How I Became an Addicts Wife
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Join Date: Aug 2014
Location: Columbus, IN
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How I Became an Addicts Wife
I came into this world into an already dysfunctional family. Although my conception was planned, my parents were in no shape to actually be parents. My mom already had my sister when she was 16. My dad wasn’t her dad, but he treated her as if he was. He still refers to us as his daughters (my sister has never referred to him as her dad). My dad was a chronic alcoholic. He was never home and when he did come home he was a sloppy drunk, oftentimes beating my mom in the other room, while my sister and I laid in bed sobbing. Even before I turned 5 I remember hating the world I was brought into.
My mom left my dad when I was 5, we immediately moved in with the guy she had been having an affair with. It didn’t take long before his abuse began too. Although he wasn’t an addict, he was a monster. He was abusive to my mom, starting from the beginning, oftentimes beating her while she was pregnant with my brother and continued to do so the entire rest of their marriage. He was abusive to me as well, mostly emotional but at times physical as well. I recall one time when I got in the pool and I noticed a full handprint on me. He didn’t miss a beat telling me I was stupid or ugly or ignorant. I had made a comment in elementary school to one of my teachers, just a statement of sorts rolling my eyes about a happy family or whatever, they reported it to the counselors and I immediately was taken down to the counselors office. I don’t recall what I said, but it was my first moment of someone reaching out to try and help me. My mom was too consumed in everything going on her life to understand the impact that it was having on me and my siblings. Instead of being a 10 year old girl I was a mother to my brother, protecting him from the screaming, running to get help when I thought my mom was going to be killed and living in fear that with every move I made, it was going to be my last.
All the while this was happening, my mom was still sending me every other weekend with my dad and there I received the same amount of abuse, emotional and physical. I begged my mom not to make me go, but I think she just wanted me away, a break from me, from having the responsibility.
Well once again my mom was having another affair and once again we were moving. This next guy wasn’t abusive, wasn’t an addict, he really was my mom’s savior, but with that came her obsession with him and her ignorance of life outside his world. I left her 2nd marriage with a boatload of emotional problems, being told I was stupid every day of my life for the last 5 years, during my elementary school years, left a toll on my self-esteem.
I ended up starting to date some guy in middle school and dated him until the end of my high school. It was an extremely dysfunctional relationship. I was an emotional basketcase. I started cutting myself in high school and for those that don’t understand the cutting, it feels better to cause the pain to yourself than to feel the pain others are putting in your life.
On several occasions I took over the counter medication to try and overdose. I was half serious about it at times and half not. One time I took about 25 Tylenol, ended up in the emergency room. Another time I took about 10 sleeping pills, praying to not wake up. Well I didn’t wake up for two days. My parents just thought I was sick, they never knew what I had taken.
So that takes me to the end of high school, when I met my husband, the man of my dreams, or so I thought. He was a friend of my brothers, popular in school, good looking, in shape. What wasn’t there to like about him? He was the supervisor of the volleyball program and I was playing in the summer league. I would try and show off for him, which wasn’t necessary because he already had an eye on me. He invited me to his 21st birthday party and I went. He got sloppy drunk, puked everywhere and the next day he didn’t even remember me being there. I should have known then.
We dated all summer, knowing that he had to go back to Florida to finish out a program that he had started the year before at a technical school. We fell hard for each other that summer. We spent most days and nights in his room, drinking, playing games, running around, just having an absolute blast. At the end of the summer he went back to Florida and I went to college. We spent the next 9-10 months talking on the phone every day. Towards the end of the school year, he started to push away. Said he needed a break. That same weekend he got his first DUI.
So he heads back home, to me, only for him to have lost his license and needed me to drive him everywhere. We moved in together in our first apartment. Not long afterwards, I had to have surgery for an STD he had passed to me. Should have known then too. A couple of months later I had my wisdom teeth taken out, my first recollection of him taking pain pills. I just remember having a whole bottle, the codeine making me sick and the next thing I know the whole bottle is gone.
In the year that we lived at that apartment he would go on frequent alcohol binges. He was drinking whisky constantly and he was such a mean drunk. It was almost guaranteed every week we were arguing about the alcohol. I wanted no part of drinking, had no desire to drink or to have it in our home, but he couldn’t stop. He would leave, not come home, be out God only knows where and he would come home whenever he sobered up enough to get back home.
