Monthly Archives: May 2018

It’s Been A Long Time Coming But I’ve Arrived!

29 Tuesday May 2018

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I love this guy.

And in this video, he actually mentions the demographic that I am part of!

Go figure.

I have to tell you, I am STOKED!

It’s taken a long time for me to get here, but I am HERE!!

I spent the day repeating the mantra I took from one of Gary Vee’s videos:

I am a human being!!

I made it!

To human being-ness!

It is flippin’ crazy when you really think about it.

As Gary Vee says, it’s winning the Universe’s Lotto!

And so when I came home tonight and my husband found a reason to yell and curse, I didn’t care!

But in the right way!

It wasn’t I didn’t care in that white-knuckling it sort of way where you are actually seething with anger.

No, I didn’t care as in that anger was NOT going to touch MY life.

It’s been a long journey but I am here!

At My Life.

And I’m unpacking my bags because I plan to stay for the duration.

This Blog Is No Longer About His Drinking

29 Tuesday May 2018

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When your husband is an alcoholic, it will make you feel miserable, hopeless, overwhelmed, irritable, depressed, angry, hostile, lonely.

Until you decide it doesn’t.

This is not to say you shouldn’t feel those things.

In fact, I think you have to.

You have to go through the storm.

But keep going.

Every morning for the past two, three, four, five years – I lost track – I would wake up hopeful and optimisitc.

The day before me was going to be The Day I changed.

I wouldn’t suffocate my feelings with food.

I wouldn’t yell at my kids.

I wouldn’t hate my life.

And every night when I went to bed, I felt I had failed.

I ate too much.

I yelled a lot.

I spent the day cursing my life and myself.

But I never gave up.

I didn’t even realize it but I never gave up.

I’d wake up the next morning with the same hope and optimism.

And yes, I’d go to bed with the same sense of defeat and failure.

But in between, I was reading and writing, journaling and “googling.”

I was finding other people – writers, speakers, sages – and I was listeing to their words. Reading their teachings.

Then yesterday I came upon this fella “Gary Vee” and the things he said and the way he said them just clicked.

It didn’t have to be him.

(He’d probably agree.)

But now I see, it was going to be someone because I never quit.

Even when I felt like I was quitting, I actually never quit.

I’m kind a proud of myself for that.

I think you have to feel the anger and hostility, the regret and despair but you feel them so you can move beyond them.

One day, in the words of Gary Vee, you have to say “fuck him!”

My life is no longer about him, his drinking or even the fall out of his drinking. That is all his to own.

My life – and this blog – is now about Me.

It’s! Time!

28 Monday May 2018

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I’m ready!!

I had never heard of this guy – Gary Vee – but one click on someone’s Instagram account led to another click led to another and suddenly there I am, listening to a guy who is known more as an inspirational gury to 20-somethings than to “middle-aged housewives.” Well, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind that this “old lady” got fired up from one of his YouTube videos.

I am done!!

Listening to this made me accutely aware of how much I’ve been living in the chaso and turmoil of my husband’s drinking and the affects our marriage rather than basking in the miracles and abundance of my own life.

As Gary Vee says,

“I am a HUMAN BEING.”

I won the flippin’ lottery, he says.

I am a thinking, feeling, free creature in a Universe that could have made me a bug or a rock just as easliy. I have allowed his pain to become my regrets for too long.

It’s time.

To fly.

I Don’t Even Think I Care Anymore

26 Saturday May 2018

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It’s nearly 3 am.

I should go to bed.

Except I know the bedroom is hot. My husband refuses to turn on the air conditioner “before June 1st.”

Don’t ask me.

I turn it on anyway during the day but he turns it off when he comes home from work.

So the bedroom feels like a sauna if the weather happens not to coincide with my husband’s arbitrary mandate. Which is a tad ironic since the bedroom is FREEZING in the winter.

Anyway, I thought,

“Maybe I’ll just sleep on the couch.”

Except I’d have to go get a blanket and some pillows.

My next thought was,

“I don’t feel like it.” (Going for a blanket and pillows.)

Then I thought,

“I’ll just sleep without.”

How is it?

Why is it?

That we essentially turn on ourselves – can’t even be bothered to get ourselves a blanket and pillow for sleeping for example – in response to their behavior?

The Gravity of It All

21 Monday May 2018

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I know this family that is “perfect.”

Now, I also know that you may want to say,

“Oh, no family is perfect.”

And yes, this is true.

Technically speaking, perfection does not exist in nature.

My “perfect” family has its flaws. It’s trial and tribulations. It’s obstacles, heartaches and failures.

But the parents love one another.

They LIKE one another.

They are kind to one another.

They support one another.

They respect one another.

They are partners in marriage, parenting and life.

In turn, the children love and like, are kind to, support and respect one another.

It’s a nice family.

A perfect family.

Families with an alcoholic father tend not to be nice families.

It hurts me to say this:

My family is not a particularly “nice” family.

This is not to say my family is a bad family or that my kids are bad kids.

Not at all, really.

I am proud of where my children seem to be headed.

I don’t know how the scares of their childhoods will manifest themselves when they are adults but I hope they can be kind, loving, respectful spouses who love and like their partners.

But in their “family of origin?”

In the family their father and I created?

It’s not really that way.

Everyone is trying too hard to survive.

Each sibling is seen as a threat to the other. Competition for the limited resource of mom.

I’m all my kids have when it comes to a consistent and present parent.

And I don’t know that I do all that good of a job a lot of days.

It’s 3 o’clock in the morning and I am crying as I write these words.

My heart is broken for the home my children are growing up in.

Never, ever did I imagine…