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~ Life With An Alcoholic Husband

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Tag Archives: married to an alcoholic

The Stuff No One Tells You (About Being Married To An Alcoholic)

28 Monday Oct 2019

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alcoholic husband, living with an alcoholic husband, married to an alcoholic

It’s Monday morning.

The Monday morning when I planned to start taking this blog – and my life – in a new direction.

The direction I have pined for for a very long time now.

But then this morning played out in such a stark, sad irony that I feel compelled to write about it.

My (to-be-ex) husband leaves very early for work. 5 am. I am not normally up when he leaves but this morning I had to finish up some things one of my kids needed for school. (Yes, they may have told me around 10 o’clock Sunday night, ha.) As he was getting his coat and things to leave for work, I stood not ten feet from him. He put on his coat, picked up his bag and…

Walked out the door.

Not so much as a “why are you up” or “have a good day” or even the most basic “good bye.” Literally nothing. No matter how many times he does this (and he’s done it before to be sure) I still can’t get my head around this kind of behavior. I mean, you have to TRY to not say good-bye to someone who is standing just feet away, right? I contemplated for a moment calling him on his behavior but then I realized, why? Obviously this is the way he WANTS to go through life so what impact will any words from me have on him?

Shortly after my (to-be-ex) husband’s behavior, I left for Starbucks. (I don’t think it takes much to see how or why it is I came to carve out my morning Starbuck’s routine and family.) There was one of the people I see regularly but hadn’t seen in awhile there. We said our pleasantries, how have you been, what are the kids up to, etc. and then as I got my coffee and went to sit down…

“It’s good to see you.”

I felt like the Gringe, in that my heart “grew three sizes.”

Has he really beaten me down so far that a simple (though sincere I’m sure) salutation from a virtual stranger can warm me?

This is the stuff no one tells you about living with an alcoholic.

People think they know.

People think it’s just the drinking. Just the drunk week-ends, trashed holidays and/or ruined family events.

But being married to an alcoholic is so much bigger than that…

Because it affects even the smallest things in your life.

Who Really Threw Away The 40 Years?

19 Saturday Oct 2019

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alcoholic husband, alcoholic relapse, married to an alcoholic, wife of an alcoholic

There is a regular group of us who gather at Starbucks.

We weren’t friends first who decided to meet at Starbucks.

We were five or six individuals who found ourselves regularly in the same place.

Friendships like this are kind of odd because we are as sincere and honest with one another as with any friend and yet, who we are outside our morning get-togethers is relatively unknown. Oh, we know about each other’s kids or grandkids, pets or new car, each other’s political views and yet, at the same time, we know very little about each other. Our personal lives – the nitty gritty stuff – doesn’t really enter into our morning gatherings.

Except when it has to.

When something so large, so all-encompassing occurs in one of our lives that it can’t help but sneak in.

Amongst the group is a man, in his late 60’s. “Jim.”

By all accounts, Jim is a devoted father, husband and recently new grandpa.

He and his wife are financially comfortable and have good relationships with their children. They are active in the community. All and all, they seem to have carved out a nice life for themselves and their family.

Jim is also a recovered alcoholic who suffers from depression. (But then what alcoholic doesn’t have a comorbidity of depression?)

He mentioned this once to me, a rare moment when it was just him and I having coffee, though I’m sure everyone else knows as well.

That was a long time ago, he told me.

He got the appropriate help, pursued the necessary sobriety.

He seemed neither asahmed nor “proud” (in that annoying way some recoverying alcoholics can be) of his past. In fact, it seemed like he had exatly the “right” attitude about his drinking and recovery. He owned it without wearing it.

A success story in the alcoholic recovery areana.

Recently he told us that his wife of 40 years had left him!

I literally did not think I heard him correctly.

I told him somethig along the lines of,

“I thought you said your wife moved out.”

He said,

“I did. She did.”

I couldn’t believe it.

He said that was the reaction of all his friends.

He didn’t go into details but he did say that they were in counseling and he “just needed” to “keep the drinking under control.”

I know alcoholic double-speak when I hear it.

He started drinking again.

