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.
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