You know how you hear a song and most of the lyrics apply to you or a situation you’re in. Or the lyrics apply but only in a way you understand, not necessarily in the way the song writer intended? Rarely does a song represent your feelings 100% or in exactly the same way as it was written.
But sometimes a song does.
Sometimes it’s 100% spot on.
Like Keith Urban’s “The Fighter.”
I think of myself, my life years down the road and the words, the emotions, the meaning in this song fits so completely.
Which, ironically, is one of the thing that holds me back.
The knowledge (knoweledge!) that I could leave my husband and have a whole new life, complete with a healthy, happy and fulfilling relationship.
I think the outside world would be surprised, shocked, (angered even?) by the idea that a woman could regret her own happiness at the expense of her “no good drunk-ass husband’s” pain. But it’s true.
And I think as the wives of alcoholics, we have to really understand this and how it can play out in the efforts we make – or don’t make – to reclaim our lives. No one wants to leave someone behind to die – be it physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually. Even if the “leaving behind” is simply moving forward with our own lives but not necessarily divorcing our husbands.
Of course the fallacy and real tragedy is that even if we are to deny our own happiness, our own potential, our own chance at living a fascinating, creative and interesting life in the name of protecting our husbands from their own pain, we aren’t protecting them at all. We aren’t taking away their pain or insulating them from it. We’re just perpetuating and creating more pain for ourselves.
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.
It’s probably not what you would expect me to write.
I didn’t expect to write it myself.
A book for “them?”
It just kind of happened.
I was thinking about what I wanted, needed – longed for – from my husband.
And then wondered if there were any men who were interested in hearing what their wives want, need, long for from them.
It’s not a fluffy, feel good book.
I hope the guys get that.
But I hope they also get that for most wives of alcoholics, we hold onto the love and the hope for a long, long time. Maybe too long in all honesty. That can be bad news for us..
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…
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.
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.
When my first born/oldest son was little, he loved it too. He always wanted to decorate and fully immerse himself, our home and our lives in it.
Except back then I loved CUTE Halloween.
You know, happy little jack-o-lanterns and haggy but friendly, witches.
My son, just a little guy, loved the gory, scary, spooky, macabre Halloween.
You know, the skeletons, skulls and meat cleavers sort of Halloween.
I tried to marry the two, sort of ease myself into his Halloween while encouraging him to love my version of Halloween.
He was having none of it.
Precocious from the start, he stated with such conviction I had no choice but to be swayed,
“Halloween is about scaring the undead back to their graves. How are fairies and unicorns going to scare anything back to its grave?”
Now, how close his then-five year old interpretation of Halloween was, I don’t know but it seemed pretty convincing to me. I had to concede his point and ditch the happy Jacks and smiley witches.
I think I have been collecting skeletons, skulls and meat cleavers ever since.
Holidays – as in Thanksgiving and Christmas – tend not to go well in the alcoholic household but Halloween seems to escape the alcoholic’s wrath. Maybe ’cause no one is going to notice his drunken slur or lop-sided stagger amongst the zombies and skeletons walking down the street.
Either way, before we get into the full-blown alcoholic, uh I mean holiday, season, I want to wish you a Happy Halloween.
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.
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.
In case you have been living under a rock, travelling to the planet Zortex or just all around completely disconnected from the world at large – Angelina Jolie abruptly – and from all accounts without any warning to her husband – filed for divorce.
In other words, Brad Pitt – that hunky hunk of man, that movie star mogul, that dreamy dream boat – was dumped.
The world is abuzz (word has it even on Zortex) with “what went wrong?” Because after all, two people that are insanely beautiful, with unimaginable wealth and world-wide status couldn’t possibly have any of the mundane, pedistrian marital problems us mere mortals (and Zortexeans too perhaps) have. Right? I mean he’s so cute and so famous and he loves children and he says deep, meaningful artistic things about his marriage and his wife and life. HOW could they possibly be divorcing? HOW could she have possibly DUMPED him?
Well one theory in the running is that he is an alcoholic.
I certainly have no way of knowing if Brad Pitt is an alcoholic but I find what information there is circulating about the separation interesting:
A. Angie (yeah, she and I are on a first name/nick name basis) is reportedly to have filed for the “health” of her family and to “protect” them.
B. It seems universally accepted that there was some “final” incident or episode that caused Angie to “suddenly” file for divorce.
C. From all reports, it seems Brad Pitt “never” saw it coming.
D. And finally, Angie is rumored to be blocking all calls and texts from Brad.
Again, I have absolutely no idea if Brad Pitt is an alcoholic but it’s interesting that the circumstances surrounding the separation are pretty much exactly what leaving an alcoholic husband would look like.
It seems “all of a sudden” when in fact any woman married to an alcoholic deals with the situation for many, many years before finally leaving.
It is most likely how the marriage is affecting her children that will be the catalyst for a woman finally leaving her alcoholic husband.
It will seem “all of a sudden” to the alcoholic because after all, he has been on the outside of his drinking and accompanying behavior all those years.
And finally, it is hard, hard, hard emotionally for most women to leave their alcoholic husbands. Often there is still love there, along with profound grief and saddness. Women most often leave their alcoholic husbands out of need not desire and so blocking contact from the alcoholic is necessary not because the wife is a cold, heartless bitch but because she knows that her emotions are too fragile, too vulnerable to allow contact with him.
Again, I have no idea if Brad Pitt is an alcoholic but if he is, I dare say this is exactly what leaving him would look like.
