A little background: I found out 2 weeks ago that my AH - who I thought was sober - had been secretly drinking for the last year. He drove drunk with our dog in the car. It was all a shock, because I had asked him point blank about his sobriety this past year and he bold face lied to me. I've been oscillating between anger and hopelessness. He is working with SMART and AA and says he has been sober since that night I found out two weeks ago, but I have trouble believing him.
As a step to help in his recovery, I told him I would remove my alcohol from the house. For years, I didn't keep a drop in our home, but since I thought he'd been sober for 12 years, and he insisted it didn't bother him, I started keeping a bottle of wine or a high end whiskey to drink with friends when they came over. The day I found out about my AH's drinking, I had just bought a bottle of wine. I stuffed it in my closet, out of sight.
Fast forward two weeks later, this past Saturday, my friend is coming over and my recovering AH (is the acronym RAH?) sleeps most of the day and misses the AA meeting. This makes me very angry, and in retaliation, I ask him if I can have wine with my friend. He is very upset with me asking him this (as he should be, now reflecting on it) and says that he doesn't care what I do. I proceed to share a bottle of wine with my friend in our living room. We were loud and obnoxious and I had fun.
At around 10am, my husband comes in, kicks us out of the living room, turns the TV up so loud we can't think. My friend leaves and I sleep in the guest bedroom with my box fan set on high to drown out the noise.
A huge fight ensues the next morning (yesterday) about how I'm not supporting him. He's right - what I did was so stupid.
It was like something snapped in me when he slept through his AA meeting. I told him that it scares me when he misses meetings, and he says that I don't have a right to tell him how to proceed with his recovery, because AA doesn't always work for him and he is trying to figure out the SMART program.
He says my actions almost messed up his 13 days of sobriety, and that he said he almost got drunk that night but instead got on SMART and worked his way through it.
I told him I knew it was wrong and that I was sorry. Things are horribly tense right now. I'm upset with myself but I'm still upset with him too. I'm normally a level headed, mature person. I usually do the right thing. The happenings in our living room yesterday felt like it should have been on an episode of Jenny Jones.
I feel like I was in shock for the first 10 days and now it's all becoming real and the emotions are pouring out of me and I can't stop them.
Why am I acting out like this? I just feel really tired and depressed. I am going to Al-Anon weekly. We are going to counseling weekly. I'm reading my Hope for Today book every day.
If he had cancer, I'd be handling this so much differently. I know alcoholism is a disease. How come I can't see it that way?
This sucks.
