fml23, I appreciate your honest reaction.
What I write, in various posts on SR, is pretty much the basic message of an Al-Anon brochure titled: "Alcoholism: A Merry-Go-Round Called Denial." It describes the players in the alcoholic story, their repeated and forever looping behaviors--the alcoholic's tyranny over the family, the wife's resentments and attempts to control, the co-worker who covers for the alcoholic, etc.
I carried this brochure in my purse for a long, long time. I marked it up so much with underlinings that I had to get a replacement every so often. Every word of it proved true in my life with an alcoholic.
Since you have been to Al-Anon, and might continue, you might take a look at that brochure. And on here somewhere we have a condensed version of that brochure, perhaps in the stickies.
Anger is a very common reaction in the spouse who is fighting to keep her marriage and her family together as it is being destroyed by alcoholism. Eventually, we all reach a point of surrender, when all our attempts to control outcomes and others' behaviors fail miserably. We accept our powerlessness over alcohol and the alcoholic, we accept the reality of our situation. But reaching that point, which is the First of the Twelve Steps: "We admitted we were powerless over alcohol--that our lives had become unmanageable"--is always preceded by much pain, anger, and despair.
You are right, though: I do not know how your story will turn out. But I think that all of us who have lived with active addiction know that the story of any family being decimated by someone's alcoholism is, at its core, the same story. That is what the brochure from Al-Anon so eloquently captures.