Wisconsin

Hi all! It has been awhile since I have posted here, and while I have been reading and commenting all week, I wanted to re-introduce myself to the group.

I'm on my second marriage. My current husband (who I have known since middle school, but fell out of touch with for about 15 years) is an active alcoholic. He was in recovery when we got back in touch, started dating and got married. He relapsed shortly thereafter, and has been in the midst of this relapse for about three years. We have a 3-year old son together. I have two daughters from my first marriage.

I first found SR about 2 years ago, when I was struggling with the age-old issues: monitoring alcohol intake, total obsessiveness about what he was doing, co-dependency to the max. My AH worked out of town for several months when our son was a baby, and that made it easier to detach and make some progress in my own recovery. Then he left his skilled construction trade to take a factory job, so he could be home every night. He worked 2nd shift, which meant I saw very little of him, so I continued to make progress in my program. Things became very dicey with his factory late last winter, and it became clear by March that he would be laid off in the summer. March-June were the worst months of my entire life, and sent me straight back into extreme codie land.

After the layoff, he went back to his original trade, and traveled several hundred miles for a job. He has been gone for about 6 weeks, and I have made tremendous strides back in my own program. There are a lot of moving parts right now (his former "partner in crime" who has been sober for a whopping 4 weeks and keeps trying to give my AH a grand speech about recovery AND involve me in the whole drama; and my own financial issues related to my first marriage, which make it much more difficult to leave and support myself until early next year; and my own weird shame about the prospect of being twice divorced before age 40, for example), but for the most part I am staying focused on today, and focused on myself. I am making a lot of progress in accepting that this marriage just simply will not survive on its current path, and that one person alone cannot change its path. For me, that process involves inventorying myself, being honest with myself about what truly is acceptable and unacceptable, and setting my priorities based ONLY on myself and my children (and not my AH).

It's definitely a "progress, not perfection" kind of situation, but I am light years ahead of where I was two months ago. I'm glad to be back here to benefit from everyone's experiences and insight, and to hopefully offer support.