FindingErica

I gave my AH a good sum of money this past summer, to pay bills and he would have something to live on. I told myself I was doing the right thing by giving his his "share" of the money we had saved. Within a week, the money was gone, our joint acct which only he was using at that point, was in the negative. Suddenly I was getting loooooong texts apologizing, and how he loved me and was working hard on sobriety and turning back to God. This exchange went on for over an hour and he was working all these necessary expenses he needed into the conversation, until I realized between all the nicey nice, he was asking for 3k. I said "no". A couple days later Mr. Loving Recovery turned nasty and started sending me threatening texts asking for 3k. I realized that all along, he was just doing and saying whatever he needed to to get money. I held strong thanks to advice here, even though I was eaten up with guilt over him possibly having no money for food/gas. Then I saw these bank statements coming from a bank we had only used to pay our second mortgage and opened one out of curiosity. I need not have worried. Instead of paying all the bills, he had transfered some of the money from the joint into this account that he was now using. He was not starving or without gas. But he had no qualms about continuing to ask for large sums of money that would have left me and the kids scraping. He never once asked if I was able to care adequately for the kids.

The moral: please see what he has done, and be safe rather than sorry. It is less likely that a persons behavior will change dramatically and more likely that they will repeat a behavior, especially one that came with a high reward. It is hard to come out of denial. I had to have daily or more conversations with family members who had witnessed him first hand to understand who he really was. I think the person I imagined him to be either slowly ceased to exist or never really was.