“It works if you work it, so keep coming
back!” This mantra may not mean anything to most people, but for friends of
Bill W., it is the one sentence that puts life into perspective and helps to
keep things on track.
I met my husband over 13 years ago. We were in a bar on a
Saturday afternoon, he came in to get drunk before a movie, my friend and I had
just finished our restaurant lunch shifts. Our life together began slowly, but always
had an undercurrent running through it. No matter where we went or what we did,
we were drunk or high.
I have been to several AA meetings and several more
Al-Anon meetings. This is a part of life when you are married to an alcoholic
or an addict. Sonny identifies as an alcoholic, but his substance abuse problem
is more than just an afterthought. I’m what addicts refer to as a “normie”. I
like to drink but when the party is over, the bottle goes back in the cabinet.
I didn’t realize Sonny was an alcoholic when I met him.
Even when we were dating and spent more time under the influence than sober it
never dawned on me that he might have a problem. As time passed and our jobs
became less a way to pay for our weekend activities and evolved into careers, I
still didn’t notice that his drinking had an urgency to it that no one else’s
did. We dated for five years before we married, and it wasn’t until the first
time our lives were completely upended that I began to recognize our problem.
Sonny worked for a global shipping company as a truck
driver. One night about a month after we were married, he attended a bachelor
party with some of his coworkers. He opted to drive home rather than spend the
night with his buddies. It was about 2am when I got the phone call from jail
telling me that he’d gotten a DUI. When you make your living as a truck driver,
you lose your job when you are arrested for a DUI, whether you are working at
the time or not. Our well-being and future plans went down the toilet with the
loss of his job. Although I made a decent living, he was expected to make six
figures within a few years and I couldn’t come close to that at the time. This
was the first time I was advised to divorce him. I stayed.
It was a year before Sonny admitted his problem, and it
took everything I had to not walk out the door while he struggled with his
addictions. I had taken a vow and felt I hadn’t worked hard enough to justify
calling it quits. I had several panic attacks before I ended up in the
emergency room and began getting treatment for an anxiety disorder to learn how
to cope with living life with an active addict and alcoholic.
When he decided it was time to take control of his life,
he jumped in with both feet. He attended AA meetings every night for six
months. I arranged my life around his needs and let him work his program. He couldn’t
hold a full-time job without losing himself and his sobriety, so he worked at a
coffee shop chain while I supported us. Once again, I was advised to divorce
him and start my life over without the drama Sonny brought to it.
Sobriety treated both of us well. Sonny parlayed his
part-time job into a secondary position as he started his own company. I got
pregnant and we had our first child. I had always planned on moving from
California back to Illinois when our family began to grow. Sonny agreed to move
and procured a job to support us while I cashed in my breadwinner status to
become a stay at home mom. We packed up our growing family, and moved in with
my parents while we looked for a house.
It only took three months for Sonny to lose his new job. The
“D” word came back to haunt me. He was struggling with his sobriety without his
AA group to support him through every day difficulties, and he couldn’t
function at work. I had no job, so he found another part-time position that he
was able to parlay into a substantial full-time position and we found an
apartment. Life seemed to become less of a challenge and began to look positive.
He got his dream job and for six months we didn’t have to struggle. Then, he
went to the doctor for a problem with his knee. They found a heart problem, and
three weeks before Christmas, at 35, he had emergency open-heart surgery to
repair it.
Once again, our life fell apart. He had only been at his
dream job for about eight months, and they fired him due to the amount of time
he missed. We were again without income, although I was working part time as a
bartender to make ends meet. He was too ill to care for our son and my income
wasn’t enough to support us. He started taking pain medication to help his
recovery and our addiction nightmare began to creep back in.
Sonny managed to recover and get his dream job back, but
the road was paved with little yellow pills. It didn’t seem like a problem at
first, but then suddenly it was. I learned from my therapist and Al-Anon that
you can’t take responsibility for someone else’s addiction, so I did what I
could to shield our son from his mood swings and crossed my fingers that he’d
get himself together. For the first time
in our relationship, I started to consider the possibility of divorce. We
slowly pieced our life together and managed to buy our first home. We were
tentatively happy, but the pall of addiction added bitterness to each
milestone.
Last year, the day before Father’s Day, Sonny needed to
run to the grocery store and wrapped the car he was driving around a light
pole. For the first week in the hospital we weren’t sure if he would ever come
home. After 21 days, he finally did. The next six months were the hardest in
our lives together. He lost his dream job-again-this time for good. His
addiction started getting worse, he began to slip into a downward spiral. We
lost our new house. He refused to look for a job. I returned to a full-time job
and wondered if all the effort this relationship needs was worth it. Relationships
should take effort, but they shouldn’t be like climbing Mount Everest in thong
sandals. There comes a time when you have to say that enough is enough.
I don’t know when that time will come.
