Tag Archives: alcoholic marriage

There Is No Bottom

12 Friday Oct 2018

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I’m not a huge fan of Alcoholics Annoymous though I always do qualify that by saying,

“But if it works for someone, then that is great.”

My issues with AA stem from the fact that its doctrine seems to put forth this idealogy that alcoholism is somehow this “simple” issue that has their one and only “simple” solution.

Turn your drinking over to (your version) of God. They couch God in the euphamism of “your high power” but don’t be fooled. AA is a faith based program.

Never drink again.

Attend AA meetings indefinitely.

One other, in my opinion, myth AA perpetuates is this idea of “rock bottom.” As in the alcoholic has to hit “rock bottom” before he will be able to stop drinking.

Of course for some alcoholics, there will be a cataclysmic event that so shocks and scares them that they turn to a life of sobriety and never look back.

They kill someone in a car accident.

They almost kill someone.

They pass out only to wake up with no idea where they are or how they got there.

They experience blackouts that cause them to lose days of their lives.

Jail time.

Yes, these can happen.

Of course they can.

Alcoholism takes all forms.

BUT…

The truth is the majority of alcoholics never hit the proverbial rock bottom.

They just free fall indefinitely until they get tired of falling.

Or never stop falling.

For most, alcoholism is a chasm with no bottom.

And guess what?

It’s the exact same for the wives of alcoholics!!

We don’t finaly decide to leave because there is one big, overwhelming event or tragedy that jars out of our troubled complacency: we decide to leave because the daily living of little tragedies (peppered with the classic-alcoholic events like ruined holidays and drunken family vacations) finally becomes too much.

I know I buried my lead here, but I am leaving.

I didn’t lead with my lead because I felt the need to explain.

I have said I needed to leave before.

I have written about my “decision” to leave and then wrote no more of any effort.

It’s not because I “lied” or was posturing.

It wasn’t an idle threat launched in the world blogging.

It’s because this is the very difficult and convulted emotinonal trajectory of leaving an alcoholic husband.

We make the decision over and over again until we finally make the decision.

I have chosen the date.

June 14, 2019.

There are things I need to get in place (i.e. finances. aka money!) and while June 7, 2019 is doable it will also be a hustle.

The biggest obstacle women face in leaving their alcoholic husbands is making the definitive decision to leave.

I have made the decision.

I am tired of falling.

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It’s One Of Those Nights (Mornings)

16 Saturday Jun 2018

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It’s 3 am.

I have a glass of white, a bottle of diet coke and an ice cream sandwich.

I have my brand new “Passion Planner,” which if you don’t know what it is, you’re probably not the planner/notebook/calendar junkie I am. I could recite all sorts of acolydes and praise for the Passion Planner – and I’m sure all justified – but the truth is it’s just one more (planner) desperate attempt by a desperate woman to some how gain control of her life. Her Self.

I’ve cried this early morning hour for the loved ones I’ve lost and miss.

And for the life I lost and miss.

We have a wedding to go to in the normal-morning hours and when I tried on the outfit I plan to wear, all I could think was,

I’m as big as a house.

I’ve “let myself go.”

I have.

I’m one of those women.

I blame his drinking for that too.

I blame this whole hot-mess-of-a-life I am living on his drinking.

I do.

And I don’t think I am wrong.

But I do know regardless of who or what’s to blame, I am responsible.

Responsible for fixing in my life what his drinking has destroyed.

I just wish I had a better idea of how to do that exactly.

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.

The Irony (And A Little Keith Urban)

13 Friday Apr 2018

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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.

I can’t be a life preserver for his life.

He’s still going to drown.

And I’ll drown with him.

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.

 

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.

 

Who’s Fault Is It Anyway?

12 Saturday Mar 2016

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No one prepares us for how fast our lives fly by.

Oh, they try.  They tell us things like “enjoy it while you can” and “it goes by in the blink of an eye” but we don’t hear it…

Until we are ones saying it.

I’ll be 50 this year.

50. Years. Old.

And if it feels like my 50 years have gone by fast, it’s nothing compared to how fast it seems 17 years of marriage to an alcoholic have flown by.  One is a crop duster; the other is a jumbo jet.

17 years!

17 years?

And so now as I face the “second half” of my life and I think of the years past and all I wanted to do or be but never did or was, I can’t help but ask,

Who’s fault is it?

Is it my own fault?  Is all this soul-searching, therapist-seeing, blogging-effort, going-to-finally-write-my books effort a middle-aged thing? Did I, like so typical of the human condition, fall victim to, simply, the inertia of life?  Was I the one who let my dreams down?  Let books go unwritten? Let art go uncreated? Let passion for living fade?  Is everything about me and my life – from being 50 pounds overweight to eating crap to not writing to failing to live up to my potential – all on me?!

Or is all on him – the alcoholic who I married?  Do I get to lay everything that is wrong, compromised or flawed in my life at his (intoxicated) feet?

My first thought is to say, yes, why yes I do.  It’s hard to overstate how deeply and utterly completely the alcoholic affects your life.  It doesn’t seem like it should be that way.  It seems somehow one should be able to at least partially separate herself out from her alcoholic husband but if that’s even possible to do, it’s very, very hard to do.

Everything about the alcoholic’s condition – from his compulsive drinking to the volatile and erradic behaior to the emotionally vacancy – compromises your life.  How do you fly when a weighted cape has been laid across your shoulders?  How do you soar to the heights of your potential when the storm of alcoholism rages all around you?

You don’t.

Not really.

You survive today.

And then you survive another day.

And then another and another and another.

You just keep surviving while an idea, a feeling, a fear – a question – lurks unanswered in the back of your mind:

Am I just simply surviving my Life?

It taps, taps, taps, taps so lightly it seems until it builds to the thudering roar of a cresendo, refusing to be ignored.

What?

Am?

I!

DOING WITH MY LIFE?!

I suppose if you’re smart…

And you’re prepared to work hard (HARD!)…

And there is still a sliver of your soul left…

A cinder that smolders in that fire in your belly…

A tiny flame flickering in your darkness…

And if you can come to understand (accept!) that it doesn’t really matter who bears responsiblity for the state of your life and being…

You might just be able to fly again.