As my husband is writing his resentment list for his fourth step, I am cultivating a few new resentments of my own.

I have a hard time telling this man, “No.” I’ve always had a hard time with it. I have to go to meetings about it. While I’ve gotten quite good at telling him “No” about big things, I still struggle on a daily basis with refusing to fulfill his million addicty whims.

Lately, he seems to have come down with a bad case of entitlement fever. From my perspective, it doesn’t look much like he ever does anything other than exactly what he wants to do. Granted, the life he’s loafing about in is pretty conscripted by his own bad behavior over the last few years, so there aren’t friends beating down the door for the chance to hang out with him, and there’s not any extra money for indulgence in leisure activities. However, he’s got it pretty damn good for an unemployed person…there’s always food in the cabinets in the kitchen, and we’ve not yet lost the roof over our heads. Instead of being grateful for these things, which he has done nothing to contribute to keeping, he bitches and moans about how bored he is and how much he wishes something exciting would happen or that there would be better food or that he could go out and do something. He will make little cutting comments about how I won’t ever buy him a movie to watch or candy to eat. (Yes. He bitches about candy.)

Sometimes, when he bitches long and hard enough, I’ll resentfully get in my car, take him to the movie store, and rent him a movie. I’ll think about all the million things he could be doing instead of watching movies and eating candy, such as painting the 6 half-painted walls that have been driving me crazy for months, but I won’t say anything about it. I’ll rent him a fucking movie, resent him while he watches it, and resent how it becomes my job to drive it back to the movie store and drop it off on time.

I think there are two parts to what I need to own in cultivating these resentments. First, it’s my infernal inability to tell him, “No.” The second is that I’m doing things for him that I won’t do for myself. I don’t allow myself many luxuries because my finances are too tight. Sometimes I’ll have dinner out with friends or buy coffee so I can work in a coffee shop instead of at home, but that’s pretty much the extent to my extravagance with money. It is hard for me to fathom spending money on little luxuries when I am often worrying about basic needs, and I resent him when I buy him little extra things. Instead of owning my own part, I’m furious that he doesn’t see the imbalance and stop asking. I want him to stop asking. I want him to stop thinking that he deserves some kind of treat to break up the monotony of doing exactly what he wants to do, all the time.

Damn it all, I really hoped that once he got some recovery going and got a sponsor that he’d be way more fixed. Instead, here we are, him fixing himself diligently, and I have nothing left to do but face my own issues! I think I’m going to go buy him a big, fat bag of heroin so I can sit back and think about what a mess he is.