wywriter

For months I shadowed these boards, and often posted my long, frustrated and utterly hopeless posts about my AH, who seemed to be headed very quickly for an early grave. Since then, he found his bottom, which stopped (barely) short of death, and landed him in jail for two months for a DUI, with a few other charges piled on top. Since then, he's been going to AA nearly every day. He has two sponsors, and often chairs meetings. He has now been voted in as the secretary for his home group. Today (or, yesterday now, technically) he received his 6-month token. While some may say six months is far too little to know, it's very apparent to me that he is changed on a profound level. I've seen him dry before, and this definitely isn't it. I can talk to him now, and he talks to me openly about his past, about the seven dry years he had before deciding he was "past all that" and could drink again -- only to end up in the five-year drunken downhill slide that I have described in detail in the past from the codie side of things. Even if I bring up subjects he doesn't like, the angry outbursts that used to be so commonplace are gone. He takes care of the kids, does housework, cooks, he starts a new job next week (the first in two years), and money sits in plain sight until it's needed for gas, or baby formula, or cigarettes.

Life couldn't be better, but...oh yeah, there's always one of those...I find myself still struggling with a lot of things from the past. I told myself that time would help heal the wounds, and that I should just revel in the present and his living amends and my own efforts toward my health would help that to go away. For the most part it has. However, for these past months I've been struggling hard with some of the things he said and did while drunk, that I don't even think he knows he did considering the extreme level of his intoxication during those times. He has been indifferent to me on an intimate level, and most of the time I can assure myself that he's focusing on his recovery, we lead hectic lives of self-employment and young children, etc. etc. But sometimes the past name-calling, the violence, the belittling and all the other things that are so out-of-character for him when there's no bottle involved comes bubbling up. I've spent several nights wondering what, if anything, I can discuss with him that might be constructive.

Thankfully, I don't feel that anything I say or do will threaten his sobriety or any such concerns that I see from a lot of people with SOs new to recovery, but I don't want to hurt him for something that could just be something I need to deal with myself. I feel like I need to hear him tell me which things he really meant and which he didn't mean, and I haven't yet found a way to not need it. I try so hard to rely only on myself for my own happiness, but when I'm alone in my thoughts I still hear his drunken insults and am still living with the reality of feeling more like his best friend or even sibling, and not his wife. I've mentioned the eight-month lack of any hint of intimate talk or behavior (keeping it PG here), and he just tells me I'm making a big deal out of nothing. It's not nothing to me...it's important, and mostly I just want to know it's not because of something wrong with me, or maybe now that he's sober he realizes he isn't quite as fond of me as he thought.

Wow, that was long...to sum up, I'd love to hear from anyone who would like to share some of their experiences in the first months or years in recovery. Is this just normal, and I really am being hyper-hormonal and overreacting? I really don't know why it matters so much to me now after so much time he spent passed out or mean, except that maybe now I can't point to any other problems except myself.