After a year in the apartment we got our own house. Nothing changed there either. He continued to drink, then the pills came and holy hell when the pills came, they came fast. I would find a sandwich bag filled up an inch with pills. He would try to hide them, but he wasn’t ever sober enough to really understand that he wasn’t doing a good job hiding them. Every time I would flush them down the toilet and over and over again I would find more. Then there was trying to prevent him from driving. I would have to hide his keys and sleep with them in my hand to keep him from driving. The arguments fighting over the keys got severe at times. All the fights got severe. The screaming, yelling, pushing, it all escalated.
We got engaged in 2008, what was I thinking? We got married a year later and even weeks before the wedding we talked about calling it off because things just weren’t working. We walked down the aisle, but the best was only yet to come. Our honeymoon was in Cancun. Not a place to take a drug addict alcoholic, especially when the drinks are free. I remember the first day that we were there, my husband was already talking to the concierge to find drugs. The entire week was torture. One day he left for almost the whole day, taking a bus to downtown by himself to try and get drugs at some drugstore. Scary ****. Even to this day he won’t talk about our honeymoon. The best night though was when we went out to a club, my husband goes to the bathroom and never comes back. Luckily we were there with several guests from our hotel, one couple which offered to pay for my ride back to the hotel. I had no idea where my husband was. Where he went, who he was with, whether he was alive. Somehow, he had made it back to the hotel. He had left me in downtown Cancun by myself with no cell phone, no money, no id, nothing. He told me the people just kicked him out, he didn’t understand why. Well he had been trying to buy drugs in the bathroom. Perfect.
After that honeymoon trip, I finally said I have had enough. I told him he had to get his **** together or I was leaving. He spent the next couple of months trying to detox. It was an awful experience I watched him go through. He literally had the shakes, went white as a ghost, lost a ton of weight, just awful. Well it didn’t take long before he was back on everything.
We got pregnant with our first child in 2011. He once again decided it was time to get clean. You think? That too didn’t last. He used the whole time I was pregnant although he told me he didn’t.
So over the next couple of years he continued to use, we continued to have problems. We went to marriage counseling religiously, but of course it wasn’t going to work because the addictions were in the way. Nothing could be fixed until the addiction was removed from the equation. So I finally said you have to do something different. He got put on Suboxine in 2012. This was after I kicked him out several times, which left me being a single mom. The Suboxine seemed to tame things down, but the drinking never stopped.
I got pregnant again this year and finally said you have to stop everything. You have to get off the Suboxine, you have to give up the drinking, everything. Well that didn’t work out so well. He had me start to control the Suboxine, but he would steal them from me, lie about how much he took and we continued to argue. Just a week before we were set to move from our house, he got his second DUI. While he was still in jail, I went to the bank, pulled out all the money and left (at least for the day). We really didn’t talk about it because he knew I was pissed and there wasn’t anything to really say. We were getting ready to move, had already agreed to each go to our parents house while we were looking for another, so we were just ready to get away from each other.
He started going to meetings, started going to church and really went head over heels into achieving sobriety (or so I thought). A month later I got into an argument with my mom because she wanted me to leave him and I wasn’t going to have someone tell me what I needed to do when I’m 8 months pregnant, so I went to go stay with him at his parents. Then became the drug abuse again. He started doing the back door deals on the pills and started racking up hundreds of dollars a week in drug debt. Just last week he spent my whole check on drug debts. I am now 9 months pregnant, have a 3 year old son, a house we are renovating and a husband doing drug deals.
I went yesterday and had a counseling session with a former addict to get his perspective and he gave great insight into making a decision on leaving. He said that only I can make the decision as to what is best for me and my family. It’s not that I don’t want to leave because I do, but I also know that I’m 1 week away today from having our 2nd child and while everyone can offer up the advice for me to leave, no one else is going to be with me through the middle of the night taking care of our newborn. He is a great dad when he is home and clean, but I also know that it has to be all or nothing. I have already advised him that if he doesn’t continue with his program, attend meetings, attend church, eliminate all the addicts and friends in his life, then I am going to file for divorce and ask for sole custody with him having supervised parenting time (I work at an attorney’s office and have kept enough evidence to warrant all of this).
