Tag Archives: alcoholic father

Why I Finally Feel Ready To Leave

03 Monday Jul 2017

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People in the “outside” world seem to be befuddled by the fact that the wives of alcoholics don’t simply run for the door the first time they trip over a pile of “empties.” They think drinking problem = marriage dissolution. No questions asked. No doubt. No remorse or hesitation. If only it was that simple.

Or easy.

Or painless.

No, leaving our alcoholic husbands is never simply, easy and certainly not painless though that seems to befuddle the outside world as well. Why would we grieve leaving some “no-good drunk” of a husband?

Well, for lots of reasons I won’t go into right now. What I will go into is why I finally (finally?) feel ready to leave. Ironically, it has nothing to do with his drinking, per say.

I asked my husband if he wanted to take a vacation this summer.

“We can’t afford it.”

“Who is going to watch the dog?”

“I don’t know if I can get off work.”

No sooner did he finish his last objection thent I realized,

“Oh my God! I have been listening to these excuses for 20 years!”

Everything – EVERY! THING! I have ever – EVER! – presented to my husband in terms of our lives, direction we might take, dreams we might pursue, adventures we might create has always – ALWAYS – been met with the same – SAME – reasons why we CAN’T.

First and foremost is the steadfast,

“We can’t afford it.”

I don’t care if I was suggesting planting a willow tree in the backyard or taking an overnight trip to the lake.

“We can’t affort that.”

It’s his go-to, his safety, his stand-by.

Then, depending on the situation, he has his alternates.

The dog is a popular one for any sort of trip.

“What are we going to do with the dog?”

When I suggested we be foster parents (this was LONG ago, when I would even dare suggest such an idea), I guess since money is hardly an issue there, he had to pull out the,

“We don’t have room for that.”

There is also his all encompassing,

“That will never work.”

So when he said we “can’t afford” a vacation this summer, it hardly seemded the sort of thing that would cause a deep revelation within me. But that’s the thing with “revelations;” they may seem sudden, like a volcano erupting, but really they have been a long time coming. Like a volcano after all. The energy brewing and percolating beneath the surface, “undetected” until the day…

And so last night when my husband began with his litany of “can’ts,” it hit me,

“He will never want to do anything.”

His excuses are just that. Excuses. The real “excuse” is he doesn’t want to or can’t leave his comfort zone. He wants to work, come home, drink only to wake up and do it all again the next day. Now I by no means think he’s happy or fulfilled. No, I know he is quite unhappy but he’s not going to challenge that. He’s not going to work to Be happy. He’s just going to sit in our house, worrying and yelling about about money until the day he dies.

And THAT is why I finally feel ready to leave.

Because I want to LIVE…

Until the day I die.

I Used To Hate Him For…

28 Wednesday Jun 2017

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his drinking.

I used to hate him for the beer bottles littering my house.

I used to hate him for his snoring as he laid passed out in the living room.

I used to hate him for the way he would scream and curse at me.

I used to hate him for the dirty dishes and trash he left laying around.

I used to hate him for being emotionally unavailable.

I used to hate him for never fully participating in our family life.

I used to hate him for the way he drove.

I used to hate him for being such a pessimist.

I used to hate him for his anger.

I used to hate him for turning the smallest incident into a verbal assault.

I used to hate him for his refusal (or inability?) to communicate with me.

I used to hate him for his constant harping about money.

I used to hate him for the suppressive pall he cast over our home.

I used to hate him for everything our marriage was not because of his drinking.

Now I just hate him…

For making me hate myself.

Who Are The “Lucky” Ones?

02 Friday Jun 2017

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If you ask me, eventually and essentially, the alcoholic marriage comes down to one of just two types:

The Slow Erosion.

This is my marriage.

