Living with the Monster

I am now living with a monster. At the end of 2006 I look at my husband and I no longer know who he is.

What has happened to him?

He breezes around like an egomaniac monster that I have come to be acquainted with. He offers little support during the house rebuild. He seems to prefer to not talk about the emotional turmoil we both feel. He just wants to bury things. There is little conversation, no support. We are now a couple of people conjoined by finances and children. I try to reach out to him countless times - he refuses to take my help or my lead. He doesn't sleep, he is constantly agitated, seemingly under some kind of pressure from somewhere or someone that he can't tell me about.

His guilty conscience seems to change his personality - he accuses me of having an affair - with whom I have no idea and where he thinks I have the time to waste in fooling around with someone, God only knows - he is irritable with our children. He finds fault with everyone, and everything. He is angry about something but is incapable of articulating what it is.

We exist in the same space, a rented house as ours is painstakingly rebuilt, orbiting each other, me wondering what the hell has got into him.

We moved back in to our own home 10 days before Xmas of 2006. The builders worked very hard to try to make it happen for us as they appreciated how good it would be for to spend Christmas as a family back in our home and to put the dreadful events of 2006 behind us.

I raced around all that day,taking leave from work, extremely excited that our children would have their rooms back, relieved that we could move back to our home and we could help them overcome the demons they faced going back into their own rooms. I took deliveries of new furniture and electrical goods during the day which replaced all that had been destroyed in the fire. I moved everything from the rental house with the help of the man that had salvaged anything that could have been salvaged from the fire 5 months earlier.

I unpacked beds and mattresses for me and the girls to sleep on that night, I moved boxes and unpacked our salvaged belongings. I set up the TV and the girls PC's to restore a degree of normality for them. Friends offered their practical support and called in with gifts, made tea, ran errands. The Fire Crew that had been in attendance at the incident in the summer, dropped by for a cup of tea, an offer of help, lifted and shifted a couple of heavy boxes and left us some beautiful flowers and a card.

My husband spent that day at the office, putting the final touches to the arrangements for his company Christmas Party, to which I was apparently invited but had never been encouraged to attend - I now know why. He stayed in a hotel that night, comforting the whore who told him she was "sick of everything and what was he going to do about it".

We snuggled down in our new beds, glad to be home at last - a joy for all of us. Our children delighted to be in the surroundings that are familiar and safe for them; me tossing and turning during the night, knowing he was most likely with her and me fearful of what our future held with an emotionally vacant husband and father. A loving husband that had morphed into a monster.