SEVEN

Is it Done?

He signed the papers today and one huge weight is lifted from my shoulders.  Now I just wait for the court's approval.

I survived.  Is it done?

He ran me through the ringer yesterday, he was so drunk and belligerent.  He said he wanted to punish me for all the bad women in the world.  All day, drunk email after drunk email.  And then last night he asked me to forgive him for his behavior.  And today after he signed, he said he's ready to accept help.

I hope for him it sticks.  He's in the care of his father now for a while.  I hope he gets help, but AT LAST I can free myself of this burden of his.  It is not my burden anymore.  A weight has been lifted and I feel free.

SIX

So Close

So close to being done, yet I can't breathe, I'm holding my breath.  I'm waiting for this latest agreement to explode. 

His father took over negotiating for him and NOW we're finally getting somewhere.  Now I'm negotiating with someone who isn't stuck in the hell of his son's life and actually understands what we're talking about.  I am relieved, yet it's not done so I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.  The other shoe ALWAYS drops.

So close, but not done yet.  Deep breath.

FIVE

In Limbo

I am a stressball and I just want to give up and cry.  I am tired of holding it together.  I want this done so we can move on and so my life isn't in limbo. 

I've been in limbo for six months and I just want a home.  I'm tired of the uncertainty.   I'm tired of holding it together.   I'm tired of the drinking and abusive texting rollercoaster.  I'm tired of wondering if he's ok and not noticing that I'm not ok.  I miss my dogs.  I miss leaning on him and our love when things were good, but I don't have that now.  I have a rollercoaster and I just want some solid ground and a peaceful place of my own so I can recover. 

There, that's where I am emotionally right now.  Falling apart inside.

 

 

FOUR

Verbal Text-Abuse

It's been a week and a half since the last string of verbally abusive texts have come in and it's always when he's drinking.  He wasn't ever verbally abusive in our relationship until the drinking ramped up and I left, and now it's pretty much clockwork--if I start getting abusive texts, that means he's drunk, and when he sobers up, he apologizes.

A Happy Drunk

He had always been a mostly happy drunk.  Usually he'd get manically excited and outgoing, sometimes, though, he'd get depressed.  One time I had to follow him down the road in the middle of the night because he was drunk and wanted to go die alone in the woods.  In the end now it's mostly been angry.

His grandfather was an alcoholic and apparently a pretty mean one, until he quit drinking cold turkey and never touched it again.  I didn't know that until the end of our marriage because he'd always put his grandfather up on a pedestal.  I knew his grandfather was alcoholic, just not that he was a "mean drunk".

My husband inherited his house we were living in from Grampa, and Grampa was everywhere there.  My husband liked to put up pictures on the wall of growing up, and he'd put them on the wall in the same spot in the house where the picture was taken.  If we needed a tool, we got one out of Grampa's Workshop downstairs.  The basement furniture was Grampa's end table and Grampa's bedroom set.  It was neat.  Grampa took care of Grandma when she was old and frail, and I envisioned my husband taking care of me when I was old and frail.  It made me feel connected to this man I never knew to have so many of his things so close at hand.  It doesn't change it that Grampa was a mean drunk, it just creates a more realistic image of the man my husband had been idolizing.  People are black and white; good and bad; happy and mean; drunk and sober.  My husband is all of that.

Hope. 

I have a bracelet and necklace I wear with interchangeable charms, and on them they say "hope", "faith", leap of faith", and "let it go".  I have hope for my new future where I can go back to the calm and peace I need in my life.  I have faith in the goodness of the world and the path I am following.  I am taking a big ol' leap of faith in starting over.  I feel like maybe I'm giving up on my marriage too soon, but I know I can't be happy in the rollercoaster life an alcoholic provides and I don't have faith that the drinking will stop and he'll get the mental health help he needs.  I've been let down too many times.  I need to let go of the control I tried to have over his health and happiness and the control I lost over my own life during that time.

THREE

TWO

ONE

Life with him was a rollercoaster.

That was it.  I was done.  I couldn't take his drinking anymore.  I moved out and now we're getting divorced.  He's still drinking and it's still really hard.  I love him but I can't be with him.  His drinking is a rollercoaster and I'm sick from the ride.

I am strong.

I was never a typical alcoholic's wife--not as codependent as I would have needed to be to stay with him one minute longer than I did.  We were together five and a half years when I moved out and were married for three.  I have a social work degree and have always been an independent woman--I would even proudly call myself a feminist.  I have a great job, even an extra part time job teaching at one of my life-long hobbies, I volunteer, and I have the best girlfriends a person could have. 

