So, right now we have a number of projects H started 1, 2, or 3 years ago. Like for instance, he tore up a small ceiling area because there were drips coming from upstairs. The ceiling has been unfinished and sits unattended for 4 months. There is a shed that has a hanging off door and I have been asking that we decide and work together to fix the door or remove the shed. It has been an eyesore and a vermin magnet for over a year. Many more projects that need to be done around our house. He mostly says that he does not feel well this day or that day or the weather is not good....anything to derail me. Today he started shoveling some dirt from a 4'x 12', 30 year old raised garden which stopped being able to grow anything in it because bacteria and fungus has contaminated the soil. So right now I was watching H with his tractor and wagon on the NEIGHBOR LADY'S LAWN and I asked, "What are you doing?" He said he was "filling up the little indents in her lawn using the soil from the old raised garden". I reminded him that a few years ago, I took samples of plants and soil to the State Extension and they told me the soil had bacteria/fungus that was infecting anything that was trying to grow in it. That is why we stopped planting that garden. I told him he had better not put that all over the neighbors lawn. He said to me that I was lying. WHY would I lie??? He kept shoveling the wagon load of dirt on her soil. WHY was he even using his time to do that to a neighbor's lawn anyhow?
This is clearly ADD because in his mind, I'm guessing, he was just totally involved with the shovel, the wagon load of dirt and the tractor. His attention was so focused on the shovel, the tractor, the wagon load of soil, that he could not think about what was appropriate (not doing anything to the NEIGHBOR"S lawn!). We live on 8 acres of country woodland by a creek....ACRES of woods and rocks to put that soil in many areas that we own. But in his mind, he was doing the neighbor a favor and can't be interrupted on his mission of working with the tractor, the shovel and the wagon load of soil. I am powerless to stop him. I and the neighbor lady do not exist in his world of the shovel, the tractor and the wagon load of soil. The "little lawn dents" are not even visible on a country lawn....we all have "dents", violets, and all sorts of wildflowers growing in our lawns here. So there he is killing her lawn with infected soil and I feel powerless to stop him. He, meanwhile, is angry at me for mentioning that the soil was infected and tested.
This makes me so upset because it seems so bull-headed and pointless and he is so unable to talk or consider me (or the neighbor lady) or realize that what he is doing is harmful and none of his business. While those things that ARE his business and his responsibility have been erased from his consciousness.
I am trying to describe my feelings....frustrated, infuriated, helpless, afraid of our future together and ashamed of all the years I have spent in this sort of situation where I had no voice and, by association, was involved in yet another odd, inappropriate action.
And I know that he will be slamming things extra hard tonight because I interrupted him with my "lies".
Bizarre Focus
Submitted by jennalemone on
And now he has started to trim the old neighbor lady's large bushes. She has not asked him to nor does she even know he is doing it. He is trimming and cutting the large branches into small lengths and placing them into his wagon. It is so strange to me. He does this with the garbage too. He spends time cutting the garbage into tiny bits "so that they compost better". I mean TINY bits, dime size. While things like earning a living, hygiene, our own bushes and house are not on his radar of responsibilities. His attention goes to such bizarre focused places. He doesn't see the whole picture. Just cropped portions of strange attractions that to him are pleasurable or have his own singular interest. I have been singing the song of "Let Him Be" on this board for a while now. And I am just letting him be. But that doesn't mean that sometimes what I witness is him being weird and it feels so bullishly independent. I sit alone and get nervous just being with him.
Can't get away from it....
Submitted by c ur self on
I know what you mean....Same space....I've been thinking about buying a camper to pull to the beach, mountains etc....But if I do, I might end up living in it at times....I've also thought about a cabin on the river...But she would definitely want to hang out there (fun place)...And that means more fights when I tell her she can't bring junk and clutter there....LOL....
It's just acceptance and endurance Jenna.....Hopefully you will stop lying to him...LOL....You knew when you walked out there and questioned him, you were going to be the bad girl....:)....I hope the neighbor lady didn't get upset about him not asking her permission....
c
Can relate.
Submitted by CaliforniaGirl on
My ex once spent an entire afternoon meticulously laying down a bunch of broken bricks that were laying around into a circular patch of dirt off the driveway for no reason that made any kind of sense to anyone other than him. Digging out the places in the dirt. Laying the different sizes in them to make a pattern. Refilling in between, with the spare dirt he had dug up. Perhaps it made him feel like he was accomplishing something.. I don't know. Meanwhile the actual house itself was in massive disrepair and that fact seemed to elude him.
He had a lot of reasons not to finish things as well. It's too hot. It's too cold. I don't want to be at the computer (but I'll play on my iPad), yadda yadda yadda.
Just wanted to say that on some level, I understand.
Crazy projects
Submitted by sickandtired on
I can certainly relate when you describe many projects going on that never get finished or don’t make sense. My exBF lived with me when I bought a house in a historic mountain town perched on the side of a cliff. I got it at a reduced price because it was in dire need of a retaining wall. After we moved in, he decided that instead of using the local master stone mason who was a friend of ours, that he would do this huge crucial project all by himself. “Why pay someone when I can do it?” He would say in our many many arguments about this wall. I became worn down by his insistence on building it, and felt helpless to stop him.