There are the expected flare-ups every four, five or six weeks. Sometimes not for months. The fuck-you’s and the fucking bitches, shut the fuck ups and go fuck yourselves. It’s a pressure cooker of a home, no doubt, but the intensity of the pressure is not constant. What’s constant is the slow climb. The building of pressure that leads to the climax. The alcoholic unleashing his fury and purging himself – at the expense of his family, of course – of the loathing, self-hatred and anger like a volcano spews it’s lava, noxious gases and broken rock pieces.

It’s a deceptively dangerous alcoholic, what some in the “industry” euphemestically refer to as a “functioning” alcoholic. The idea (fallacy!) being that somehow, in between the eruptions, everyone is living mentally healthy and emotionally safe lives. That because the alcoholic doesn’t spend the mortgage money on booze or get arrested on a regular basis, somehow his wife is spared the sterotypical pain and dysfucntion of an alcoholic marriage.

And it’s the marriage that is most likely to rob us of our lives, our souls. The marriage that steals our days and lives so gradually, so insidiously that we lose ourselves to complacency.

We live in the in-betweens. It’s like we are periodically jerked out to sea, tossed about violently and mercilessly in the ocean depths only to be returned to the peaceful shoreline for a few weeks or months. We live with the fear, the dreaded expectation – the knowledge! – that it will happen again but the warm sunshine and the soft sand are deceptive. We let ourselves be fooled. Not because we are dumb or weak or “co-dependent” on the ocean’s rage but because we are human beings and human beings (the good ones anyway) tend to have a hard time walking out on committments they have made and people they love. (Or onced loved?)

And then there is the other alcoholic marriage.

The Pure-Hell-All-The-Time.

An ocean that is constant in its assault on us. An ocean that nearly never stops pounding us with thousands upon thousands of gallons of bone chilling water. An ocean that we somehow endure its absolute worst day in and day out until one day it delivers even more.

One day it becomes even more viscious in its attack on us.

Think of the alcoholic marriage where there is repeated jail time, jobs continually lost or extra-marital affairs regularly. Think of the alcoholic marriage with physical abuse or holes punches in walls or public displays of drunken behavior.

The alcoholic marriage that one day, somehow, is even worst than all the years of worst.

This is where my friend is in her marriage.

A marriage that it is impossible for her to deny its destructive affect on her.

A marriage she knows she has to leave and yet she doesn’t know how.

She will find a way.

Because she has to.

Meanwhile, I am “safe” (relatively of course) in my marriage of mostly nothing. My marriage with an emotionally absent husband whom I can “ignore” because he’s not in jail or having an affair or losing job after job.

When my friend tells me of what she is enduring in her marriage – infidility (blamed on her, of course) – I think I am “lucky” one to not have to face the pain of betrayal while trying to navigate and mitigate the anger and hostility of an alcoholic husband. (Caught in an affair, no less. Like a cornered animal, the alcoholic who has no way out will attack).

Yet, when I think of how she will find her way out because she has no other choice, I wonder…

Maybe she is the “lucky” one.

P.S. I love you T. You can do this!

Spoken Like A True Alcoholic

07 Saturday Jan 2017

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If you’re too young to know who David Cassidy is (“was”) he was a teen heartthrob from the 70’s and the frontman for the group “The Partridge Family.”

At the time of this interview, he was a recoverying alcoholic.  I don’t know if he still is though if I was going to place my bet based on this interview, I’d say he did not stay sober.

The first 15 minutes or so are interesting enough but it’s around the 16 minute mark when he begins to talk about his marriage, getting divorce and the affects of his alcoholism on the marriage.  Apparently as far as the divorce was concerned, all was well and amicable in the proceedings until his wife saw a picture of him with his new girlfriend.  Then that old bitch of an ex-wife-to-be just couldn’t handle it and got all vindictive.  And he’s really hurt by it.  And he tried “reaching out to her” but she won’t speak to him.  Oh David, how could she be so petty and cruel?

Hey, I know, maybe…

Maybe she was gritting her teeth and biting her tongue just to get through the divorce “amicably.”  Maybe she was trying to put 25 years of being married to an alcoholic behind her just for the sake of getting the divorce over with.  Maybe she was trying to move forward and not hold onto all the pain and hurt you caused her.

