Thanks Silly Squirrel (btw, I love your user name-- my D5's favorite book is Scardey Squirrel so your name made me think of that).
It's odd how it never occurred to me before now that just as our AH's are all so similar (or AW's) so too are the charming families they came from.
More about AH's family: oldest sibling is a girl- she's as narcissistic and passive aggressive as they come. she was nice to me until the day we got engaged and has spent everyday since then finding ways to try and make me the bad guy in her family's eyes. when we told the inlaws i was pregnant with D5, my mil's first remark upon hearing this was "oh, this will be hard for sil (39 at the time) since she's always hoped to marry and have children". YUP. sil now has a son who is 1 1/2- she's unmarried and the father wants nothing to do with her and is fighting for custody. she's a real gem. D5 and D3 have been treated like they don't exist since he was born (which is fine by me but confusing to them when we are all together).
bil is 2 yrs older than AH. he too is an A. he is on disability for anxiety and brags about how he "cheats" the system. he judges the world without mercy-- everyone in AA are losers, racial minorities are every slur imaginable, he's as extreme with political views as he is with the rest of his views, he calls H only when he wants a. money or b. someone to drink with him (and tells H he will have to pay) or c. wants to vent and be told he is right to feel he is a victim of the world. My H is so desperate for any relationship with his brother that he leaps and does whatever his brother says. Over the years this has meant breaking promises to his children and I to bail at the last minute to go "help" his brother (code for going out to drink together) among other things. BIL's parents pay for him to live in a hotel full time, he is not expected to try and work, go to T, he has a credit card paid for my his parents that he uses to expand his stereo equipment collection... He lives an unrealistic, immature life and thinks that at 40+ he is living the way most adults do. Anything that befalls him is someone or something else's fault. This winter I made the mistake of asking him to join me in a family meeting to talk to AH about our concerns. He spent weeks texting and calling me obsessively telling me that I am uneducated, know nothing about alcoholism or alcoholics and the only person qualified to be H's sponsor (I wasn't suggesting I be his sponsor btw) was him. BIL who recently said "Charlie Sheen is right - AA is a cult" believes that he is THE single most knowledgeable person in the universe on alcoholism and can spew what he "should" do like the best of them. But his actions and his life speak to something very different. His mother, my mil, listens to the quacking and belives that quacking=action and tries hard to tell me (whether I've asked or not) that bil is really healthy. SURE!!!!!
My AH is the youngest of 3. He is the "golden child". His role in the family was as the one who never caused trouble. He excelled in sports and academics but got credit for neither. He felt like an outcast at school, kept the family secret and finally fell in with a red neck crew of kids in high school and starting drinking/smoking cigarettes and pot with them and with those substances in him "the real him" (as he says) was able to come through. College was spent high and drunk and he managed to play D2 soccer and do well academically. He's always maintained a different professional image/public image than his private one. He's told me he is desperate for the attention/affection he never got as a kid and that as a wife it is my "job" to make him feel good about himself... His family is toxic to him and he won't ever see it and it's sad.
I tried to convince him of this for years and now I'm giving up. Either he'll see it and want to ask for help or he won't and he'll become his father; an A who at 65 is a shell of a man, has every medical condition known to man, had a diabetic stroke this fall (due to drinking but MIL of course says it's bc of diabetes that has nothing to do with his alcoholism) and is wasting away in front of everyone's eyes. Can't really talk, can't really hear, is in chronic pain and is still drinking bc though he can't drive, MIL gets him vodka and says that since it's too late to stop it, the last "loving thing" she can do is "provide him something to take away the pain".
Quite a family eh? And I bet that this story is like so many of us on here...