My Ex had the kids all last week. In the three years we have been divorced, this is only the second time he took his week and only because I guilted him into it. In hindsight, the kids should have stayed home with me.

I've blogged before about owning a house with him. He refused to refinance it to get my name off of the mortgage and deed, and now the house has been foreclosed. I got notice that the house would be put up for sale by the Master Commissioner. Obviously, if I got the notice (and I don't even live in the house), then I would assume that he got the notice too.

Well, the entire week he was off, he did absolutely nothing. No packing, no cleaning up, no purging of junk, nothing. Apparently, all he did that week was drink. When my kids came home Friday, they told me that on one of the days when he picked them up from school, he was drunk. For my kids to notice that he had been drinking, he must have been drinking pretty heavily. They would go down the street to talk about it because they were too scared to say anything in front of him.

The house is packed to the rafters with junk! When he and I were together, he was a packrat, but I was able to purge a lot of it while he was at work. Apparently, since I left, he has stuffed every closet, my daughter's bedroom is completely packed up to head-height. There is a one-car garage attached, and it is completely full. I mean completely! When his family was cleaning out his mother's house after her death, instead of taking stuff to Goodwill or Salvation Army, he took everything that no one else wanted and stored it in his house. Why? Because it belonged to his sainted mother [big eye roll]. While I did love her, her kids seem to think she was a reincarnation of the Blessed Mother. Last time I was over there, the garage door was open, and I got to see for myself how bad it has become. He saved rubber yard geese, her old paperback books, old pots and pans, I even saw a box of old dishtowls and pot holders. There was even a box of old newspapers that she hadn't taken to recycle yet.

So, within the next couple of months, unless he pulls his head out of the bottle and find somewhere to live, he is literally going to be living in a van down by the river. Not only that, the sheriff will come and throw all of his crap out into the street and change the locks on the doors. Maybe then I can finally go over and rescue the pictures of my kids when they were babies - all the precious things I had to leave behind because I fled from the house late in the night.

It just boggles my mind that someone can be this helpless. I just want to hit him over the head and tell him to be a man for once in his life!!