I love my husband, but he isn’t the same person anymore. I see glimpses of him from time to time, but for the majority of the time it just isn’t him. As much as I want him to change and come back to us, I don’t know that he will. The only positive that I see is that he wants to be clean. He says that almost every day, however, I have heard that before, as we all have.
My mom left my dad when I was 5, we immediately moved in with the guy she had been having an affair with. It didn’t take long before his abuse began too. Although he wasn’t an addict, he was a monster. He was abusive to my mom, starting from the beginning, oftentimes beating her while she was pregnant with my brother and continued to do so the entire rest of their marriage. He was abusive to me as well, mostly emotional but at times physical as well. I recall one time when I got in the pool and I noticed a full handprint on me. He didn’t miss a beat telling me I was stupid or ugly or ignorant. I had made a comment in elementary school to one of my teachers, just a statement of sorts rolling my eyes about a happy family or whatever, they reported it to the counselors and I immediately was taken down to the counselors office. I don’t recall what I said, but it was my first moment of someone reaching out to try and help me. My mom was too consumed in everything going on her life to understand the impact that it was having on me and my siblings. Instead of being a 10 year old girl I was a mother to my brother, protecting him from the screaming, running to get help when I thought my mom was going to be killed and living in fear that with every move I made, it was going to be my last.
All the while this was happening, my mom was still sending me every other weekend with my dad and there I received the same amount of abuse, emotional and physical. I begged my mom not to make me go, but I think she just wanted me away, a break from me, from having the responsibility.
Well once again my mom was having another affair and once again we were moving. This next guy wasn’t abusive, wasn’t an addict, he really was my mom’s savior, but with that came her obsession with him and her ignorance of life outside his world. I left her 2nd marriage with a boatload of emotional problems, being told I was stupid every day of my life for the last 5 years, during my elementary school years, left a toll on my self-esteem.
I ended up starting to date some guy in middle school and dated him until the end of my high school. It was an extremely dysfunctional relationship. I was an emotional basketcase. I started cutting myself in high school and for those that don’t understand the cutting, it feels better to cause the pain to yourself than to feel the pain others are putting in your life.
On several occasions I took over the counter medication to try and overdose. I was half serious about it at times and half not. One time I took about 25 Tylenol, ended up in the emergency room. Another time I took about 10 sleeping pills, praying to not wake up. Well I didn’t wake up for two days. My parents just thought I was sick, they never knew what I had taken.
So that takes me to the end of high school, when I met my husband, the man of my dreams, or so I thought. He was a friend of my brothers, popular in school, good looking, in shape. What wasn’t there to like about him? He was the supervisor of the volleyball program and I was playing in the summer league. I would try and show off for him, which wasn’t necessary because he already had an eye on me. He invited me to his 21st birthday party and I went. He got sloppy drunk, puked everywhere and the next day he didn’t even remember me being there. I should have known then.
We dated all summer, knowing that he had to go back to Florida to finish out a program that he had started the year before at a technical school. We fell hard for each other that summer. We spent most days and nights in his room, drinking, playing games, running around, just having an absolute blast. At the end of the summer he went back to Florida and I went to college. We spent the next 9-10 months talking on the phone every day. Towards the end of the school year, he started to push away. Said he needed a break. That same weekend he got his first DUI.
So he heads back home, to me, only for him to have lost his license and needed me to drive him everywhere. We moved in together in our first apartment. Not long afterwards, I had to have surgery for an STD he had passed to me. Should have known then too. A couple of months later I had my wisdom teeth taken out, my first recollection of him taking pain pills. I just remember having a whole bottle, the codeine making me sick and the next thing I know the whole bottle is gone.
In the year that we lived at that apartment he would go on frequent alcohol binges. He was drinking whisky constantly and he was such a mean drunk. It was almost guaranteed every week we were arguing about the alcohol. I wanted no part of drinking, had no desire to drink or to have it in our home, but he couldn’t stop. He would leave, not come home, be out God only knows where and he would come home whenever he sobered up enough to get back home.
