honeypig

This was the case w/XAH too. Eventually I learned to see, sometimes, when he was drunk, but the signs were so very, very subtle and no one who hadn't lived with him for 20+ years would have ever noticed. Until the night he ended up in the ER as the victim of a hit-and-run down at our mailbox, I never realized just how drunk he really was on a regular basis, as he didn't appear impaired, for the most part.

That night, based on his BAC in the ER and using a website to calculate backward to the time he claimed he had his last drink, I saw that his BAC at the time of the accident had to be nearly .20, enough to make a normal person need help walking/standing, enough to make a normal person vomit, enough to be blackout drunk. And I had no reason to believe he'd drunk any more than what was normal for him that night. It explained SO MUCH about what I'd been living in/with for so many years!

Using that same calculator, I realized that he would still have had a measurable level of alcohol in his blood at the time he would be going to work in the AM, but it would be much lower than his "happy" level. This explained a lot about his behavior in the mornings at home...

What you said here:
is exactly what I eventually realized. In the beginning, I felt SO STUPID--how on earth could I not know he was drinking like he was? As time went on and the pieces of the puzzle slowly came together, I came to understand that I probably hadn't seen him fully sober in many, many years. How could I possibly tell sober from drinking behavior when I hadn't seen him NOT drinking in at least a decade?

It did make things harder when I began to consider leaving the marriage--if he'd been peeing in the living room, vomiting on the lawn and slapping me around, well, the action to take would have been obvious. However, since none of this happened, was it "that bad?" I eventually decided that whether it was "that bad" or not, I wanted more than that from a marriage partner.