New Beginnings
I've decided to start blogging about my journey in order to get me through this new path my life is taking. Since everyone of you here can probably relate, I wanted to copy my first post here.
It's long, but I needed to get a lot of this out.
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A few years ago I remembered telling my husband, “I pray for the day when I actually have enough strength to leave you.” I said this one morning to him after he had a particularly rough relapse and was apologizing for his actions from the night before.
As my husband pleaded forgiveness, he talked about how this time, “THIS TIME!” things would be different. Things were going to change. He was going to be a better man, a better husband. It was the same apology I’d heard hundreds of times before. The same hope of this new better life we’d have. The same damned diatribe. The words “I’m sorry” lost their meaning a long time ago.
So when I told him I prayed to find the strength to leave him, it wasn’t meant to be mean or to hurt him, it came from the depths of my heart. It was a plea for him to just let me out of this hell I was living in because I was too weak to release myself.
This man that I married, this man that I love, can be a monster. Alcohol, the love of his life, turns the kindest person I know into a gigantic ball of hate aimed directly at me, the source of every problem that he has ever faced. It’s a very real Jekyll/Hyde situation.
This man that I married, he lies to me constantly. He lies to me effortlessly. I can see straight through the lies almost every time. I watch him lie to my face and then I do nothing about it. If he’s drunk and I confront him in a lie, well I’ll invoke that monster I talked about. I don’t like it when the monster comes out to play.
I‘ve learned to edit myself around him. I learned how to spot his moods by the way he carried himself. I changed my life so as not to upset his. I learned ignore my feelings and just push them away because facing reality was too scary. I grew smaller and smaller until I nearly disappeared.
This man that I married is sick. He has a disease. He honestly doesn’t want to do the things he does. He has no choice. He is powerless to Alcohol’s control.
I used to think if I loved him enough I could change him. I learned that no amount of love has the power to change someone. I felt defeated. I felt like a failure. I spent my time trying to support my husband in any and every way possible, and his response was to tell me that I didn’t love him enough.
And then I lost more of myself and got even smaller. I started sinking.
And then I got help.
I started learning about setting boundaries, the problem for me was sticking to them. I struggled with this a lot. I set boundaries only to watch my husband walk right over them. It turns out that practice makes perfect with this I suppose. I set a big boundary, no drinking anymore period or he moves out. This wasn’t about trying to control his habits, it was that I truly could not take it anymore and it was now his choice, drink or stay.
I guess God does answer prayers, because he drank and I asked him to move out. I found the strength to leave him and with him gone from my house, I feel like I am finally starting to heal. This has not been easy, in fact it’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But for now, he’s out of the house but not out of my life. I am taking it one day at a time and finding myself again.