This man is so gentle, so kind, so nice that it’s hard to reconcile the limited snapshot I have of him with what I know the big picture of alcoholism is.

But I can do it.

I understand.

I dobut those who interact with my husband outside of our home would ever guess who he is behind closed doors.

I told Jim I noticed he still wears his wedding ring.

He said he is hopeful and optimistic he and his wife will get through this. He said,

“I don’t think she is going to throw away 40 years.”

Wow.

I smiled politely but inside I raged.

There was SO MUCH I wanted to say.

It’s the rare – if any! – alcoholic who REALLY! GETS! What it’s like to be married to them!

I wanted to say to him,

“You know, when you’re an alcoholic who got sober but then falls off the wagon, it’s not ‘starting over’ in your wife’s eyes.”

I wanted to say,

“All that pain of the years ago, it wasn’t erased by your sobriety. It may have been tempered but it wasn’t erased. She may have chosen to not feel it but it’s still there.”

I wanted to say,

“This is not a new chapter to her. This is another chapter of the same, old tired book that she thought she was done with.”

I wanted to say,

“She’s not throwing away 40 years. You did.”

“One drink at a time.”

Time To Triple The-F Down

11 Monday Jun 2018

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alcoholic father, alcoholic household, alcoholic husband, Gary Vee, married to an alcoholic

View this post on Instagram

. For all the parents. & For all the kids. – To all the “Ryan’s” our there, so many complaining out there, parent saying kids need a kick in the pants, kids saying parents just don’t understand, my thing is this… stop debating and complaining, if you’re so right, PROVE IT. – Tag the entire internet.. especially your best friends. – #parenting #graduation #careergoals #careeradvice #proveit #entitlement #entrepreneur #entrepreneurmindset #entrepreneurs

A post shared by Gary Vay-Ner-Chuk (@garyvee) on Jun 9, 2018 at 11:49am PDT

I can’t get enough of this guy Gary Vee because he is so spot on!

I was watching this video and thought,

“I wonder what he would say if I told him how my marriage was killing me?”

And while obviously I can’t literally answer for him, I’ve watched enough of his videos now to think his answer might go something like this:

“Fuck him! Get the fuck out! Look, I’m not just some cold-hearted bastard but it all comes down to this: your life or your marriage. And if you spouse is dragging you down. If he’s making it so you can’t live your life, that you are WASTING this one opportunity you have at this thing called living, then you have to make the hard choices, the tough decisons.”

Yep, that’s what I think he would say.

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

29 Tuesday May 2018

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alcoholic father, alcoholic husband, alcoholic marriage, Gary Vee, married to an alcoholic, motivation

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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Tags

alcoholic husband, alcoholic marriage, Gary Vee, married to an alcoholic, motivational

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.

I Used To Hate Him For…

28 Wednesday Jun 2017

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Tags

alcoholic father, alcoholic husband, married to an alcoholic, surviving the alcoholic marriage, wife of alcoholic

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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Tags

addict, addiction, alcoholic father, alcoholic husband, dysfucntional marriage, married to an alcoholic, wife of alcoholic

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!

Hiking With A Broken Leg and Therapy

14 Friday Oct 2016

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alcoholic father, alcoholic husband, children of alcoholic, funtional alcoholic, living in an alcoholic marriage, married to an alcoholic, wife of alcoholic

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.

 

 

 

The Stress

16 Thursday Jun 2016

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alcholic husband, alcoholic father, children of alcoholic, married to an alcoholic, wife of an alcoholic

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.

Well I Did It!

08 Wednesday Jun 2016

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alcoholic father, alcoholic husband, married to an alcoholic, wife of an alcoholic

Not that anyone is here to “listen.”

This blogging stuff is tough.

Of course I am not exactly tearing up the Internet with regular posts but…

To all those out there not listening…

I have published a book!

Or at least in three to five business days it will be available on Amazon!

“The Alcoholic Husband Primer: Survival Tips For The Alcoholic’s Wife.”

I feel so empowered!

Being married to an alcohlic zaps your strength, your soul, your will, your drive.

But I think I am (finally!) on the path to renewing it all.

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