Maybe she saw a picture of you and your new girlfriend and said to herself,

WHAT THE LIVING FUDGE!!

I DEALT WITH HIS S*T FOR 25 YEARS AND NOW HE THINKS HE’S TAKING HALF OUR ASSETS TO SET HIMSELF UP WITH A NEW LITTLE LIFE?

Maybe it was something like that David.

At the 20:23 mark, Pierce asks him what would he say to his (ex) wife if she were to be watching.

Oh!

My!

God!

I’m surprised my computer is still in one piece.

Typcial (T-Y-P-I-C-A-L!!!) alcoholic non-apology apology.

He said he would say he is “sorry” “if” he hurt her.

Oh wait, he says yes he did hurt her and he’s sorry BUT…

But he “just” wants her to be fair and if she has a problem with him having a girlfriend, well he’s sorry for that but…

And then he SHRUGS HIS SHOULDERS!

He goes onto say he hopes she considers their 25 years together and all he did for her, their family and her family!

What he DID for HER FAMILY!

Straight out of the alcoholic’s playbook!

“You can’t be completely mad at me because look what I did FOR you!”

I supported you or gave your mom money or paid for your brother’s college or whatever!

I don’t care if he set her and 250 members of her extended-extended family up in tiki bungaloos in Tahiti for six months!!  Here’s what alcoholics – and even recoverying ones apparently – DON’T! GET!!

EVENTUALLY THERE IS NOTHING (AND I MEAN NOTHING!!)THE ALCOHOLIC CAN DO TO “MAKE UP” FOR HIS BEHAVIOR AS AN ALCOHOLIC!

There is not enough money, enough trips, enough designer handbags, diamond bracelets, sweet surpises, ENOUGH OF ANYTHING!! to “make up” for the alcoholic’s behavior and the pain he inflicts!

The only way to “make up” for it is to apologize.

Not as an alcoholic apoligizes but as someone who is sincerely taking ownership of their actions apologizes.  The day I hear an alcoholic say something like this:

I’m sorry.  I have hurt you beyond what I know I can fully comprehend.  I will spend the rest of my life working for your forgiveness.  Whatever you need from me in order to heal from me, I will give you.

Is the day I trust I am speaking to a truly recoverying alcoholic.

At the 24:33 mark he does say his greatest regret is that his son no longer trusts him “but…”  “he’s been living with his mother…” so Cassidy is sure that has influenced him “some.”

Yes David Cassidy, that’s it.  Again, that mean old vindictive bitch-of-an-ex-wife-to-be has victimized you. Your son’s feelings and mistrust of you has nothing to do with what life was like growing up with an alcoholic father.  That couldn’t possibly be it.  No, it’s his mother’s “influence” that is causing him to shut you out.

Sadly to me David Cassidy sounds like a non-recoverying-recoverying alcoholic.  He apologizes and acknowledges things but always with a caveat.

The “yeah but” of alcoholics everywhere.

If Someone Won’t Swim…

26 Monday Dec 2016

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is it your fault if they drown?

I tried talking to my husband today about our marriage.

He said, to paraphrase, he’s tired of walking on egg shells around me; I am always angry and mad; nothing he does makes me happy; I am the unhappiest person he has ever met and…

Wait for it…

He doesn’t know how much more of our marriage he can take.

I looked around, half expecting to see Alice in Wonderland and the Mad Hatter popping out of the closet.

It’s insane.

It’s crazy.

It’s mindboggling.

And dangerous.

Do you know I have – and did – actually stop and think,

“Could his perception be the accurate one?”

Look, life is all about perception.

For even the healthiest of adults and relationships.

But some perceptions just have to be more accurate than others, don’t they?

In the alcoholic marriage, who is the problem?

Really?

Well, it can become that you both are.

I am angry.

I am unhappy though only with and around him.

He does piss me off with just about everything he does.

