Marriage should get easier with time, shouldn't it?

All day, I had planned to write about how I like a clean slate, the kind of clean slate you get at the beginning of the year.  I was minutes away from writing it, looking forward to the positive, upbeat feeling of it and feeling good about 2011.

Then I smelled it. 

Pot. 

Somehow, ten years into marriage, I feel as though I've begun living with a teenager, and it's not my 8-year-old son. 

I had had hints about it beginning several months ago.  But I wasn't quite sure.  I guess I couldn't believe it really. 

It's not that I'm a total prude.  Sure, I could see Randy and his bandmates smoking a joint after a gig.  But before church?  On the way to get a gallon of milk?  It just didn't fit to me until I really couldn't ignore it.

When first I confronted him about a month ago, I lost it.  Really lost it.  Told him he had to figure some things out.  Get his shit together.  I thought I had made myself pretty clear. 

After all, this is a man who had been out of work for six months.  Who had not been pursuing a replacement job with quite the zeal I would expect from someone with a family.  With a son who has medicinal and psychosocial needs that are not fully covered by insurance.  With a 15-year old car.  With a wife who likes to eat out at least once in a while. 

It just didn't fit, to me, that he'd be zoning out on pot on a pretty regular basis.

I can't help but wonder if there a connection between the lack of job motivation and the pot smoking?  Wayne and Garth were never real eager to move on with their lives.  Neither were the potheads in my high school.  And I guess you can kind of see it in a 17-year-old boy who isn't ready to grow up.  But a 58-year-old man?

So I detected the tell-tale aroma again just moments ago.  I guess that since I have resumed speaking to him and we've had some good family meetings, he thought that the weed was back on the table. 

I really had no idea that you could deal with this kind of stuff after being married ten years.  Maybe I'm stupid.  Maybe he's been doing this for ten years and I'm just now catching on, although I don't think so. 

If it was just the pot, if we had sufficient funds to cover our bills and do some fun things, if Dylan didn't require every single ounce of attention and fortitude, maybe, maybe I'd say, yeah, whatever.  But the fact is, we are struggling financially and our son needs both of us to be on our toes, aware and proactive to his needs.  I need a full partner in all of this.  Not someone who runs to smoke a joint whenever he gets stressed, even if this is way of self-medicating his own ADHD.

I told him again, more calmly (that is, resignedly) this time, that I'd like him to stop.  But I just didn't even have the strength to address it.  I was coming off of my own high - the clean slate high. 

Unfortunately, the clean slate just got cloudy from all that smoke.