Okay...I'm here.
Hi,
I am finally going to see if I can get some help. I've been married for over 11 years and we have four children. I homeschool the kids, just started raising chickens, work on a farm and will be raising two goats starting in October. My husband is going to start working towards his driver's license next month which he lost for three years after his second OUI. We were seperated once - for 9 months - and then he came back when we were moving into our brand new Habitat for Humanity home. It was soon - probably too soon - for me to take him back. He was still drinking but I didn't know that until two weeks later. Things are just so unpredictable.
About the only thing that is predictable is that if I tell someone things are good, we'll have a horrible day or night with him right after. People will ask me how things are going because it is no secret in our community that he left us, I went to the homeless shelter, was on welfare, continued to build the wonderful house we live in now and then we were back together.
When I told him I knew I couldn't make him stop drinking but that I needed him to agree not to drink in the home, we had the usual 2 weeks of that seeming to work and then the hidden alcohol in the house began.
I am tired. I am 32 now and feel like I'm prematurely aging with all this stress sometimes.
There have been some good things. He has held a job - the same job - for over a year now and the pay has been pretty good. He seems to care and comes home now and is just more dependable in general. It's just the fact that he NEEDS to drink and he does NOT see that as a problem. He even told me last night that he tries to drink what he NEEDS before he gets home so that he won't have to drink it here. And the whole point is for him not to be drunk around us - but he just doesn't get it.
The other "boundary" (not sure if I'm even using this term correctly) I tried to set was that I would never be in the car with him again after he had had a drink. More than twice he has tried to grab my steering wheel when angry and he has also scared all of us and done other horrible things in the car. It takes NOTHING to make him angry when he is drinking. I could tell him dinner's ready and he'll freak out.
I stumbled across a chart today about children of alcoholics and it described my four children so well it was scary.
I'm just ready to get some help but it needs to be somewhere the kids can come with me and I'm not sure if there's a meeting like that.
I went to al-anon once and it kinda freaked me out and I felt like I didn't belong.
Well I hope this was a good introduction. This was hard for me because I have been trying to say absolutely nothing that would bash my husband in anyway - just a new habit I wanted to start for myself. I feel that even if he doesn't do anything to deserve it, I want to be the kind of woman and wife that respects her husband. I don't want to talk behind his back! But I also had to tell you who I was and it felt good to let some of this stuff out.
Thanks,
Jen