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.