I didn't marry until I was 40 because I always said "I'd rather be single and happy than married and unhappy", so single I was until 40.  I owned my own house--my third property I'd owned--and I didn't need a man to maintain it.  My dad raised me knowing I could mow the lawn and run a snow blower, and to learn how to fix a lot of things (and if I didn't know how, I could always call a handyman).  My mom raised me to take care of myself.  She remembered her mom telling her "never have more kids than you can support on your own".  She told me that as a teenager and I internalized it to mean "always be sure you can take care of yourself" and "don't rely on a man to take care of you".  My parents are still happily married and they both taught me to be strong and to be true to myself, and that I can do anything.  And that's why I can't stay married to him. 

He is toxic.

I love him.  He has a good heart and we share similar traumatic experiences as kids.  He loves my pets and they've become "his", too.  He is funny and I always wanted a funny man.  When he's sober, he is honest and accountable.  When he's not sober, he's a disaster.  His "funny" is heart-wrenchingly hard to watch--the desperation of it.  When he drinks, he blames.  He blames my dad for breaking us up.  He blames me for being hard on his health.  He blames everything and everyone external for his health problems and for his drinking.  He drunk-texts me a string of texts unbelievably long saying "it's your dad's fault I have health problems and I drink".  Then he texts me an apology the next day and says he's going to get sober.  Then a week later, a month later, maybe a few days later, he drinks and starts it all again.

When he's sober, he's not always an easy man, but he's accountable.  He can't just "go with the flow" because he's too traumatized.  His parents divorced when he was young and then his mom was murdered by her boyfriend when she tried to leave him.  She was a recovering alcoholic and she met this man in AA--so in a way, you could say her drinking killed her.  My husband found her body and the body of the man who killed her--a murder-suicide.  He recalls the kind police officer who tried to "take his pain away", and he's still waiting for someone to take his pain away.  He's traumatized.  I know why and how, but I can't stay married to him.  He is toxic.

He has some frustrating health problems to be sure, but not the kind that should keep him from working, yet he barely works.  He's self employed but barely earns any money at it.  He has a college degree but he always finds a reason that he can't stay employed, and it's always because of someone else.  Usually it's because of his boss, but it's also been because of the schedule, or because they "ask him to lie", or they don't train him properly, or they don't give him the tools he needs to do his job, or the drive is too far.  Whatever the reason the end result is always that he barely works and I always supported him.

The drinking crept up slowly.

Sure, he could pound them down at a party, but it was just at a party, or a more "appropriate" time:  Saturday night when friends were coming over, at my company party, or at a Halloween party.  Five years in to our relationship his dad fell and broke his neck and two months later my husband was drinking at "inappropriate" times.  His dad recovered although a little worse for the wear, but he fell apart.  I'd wake up in the morning and he'd already been drinking, if not was already drunk.  It would be six o'clock at night and I'd been home from work for an hour, and I'd notice him slurring his words and carrying a coffee cup manically around the house with him.  An hour later he was drunk.  He'd visit me for dinner at my part time job and I'd smell liquor on his breath.  He was secret-drinking and he was drunk.  A lot.

He threatened divorce.

We didn't argue often because we could usually talk problems through pretty well and because I abhor conflict.  I was always the kid in my family that tried to smooth everything over and make things better when people fought.  It was just a few weeks after our third anniversary and we had a fight.  He didn't want to hear my side and instead he threatened divorce: "I will divorce you if you keep being hard on my health!".  THE D WORD.  In MY world, you don't say "the D word" unless you mean it.  You don't throw it around to intimidate me and to get your way.  That "D Word" was the beginning of the end.  I couldn't look at the situation with the denial as I had been doing.  I went to my best girlfriend's house for the weekend, looked online for an apartment, and within a week I was moving on.

Detox.

The weekend I moved out he drank so much for so many days straight that the neighbor brought him to the emergency room and he landed in the county detox facility.  She is a nurse and his blood pressure was so low that she was afraid he was going to die.  She saved his life.  He came home three days later and was inconsolably pissed off.  He wanted to try getting sober but he was raised without religion, being somewhere between agnostic and atheist, and he refused to get help from any agency whose program was founded on (or even mentioned) a "Higher Power".  He also wouldn't do an inpatient program and he wanted to try a program that was only a few hours a day.  These constraints left him without most of the programs available for recovery, but he found one and he tried it...which lasted exactly one and a half nights.  He had an anxiety attack from the intake questionnaire so he tried going again the next night, but the counselor "didn't understand" and he quit.

Counseling.

We tried marriage counseling for a few months, but the sessions were HIS sessions.  He had so much to process from his life, so much to talk about, so much to complain about and to convince the therapist about.  I went to every third or so session with him, but it was always his session with me just sitting in.  He was sober for a few months but eventually I said something in therapy that he didn't want to hear, so he stormed out of the session and got drunk the next day.

Since then he's had a month here and a few weeks there of sobriety, but nothing has really changed.