My high functioning AH left me and our newborn
Newbie here, and my head is still spinning. In March my AH left me.
We've been married for 10 years, together for 15. We just bought our dream house in Sept. We never wanted children but last year HE changed his mind and convinced me.
He always drank, but I had a really great ability to sweep everything under the rug, believe lies, and justify his behaviors. So when he left me, and said he's been unhappy for years, and he drinks because I'm a terrible wife, I was SHOCKED. We had always been SO happy.
Since then, I've been doing some serious self-reflection. I started attending AlAnon. I made a list of the insane things he's done that I read everytime I start to feel like maybe it WAS all my fault.
A small sample of the list: hidden bottles, friends saying they saw him stop at bars and pay cash (so I couldn't trace it), never allowing me to go out with him and his "bar friends" because he wanted his own group of friends, the time I found eyeliner that wasn't mine in his, the argument we got in because he didn't want the car seat in his car, or how disinterested he was in feeling the baby kick when I was pregnant, how drunk he was the night my water broke.
I made excuses for everyone of those things. And I believed his lies for years. What I can't understand is why did HE decide he wanted to have a baby? He promised to cut back on drinking, and to quit going to the bars all the time once she got here. And after she was born he was AMAZING with her for the first two months. But then one night he got loaded and drove and I told him that he couldn't do that anymore because we have a baby now, and I would do anything to protect her. He looked me with cold dead eyes and said "What are you gonna do about it." Then a week later, the day he went back to work after paternity leave, he drank an entire 5th and dropped the D Bomb.