Mind you, this was a 20ft tall wall that was 73 feet long. It took him about 3 years to complete. He insisted on building it out of WOOD because he fancies himself a carpenter, not a stone mason. I kept telling him the wood will rot and let go the hundreds of tons of rock and soil behind it, and that it needs to be built by a professional out of concrete or stone...something durable. He accused me of not respecting him, and it all became about him. He also installed grass and a sprinkler system in the yard being held up by the wall. This just added more weight to the heavy soil by irrigating it daily. I could see a disaster in the near future, and we had many arguments about this, with him only concluding that I “worry too much”. Long story short, after I broke up with him, the wall failed about 5 years after he had started building it. I’m sooooo lucky my car was not parked below it when it fell. $80,000 later, after hiring an engineer and professionals to build me a proper retaining wall, I was barely able to save my house from falling off the mountain.
Oh, sickandtired, you might
Submitted by PoisonIvy on
Oh, sickandtired, you might be the "winner" of this category. I feel for you (but a little better about my own situation, such as the deck my ex-husband built many years ago that seems to be contributing to water leaking into the basement whenever it rains). And jennalemone, I can relate to having a spouse who would obsess about certain unnecessary (and even unwanted) tasks to the detriment of necessary things for his own family.
He did all kinds of irrational things
Submitted by sickandtired on
...like when my parents gave me a huge L shaped sofa, I came home one day to find that he had cut off the lower cushions all along the back! I was furious! He said he it was not comfortable for his shoulders when he would lay on it (which was a majority of the day), so he “just made more room”.
Another thing he did without thinking about it first was on a trip while we were walking across Hoover Dam. I got a few steps ahead of him and noticed the people coming my way had horrified looks on their faces. I turned around to find that he had picked up our terrified 50 pound dog and was holding him up on the one foot wide concrete ledge! I said what are you DOING!!!???!!! I grabbed my precious dog and got him down from the edge, and all he had to say was, “ I wanted him to have a better view!” For the rest of the trip to California he yelled at me how I embarrassed him, how I worry too much, am always negative, don’t trust him, and care more about the dog than him.
Well.... he is out of my life, and my precious pup is here right now sitting beside me on my new couch.
The pressure cooker
Submitted by sickandtired on
My exBF had an obsession about buying old broken things on EBay and “fixing them up to bring in some income” (he never sold any of these things and he never contributed a dime to our household and I paid for EVERYTHING) while our home deteriorated and became filled with junk. He started buying broken pressure cookers that needed electrical repairs. So after spending hours and hours fixing the wiring on one of these pressure cookers, he dropped its plastic lid on the floor, and it shattered into hundreds of pieces. I was kind of relieved, hoping he would trash this thing, and focus on the many other unfinished projects necessary to make our home safe, like fixing broken steps the dogs were falling through. I was getting over my broken leg and I needed safe steps too.
Anyway, after cursing God at the top of his lungs over shattering the pressure cooker lid, he swept up all of the pieces, but instead of trashing them, he got out a big bottle of Elmer’s Glue and spent WEEKS hyper focused on gluing all of these tiny pieces back together. This was a LID for a PRESSURE cooker. THINK about it.
Pressure Cooker
Submitted by SweetandSour on
That's a funny story!
The forgetfulness - ugh
Submitted by Dagmar on
My cast-iron bathtub is a streaky, horrible mess, because after researching the type of paint we needed, going out and purchasing it and making sure that it matched the wall color, he just painted it with the latex wall paint. He had no memory of all the work and planning that we did to find the correct paint for the cast-iron tub. Then, when he tried to remove the latex paint, he got bored and decided that it was good enough and then just painted over it with the enamel. I want to strangle him every time I see it. I just don't understand how it's possible to put that much effort into something and then just forget.
Projects never end, or finished.
Submitted by dedelight4 on
I had to stop in today and say Hi to everyone, and comment on the projects thing. The project thing is currently a hard thing for me to handle. Our ENTIRE house is now filled (every room) with unfinished projects and mess of every kind, which makes the house unbearable for me to live peacefully. I hate living in such mess.
For 36 years, I've been the one cleaning up everything and putting things "in their place". It's now to where I can't keep up with it any more, and when I make a clean space anywhere, H puts something there and covers it up. What is the aversion to CLEAN SPACES? It's almost as if he hates seeing a clean spot. He likes clean, but won't do anything to help it stay that way. Last week he told me "No one EVER "TAUGHT" me to put anything away", "I know I never put stuff away, and I get mad at myself for not doing it, but no one taught me how".
I was sort of angry at that, but didn't say anything to him. No one taught me how eitber, but when I grew up, had my own place, I just started DOING it. And I was proud of the clean afterwards, and still am. It makes living so much nicer and more manageable.
We currently still have painting products all over the house (3+years now) because he's painting the interior. The open living area is 5 different colors with walls still half painted. It looks crazy as you know what. He just "finished" the bathroom painting, which is so poorly done, he would have screamed bloody murder if I had painted it like that. Meanwhile, we're still trying to live amongst all the mess, and stuff he continues to bring IN to the house. Why do some of the adhd'ers insist on buying more junk? I'm at the point of throwing 3\4 of the contents of the house out into the lawn. But, he's got projects going on out there also. He's trying to grow grass, and just let your imagination go wild on that one. The neighbor told us our yard looks like crop circles when he mows the grass.Okay, go from there.
Okay, that's enough rant for now. Just had to vent for a minute.