After a year in the apartment we got our own house. Nothing changed there either. He continued to drink, then the pills came and holy hell when the pills came, they came fast. I would find a sandwich bag filled up an inch with pills. He would try to hide them, but he wasn’t ever sober enough to really understand that he wasn’t doing a good job hiding them. Every time I would flush them down the toilet and over and over again I would find more. Then there was trying to prevent him from driving. I would have to hide his keys and sleep with them in my hand to keep him from driving. The arguments fighting over the keys got severe at times. All the fights got severe. The screaming, yelling, pushing, it all escalated.
We got engaged in 2008, what was I thinking? We got married a year later and even weeks before the wedding we talked about calling it off because things just weren’t working. We walked down the aisle, but the best was only yet to come. Our honeymoon was in Cancun. Not a place to take a drug addict alcoholic, especially when the drinks are free. I remember the first day that we were there, my husband was already talking to the concierge to find drugs. The entire week was torture. One day he left for almost the whole day, taking a bus to downtown by himself to try and get drugs at some drugstore. Scary ****. Even to this day he won’t talk about our honeymoon. The best night though was when we went out to a club, my husband goes to the bathroom and never comes back. Luckily we were there with several guests from our hotel, one couple which offered to pay for my ride back to the hotel. I had no idea where my husband was. Where he went, who he was with, whether he was alive. Somehow, he had made it back to the hotel. He had left me in downtown Cancun by myself with no cell phone, no money, no id, nothing. He told me the people just kicked him out, he didn’t understand why. Well he had been trying to buy drugs in the bathroom. Perfect.
After that honeymoon trip, I finally said I have had enough. I told him he had to get his **** together or I was leaving. He spent the next couple of months trying to detox. It was an awful experience I watched him go through. He literally had the shakes, went white as a ghost, lost a ton of weight, just awful. Well it didn’t take long before he was back on everything.
We got pregnant with our first child in 2011. He once again decided it was time to get clean. You think? That too didn’t last. He used the whole time I was pregnant although he told me he didn’t.
So over the next couple of years he continued to use, we continued to have problems. We went to marriage counseling religiously, but of course it wasn’t going to work because the addictions were in the way. Nothing could be fixed until the addiction was removed from the equation. So I finally said you have to do something different. He got put on Suboxine in 2012. This was after I kicked him out several times, which left me being a single mom. The Suboxine seemed to tame things down, but the drinking never stopped.
I got pregnant again this year and finally said you have to stop everything. You have to get off the Suboxine, you have to give up the drinking, everything. Well that didn’t work out so well. He had me start to control the Suboxine, but he would steal them from me, lie about how much he took and we continued to argue. Just a week before we were set to move from our house, he got his second DUI. While he was still in jail, I went to the bank, pulled out all the money and left (at least for the day). We really didn’t talk about it because he knew I was pissed and there wasn’t anything to really say. We were getting ready to move, had already agreed to each go to our parents house while we were looking for another, so we were just ready to get away from each other.
He started going to meetings, started going to church and really went head over heels into achieving sobriety (or so I thought). A month later I got into an argument with my mom because she wanted me to leave him and I wasn’t going to have someone tell me what I needed to do when I’m 8 months pregnant, so I went to go stay with him at his parents. Then became the drug abuse again. He started doing the back door deals on the pills and started racking up hundreds of dollars a week in drug debt. Just last week he spent my whole check on drug debts. I am now 9 months pregnant, have a 3 year old son, a house we are renovating and a husband doing drug deals.
I went yesterday and had a counseling session with a former addict to get his perspective and he gave great insight into making a decision on leaving. He said that only I can make the decision as to what is best for me and my family. It’s not that I don’t want to leave because I do, but I also know that I’m 1 week away today from having our 2nd child and while everyone can offer up the advice for me to leave, no one else is going to be with me through the middle of the night taking care of our newborn. He is a great dad when he is home and clean, but I also know that it has to be all or nothing. I have already advised him that if he doesn’t continue with his program, attend meetings, attend church, eliminate all the addicts and friends in his life, then I am going to file for divorce and ask for sole custody with him having supervised parenting time (I work at an attorney’s office and have kept enough evidence to warrant all of this).
I love my husband, but he isn’t the same person anymore. I see glimpses of him from time to time, but for the majority of the time it just isn’t him. As much as I want him to change and come back to us, I don’t know that he will. The only positive that I see is that he wants to be clean. He says that almost every day, however, I have heard that before, as we all have.
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