(And by “everything” he does, I mean the NOTHING that he does.)

But this is how I see it, the alcoholic spouse “starts” it.

How do you not become angry and moody and unhappy when you are called a fucking bitch, told to shut the fuck up and emotionally ignored and by passed by the one person who is suppose to be with you through it all?

The alcoholic starts it.

But it’s up to you and me to end it.

That is, we have to save ourselves, even if it means leaving our husbands behind to drown.

It’s not an easy choice.

Not in the least.

But you can’t make someone swim.

And you can’t make someone save their marriage or themselves.

The Truth Is He Can’t

26 Wednesday Oct 2016

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Yesterday my husband screamed at me,

“I CAN’T MAKE YOU HAPPY!”

And in that moment, I realized the saddest thing.

He was right.

He can’t make me happy.

I know he said it as an accusation.

As in, I am a bitch who will never be satisfied no matter what he does or how hard he tries.  But I heard it as a confession.  A plight.  As pain.

He can’t make me happy.

As in he doesn’t have the emotional skills, the understanding or the ability to make me happy.

The truth is there are times he tries.

I know he tries.

But how do you tell your husband,

“Yes, I know you cleaned the kitchen tonight but there is 20 years of other stuff (alcoholic stuff!) that can’t be erased so easily.”

How do you tell your husband that bringing home your favorite ice cream one time hardly negates the countless times he has told you to shut the fuck up?

How do you explain to someone – who feels that by cooking your favorite dinner he is really putting himself out there – that there is more – so, very, very much more that you need from the marriage?

My husband can’t make me happy.

This is a truth that is as equally sad for him as for me.

 

Hiking With A Broken Leg and Therapy

14 Friday Oct 2016

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I want to find a therapist.

I’m sure a lot of people – a lot of people outside the world of the alcoholic marriage that is  – would think along the lines of “duh?” Maybe even, “about time.”

People inside the world of an alcoholic marriage – that is you and me – understand that like everything else in the alcoholic marriage (everything!!) the decision to seek and finally see a therapist is complicated.

The reasons I want to and the reasons I hesitate are actually one in the same.

I saw a therapist once.

I told her my husband was an alcoholic but that was not what I wanted to address in my own therapy.  She proceeded to ask me questions about his alcoholism, which I answered for about 20 minutes and then said,

“But his drinking is really not what I want to deal with in my therapy.”

To which she replied,

“Then why have you been talking about that?”

Uh, because you kept asking me questions about it!

I view where I am in life, in my marriage, in dealing with my alcoholic husband something like this:

I’m on a month long trek through a dense, mountainous forest.  I fall and break my leg.

Bad!

This SUCKS!

It hurts!

A LOT!!

I curse my bad luck.

I curse my pain.

I curse God.

Several times maybe.

But then?

But then I have got to patch my leg up best I can and proceed on getting out of the forest!

I told the first therapist my husband was an alcoholic just as I’d tell someone who happened upon me in the forest that I had broken my leg.

It’s information that would be necessary for anyone trying to help me.

It sucks being married to an alcoholic.

It hurts.

A LOT!

I’ve cursed my bad luck.

I’ve cursed the pain.

I’ve probably cursed God a few times as well.

But now it’s time to get moving.

Whether that is literally out of my marriage or to a better place within myself within the marriage, I don’t know.

I just know the time for cursing is over.

 

 

 

Who? (Would I Be)

01 Thursday Sep 2016

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I don’t like me.

No, I really don’t.

I don’t like who I have become, how my life is going or the way I am living this life.

I don’t like me as a mother, as a pet owner, as a woman, as a liver-of-life.

I have no energy, no passion, no enthusiasm for this limit-one-ticket-per-customer ride around the sun.

And probably what I don’t like most of all about me is that I don’t like me.

Is it my alcoholic husband’s fault?  The fault of living in an alcoholic marriage?

Well, frankly yes.

Yes, who I have become is a direct result of living with an alcoholic for nearly 20 years.

