Pete Dodd Dot Com (.us)

A few people have wondered aloud why I haven’t posted in a while.  I’m sure even more just assumed that I had lost interest, as 99.999999% of all people who do anything do.  And I guess that’s part of it, but there’s a bit more to the story.  I guess the truth is that most of my problems these days aren’t my problems.  They are my wife’s.  So I don’t really feel comfortable being painfully honest pete (PHP?) when its not about me.  I feel fine telling people that I’ve shit myself 3 times as an adult, that I cry at the end of stupid romantic comedies I watch on TV at work, and that im more emotionally needy than any girl ive ever met in my life.  That’s fine.   I’ll even sharing embarrassing stories about Arnee, like that she farted like 5 times during foreplay last night – because that’s funny, and people deserve to laugh.  But I still feel weird talking about her problems.

But sometime last week she and a friend were talking and she was all “yeah pete doesn’t write on his blog anymore” and me, being the not-reactionary person that I am, was all “listen woman, it’s your fault!” and then I told her about how I didn’t want to share her problems with the world.   But she assured me that she didn’t mind the slightest.  Which makes sense, actually, because that’s what crazy people do.   I know this first hand.  In fact, this blog is proof of that.  Crazy people like talking about how crazy they are.  That’s what makes them so annoying to hang out with.   About 7 years ago I had a female friend that was going through what could only be called a mental breakdown and her crazy, crazy escapades weren’t the reason that no one wanted to be around her – those were fine.   It was that she constantly had to talk about how nuts she was and every conversation had to be spun around to be about her.   That’s what we crazy people do.  That’s why we have blogs now.

Not that Arnee is super crazy.  In fact, she is actually far too sane for someone who has been through what she has.   A quick recap of what got her here includes alcoholics, controlling crazy people, losing her baby hours after she was born, getting and beating Cancer, being cheated on while she was pregnant…  well, I can go on, but I think you get the picture.  God has whipped out his cock and beat her over the head with it.  Yet, somehow, she keeps her shit together.  Much like me, it’s a balancing act of pills, rationalizing everything to death, relying on people, being escapists (in both of our cases… videogames), therapy, being afraid of everything…   and she does most of it with grace.  Well, not exactly grace, no one as loud as Arnee would ever been called graceful, but she does it without much complaining or feeling bad for herself.  Shit happened, shit happens, shit is going to keep happening; so she deals and moves on.

Over the past year, which has consisted of pre and post wedding, which are two very, very distinct phases of life that are unlike anything I’ve ever been a part of, she has been dealing mostly with the fact that her mother’s brain is failing her.  They think it’s Alzheimer’s, or dementia, or whatever.  The bottom line is that her mother is starting to forget things, needs help with activities she didn’t used to need help with and she wont be getting better.  That’s the kicker and what turns it into something beyond depressing.   A few years ago my father had a heart attack.  It scared the shit out of me, he could have died.  But the thing was, he didn’t, and he recovered.  And now he’s doing fine.   Arnee’s mother isn’t going to do that.  What she was is gone.  What she is today will be gone in a few months.   She is now changing in ways that aren’t and never will be good.

I know I’m using really harsh language describing it, but that is only because that’s how it fucking feels.  It’s incredibly harsh.   I have gone through it with two grandmothers, one that died almost a year ago and one that is still kicking.  But I was never particularly close with either of my grandparents…  i mean not on the level that i am with my parents, or the way that Arnee, who was raised by only her mom, is with her mother.   I can’t even imagine what that feels like.  But I do know how arnee feels, and it’s terrible.  She is filled with sadness that her mom isn’t really her mom anymore and guilt that she can’t do anything about it.  For the most part this paralyzes her.  She wants to be there with her mom, but at the same time the whole thing terrifies her.  I understand this completely, as im sure my reaction would be 100% the same.   But for someone like her older brother, who is very much the matriarch of the family, he doesn’t understand it and he resents her for it.  He tells Arnee that she doesn’t care about her mom.   He’s an asshole for saying that.  I understand where its coming from – it’s all just frustration – because he is one of the only people in their family that can actually handle taking care of Joan.  But pouring guilt on top of Arnee’s sadness and her own guilt is only going to further paralyze her.

So after our honeymoon, when everything should have been totally awesome and we should have been on cloud nine, Arnee was very upset – a lot.  She tried to get back to CT as much as she could to help with her mom, but no matter how much she did her brother was still a cock to her, and seeing her mom only made Arnee more upset.  It got to the point eventually that Arnee couldn’t really function anymore.  She talked to her shrink about it and decided to do a med change to try to get a little extra kick to help her with her increasing bouts with anxiety.

And this is where the shit really hit the fan.  Actually is still hitting the fan.  There’s shit everywhere.

Arnee has been winding down one drug and ramping up another, but her body is not happy about it.  At all.  She has brain zaps, panic attacks, crying attacks, feelings of complete helplessness.   She is a mess.  Add to that the fact that we decided we couldn’t deal with this apartment any longer and have been going through the incredibly painful process of finding a new place in NYC (well finding places is easy, getting everything to work beyond that point is a nightmare).  So this month has been very, very difficult.  But as each day passes the meds work themselves out a bit more and eventually all of this turmoil will (hopefully) result in a better baseline for her to operate from.

But it’s not all bad news in Arneeville.  She has been working with the Food Network, and potentially will be doing a show or two with them this december fulltime.  She is also super cute!

So where does all of this leave pete dodd (dot com dot us)?  Well, I’m not going to blow smoke up assholes and say that’s its been totally awesome and fantastical, but in general I’m fine.  The thing is, and most of my closest friends know this, I’m actually at my best when I’m helping people.  I would guess that if I were to ask most of my long time friends to look back and think of their favorite memories of me, their mind would wander to some point where they were having a hard time and I was there to lend an ear and help them through it.  I’m just good at that, to be to be totally honest.  There aren’t many things I have an ego about, but that’s one of them.

I have spent many nights sitting on the couch next to arnee, rubbing her back and trying to ask her the right questions to get her to talk about what’s bothering her in a way that it will become clearer what she needs to do to fix it.  I’ve spent nights with her in bed while she has cried and cried and merely told her that everything was going to be ok.   We have had 100s, if not 1000s of conversations when she is doing well about how to properly handle something like what she is going through with her mother.   This is right in my wheelhouse.  This is a 85 MPH fastball right over the center of the plate.  I was born to do this.

I do worry that once she gets passed all of this that she is going to realize that I’m kinda-really boring.  Im stubborn, im not particularly adventurous, im fat and I smell like poop.   But for now, I’m husband of the year.  I would trade it all in to see her genuinely happy though.