I walked in the door of my house yesterday to find shades pulled, lights dimmed, and a box of saltines opened and lop-sided on the counter. Chris is home. Again. I peered out the window to find his car hadn’t moved from the place I’d parked it that morning. He didn’t go to work again today. Migraine.

I walked up the stairs and found what I was anticipating. He was in bed with a pillow over his head. And I am angry.

I’m angry, mostly at the migraine, but also at him. See, we’ve been treating these and there was hope. Frequent chiropractic care allowed him to have nearly 4 months without a headache. But lately the migraines are back–almost 3-4 a month. And he hasn’t been going in for adjustments. Yes, I’m angry at the migraine and how it invades his head and our lives, but I’m angry at how Chris allows it to take him, like he’s sunk in some quiet desperation with no will to fight them, treat them, try something new.

I’d had a rough day of my own. I’m battling a cold that allows me only a couple hours of sleep each night for the past week, when combined with the heartburn and sore muscles I feel from being pregnant. I imagine my own bad day only exacerbated the situation. I need to talk. I need to have some sort of control over this. Our first baby comes in 2 months, and my husband will not have time to take off to spend with our new child. And this year, like every other for the past five, he will be out of paid time off by August, meaning every sickness and migraine after that will be unpaid. Which we cannot afford. And if baby is sick–then what?

I try to talk to him, but all that comes out from him are mumbles and grunts. He wants to sleep he says. For a few moments I sit at the edge of the bed and hold back tears. I nudge him one more time with no response. I get up and storm downstairs.

I don’t know why my first instinct is always to take my frustration out at the technology in our home. Probably because that is most often where Chris is tethered. It is most often his retreat when he doesn’t want to deal with something. I resent it. We’ve had more fights about XBOX and World of Warcraft than any other thing in our relationship. My thought is that when he wakes up the first thing he’ll want to do is drown his sorrows in pixelated battles. So I yank out the cord for the XBOX and toss it haphazardly into a box in our storage room. I’m not concerned about hiding it well, it’s the principle of the thing. I also put a password on his computer so that he can’t log in until talking to me about it. It’s juvenile really, my reaction to all of this…probably heightened by third trimester hormones. I know that as I do these things I’m being childish.

But in my mind it comes down to one thing–CHOICE. Surely he will find the XBOX–that’s not the point. Will he, after knowing I’ve ripped it out of the wall, take the extra steps to hook it back up so he can go back to non-reality? It’s symbolic really. In my mind, if he has the initiative to do this but not the initiative to take care of himself, I will know. I will know what?

These are the things I know. My husband no longer dreams anymore. He is generally dispassionate about anything. I never wanted to marry a career guy. I’ve never cared how much money we’ve made as long as we can pay the bills. I don’t care if there’s any amount of prestige in what he does. I fell in love with him because of his passion (even when it was displaced in my mind). If he were excited to get up every morning to make widgets, I would be ecstatic for him. But somewhere along the way (and maybe due to some fault of my own), he forgot how to dream. How to fight. How to try. How to choose. And he allows outside factors to make his choices for him. The migraines, and life in general, have worn him down. So when there’s a hint of adversity he caves and goes back to what he knows–a head under a pillow, and ear connected to a headset at a job he hates, an alternate reality where he can control things with little to no effort required. Meanwhile a life is waiting for him to take it and make something of it. I am waiting for him.