There is the saying, “hating someone is like drinking poison and expecting them to suffer.”

Well, living with a compulsive drinker IS someone drinking poison but you suffer.

Who would I be if I were in a relationship where we grew together, challenged one another, supported our dreams – both individual and joint dreams?

It’s not nothing this burden we bear of living with an alcoholic.

You can’t “ignore” it.

You can’t live around it.

You can’t just go about your life as if you were in a healthy, normal, supportive marriage.

And yet…

Of course the only one who can take responsibility for my life, for all I don’t like about my life and myself is me.

I was reading the book “Miracle Morning” by Hal Elrod.  He was hit by a drunk driver when he was in his early twenties.  DIED AT THE SCENE.  Resuscitated (obviously) and had months and months of physical therapy.

Was it the driver’s fault?

Of course it was!

But who’s responsibility was it to recover?

Who had to endure and struggle and fight to get his life back?

Obviously he himself.

I know who I feel I have become is a result of this marriage.

But I also know if I want to become anyone different, if I want my life to be anything different, I am the only one who can make that happen.

 

This Is What Someone Else’s Drinking Does To You

17 Sunday Jul 2016

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I hate him.

I god damn fucking hate him.

I hate our stupid dog, I hate the god damn cat, I just hate…

Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.

The rage isn’t so quiet tonight.

I hate who I am becoming.

He does nothing around here.

N-O-T-H-I-N-G.

Oh, he’s “functioning.”

He goes to work faithfully everyday and brings home that pay check.

Big.

Fucking.

Deal

At this point, I’d rather live in a box with a man who loved me.

Who dreamed with me.

Who laughed and cried and was facing life together with me.

The way you expect when you get married.

I’d rather be hobos riding the rails if it meant my husband touched me sweetly, kissed me gently and cared whether I was safe. I’d take getting beat up by the conductor for hiding in a boxcar over being beat up emotionally every. Single. Day of life with an alcoholic.

There’s probably not a scenario you could offer me that I wouldn’t trade marriage to an alcoholic for if it meant I was loved and seen, valued and respected.  If it meant my family and I were together emotionally, not just physically living in the same house together separately.

The Stress

16 Thursday Jun 2016

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I woke up this morning with a splitting headache.

Splitting.

The stress of my (alcoholic) marriage feels too much for me to bear.

Some would say I have it “easy.”  When it comes to the alcoholic marriage anyway.

My husband is home every night.

He is (uber!) responsible with our money and the bills.  Almost too much, I dare say as he doesn’t want to spend a dime on anything! If we could live without electricity, plumbing or any other modern day “luxury,” he gladly would in the name of “saving” money.

He’s usually not hostile and aggressive.  Usually not, that is. He goes in cycles.  He’ll erupt every three or four or maybe even six weeks and then go “dormant” for a period.

The dormancy is what is killing me.

When it comes to enduring life with an alcoholic husband, dormancy may sound good.  Dormancy may sound like the preferred.  Dormancy may be what other wives of alcoholics wish for.

But dormancy is not nothing.

It’s not innocuous.

And it’s certainly not harmless.

Every morning I wake up, my husband having gone to work around 5:30 am and I see his empty side of the bed and I think, “he didn’t kiss me good bye again.”

Now he hasn’t kissed me goodbye in the morning (or hello in the evening) FOR YEARS now and yet it still stings.

Every.

Single.

Morning.

It stings.

If my kids and I were drowing in a river, after my husband got the children to safety, I don’t know if he would come back and save me!

Now I know that sounds absurd.  And I suppose he would be OUTRAGED if he knew I felt that way and maybe that is the furthest thing from the truth but the point isn’t whether it’s true or not, the point is that is how I feel about my husband and about my marriage.

That is how he makes me feel.

And I know all the “no one can make you feel” feel-good talk but we’re human beings – other people do make us FEEL certain things.

And living in an empty, souless alcoholic marriage makes me feel like my husband wouldn’t even save me if I were drowning in a river.