website up, both Jess and I wanted to get the entire inventory online to sell, but this was going to be a huge task. There were over eight hundred dresses to sell, and each dress needed five pictures: ones to show the front, back, and sides and a close-up. I told Jess I would do the research to see what we needed for camera equipm
ent and lights to take pictures. I also set up a shopping cart system on the website. With all these dresses, we needed at least four thousand pictures to populate the online catalog. Efficiency was key to getting this done with minimal color correction of each picture.

  There was no way we had the time to individually edit more than four thousand pictures to ensure the dress color people saw online matched what they bought. After a long time asking questions on different Internet forums and consulting photographers, I had a consensus about how to do this in the cheapest and fastest way with great results. What we needed was a dedicated room using lighting not affected by natural sunlight. We would take a few pictures and then adjust the light position and color settings on the camera to get reasonable and repeatable results good enough for all the pictures we had to take. The pros said never to use natural sunlight, as the light colors changed with different times of day and weather conditions.

  Jess agreed this was the way to go, so I bought the equipment. All we needed was a dedicated room. Jess was going to clear out a space for this, but she didn’t. I asked her multiple times over a couple of weeks. She promised me many times and told me the employees were going to rearrange stuff to make space, but she never got it done.

  Instead of clearing out a room, Jess had a new idea to take pictures at the front of the store by the large windows because there was space there. This was a huge problem, since it was the area used for window displays; we would have to tear everything down to take pictures and then put the displays back up every time. The natural sunlight would also screw up the colors, and every photo would need color correction.

  It would be a nearly impossible task to do this every day, and I told Jess it couldn’t work. We needed a dedicated room, as we had agreed. Jess argued that her way would work if she could just show me, but I explained to her the magnitude of repetitive work required. She would not listen, wanted to do it her way, and said I wouldn’t even let her try, just like with the website. I showed Jess again what the pros had said and tried to convince her to rely on their judgment. She still would not listen. Her stubbornness and unwillingness to listen to people who did this for a living was unbelievable. Jess dug her heels in and refused to listen to anyone.