A Little Epiphany - (and a newbie delurking)

[Dia]

re: Packing - yes, to move back up to his town. I don't know exactly how, when or where yet, but I'm moving back there.

I'll be posting our sitch in bits and pieces as I don't ever have a long block of time to tell the whole thing at once.

Alcohol - The first hint of an alcohol problem came during the tech stock debacle in 2001. H was working for a dotcom, had a great salary, great benes and was allowed to telecommute. We'd just had a baby and we decided to move from the Bay Area where the company was located down to the Inland Empire, where both of our families live. I was a SAHM at the time because the baby was so little. We sold our condo with the three bridge view, made a killing on it and bought a 4 bed house with a pool that was about double the size of our condo. His job seemed safe at the time, so we also furnished the house.

Then, at about noon on April 15th (tax day for you non-US folks), he got a call from his work saying "You're laid off effective immediately. Please work out the day." He only got 2 weeks severance and his stock options weren't vested yet so we couldn't sell them. By June, things were financially dire, so I walked into the local school district and took whatever job they would give me - which happened to be teaching Special Ed at a high-poverty school.

At first, he tried to be a stay-at-home dad, but his depression got so bad that I put the baby in daycare instead. He also started drinking. I don't know exactly how much or how often but I remember him asking me to get another bottle of brandy as I was prepping for a Costco run. The bottles at Costco are huge - 2 liters or so - and I knew I'd stocked a new one last time I was there only a week or two before. I mentioned that was a lot to be drinking in such a short time, and he agreed and said he'd ease up.

The unemployment dragged on for more than a year, and I know that's so hard for men. At one point, he was so discouraged that he stopped even looking for work and was afraid to tell me. The depression got bad enough that when I had to be maid of honor in my sister's wedding, I wasn't sure that he'd be able to get himself and our son there in time for the ceremony and my son was supposed to be the ring bearer. I had just given him an ultimatum about seeking help for the depression (not the kind of ultimatum that involved me leaving) when he got a job offer back in his hometown. He moved up there and stayed with family friends to start the job while I stayed behind with the baby to prep the house for rental or sale.

After about 3 months, the three of us moved into a house owned by his family, the house where he lived as a child, in fact. Everything seemed amazing at first. He and I were closer than ever, we'd always wanted to be back in his hometown, we could walk to the beach, etc.

After two years in the hellhole school, I decided to go back to grad school to finish my doctorate, so I was a SAHM mom again while working on my studies. It worked *really* well.

The real estate market was booming, but I was having these gut feelings that the bottom was about to drop out and we should sell the house down south before it hit. He wouldn't agree to the sale because his family made their money in real estate. Things were starting to unravel at this point, but I wasn't aware of it. Several things were going on.

One, my thyroid went on a permanent vacation, taking my adrenals along for the ride and anyone who's been down that road knows what it's like. Trying to get diagnosed and then properly treated was a nightmare all it's own. I had been managing the finances, but a thyroid disorder affects your brain (better now, thank you Armour thyroid!) and I knew I was not competent to manage the money at that time. He took over the finances, but resentfully and unwillingly.

I begged him for months to put together a budget because I had this bad feeling that we were hemorrhaging money on the house down south even with it rented but he didn't for over a year. By the time he did, we'd burned through our investments and about 30k on a home equity loan. Finally, he agreed to put the house on the market. We bought it at 259k, listed for 550k and sold it for 485k. It was just at the start of the whole real estate collapse here, and we were early enough that we should have made a killing. But we didn't. We made all of 8k profit on the house and he turned that around and paid off a credit card with it.

While that may sound like a responsible thing to do, we had agreed that the first thing we would do with the house money was repay what we'd had to take from the kidlet's college fund. when the house sold and the checks came in, I was in the final prep for my doctoral exams, and then taking the exams themselves. I asked him to please wait just two weeks for me to get clear of my exams before he distributed the money so that I could be a part of the process but he wouldn't. He paid off the credit card and didn't put one dime back in the kidlet's college account. This was devastating for me. I never would have agreed to take the money in the first place if I'd known he wouldn't put it back. It wasn't even our money in there. It was all gifts from aunts and grandparents. I felt like he had stolen from our son.

For his part, he says he asked me a couple of times to sit down and deal with the house proceeds but I just kept putting him off - so he handled it as he saw fit. Yes, I was putting it off, but only til my exams were over.

As you can imagine, this year of severe money stress, coming right after the unemployment and me with a severe health problem took a toll on our marriage. I was tired all the time from being sick, and mentally foggy as well. I think his drinking started back up during this time, but I'm not really sure. I do know that he withdrew, spending hours upon hours playing video games on his computer. If I tried to talk to him, he would often scowl at me for interrupting what he was doing. I also had to try to keep our son away from him during these times because he was snappish with him and felt he deserved his downtime. He wasn't doing much housework, and since I was sick, I wasn't either. We started having fights about this.

I'm trying to keep this post mostly about alcohol, tho, so back to that. It got to the point where he was drinking most nights of the week, probably 5 of 7 on average, and he was having up to 6 shots worth per night. I'd expressed more concerns about the drinking and he said he'd cut back but that usually only lasted a few days. By this time, we were in marriage counseling but he was lying to the marriage counselor (or in denial) about how much and how often he was drinking. He said he drank maybe one or two nights a week and only one or two drinks. I knew it was a lot more than that, so I started marking the bottles and that's how I know it was almost every night and around 6 shots worth each night.

There were a couple of issues related to the drinking that were extremely hard for me. One, of course, was the lying. He didn't think he had a problem - other than me - with drinking. He went to two or three AA meetings but he said they weren't his kind of people, that they all had problems like DUIs, losing their jobs, losing their licenses, totalling cars, etc., that he just didn't have. Inwardly, I was thinking "Yes you do. You're about to lose your wife and son over it."

Another issue that was hard for me was that he would come home from work, ignore me completely, take the supper I'd made into his office and eat at his computer, then stay on the computer til 11 pm or midnight. By then, feeling lonely, worthless and rejected, I'd have gone to bed. When he was done with the computer, he'd come to bed and wake me up for sex with alcohol on his breath. I was sexually assaulted in college by a date who had been drinking, so that combo was bad from the get-go. But aside from that, the whole thing just cemented for me that I was worthless, not worth spending time with, talking to or being affection with - but still good enough for a drunken f*** after he was done with all the stuff he'd rather have been doing for the night.

The alcohol also led to one of the big nails in the "I'm leaving" coffin. Some friends of mine from down south were going to a club on a Saturday night. It had been more than a year since I'd seen them, and I wanted to go. I didn't get out much, so he said he'd watch the kidlet and I should go and have a great time. The three of us got a hotel room so we wouldn't have to drive at 3 am. There was no drinking at all - I just didn't want to worry about falling asleep at the wheel.

I got home around noon the next day. H was asleep in bed and our son, who was 5 at the time and in kindergarten, was hiding under the dining table with my big sewing scissors and half of his hair missing. The places where he'd cut it were cut so close to the scalp that there was no way to cut the rest and camouflage it. We had to shave his whole head right down to the skin. Those were big, sharp scissors, and I'm amazed that the child didn't manage to slice his scalp or take off part of an ear. H had been up drinking and playing computer games until 6 am when the kidlet woke up. H told him he was going to bed and to call him if he needed anything. The kidlet was still in his clothes from the day before, and he hadn't eaten anything. H says the kid should have told him if he was hungry.

This is one of the areas where the marriage counselor and I didn't see eye-to-eye. She said that was a just a permissive, laissez faire parenting style which, while different from my own style, was ok and I'd need to accept it. My take was "No, that's neglect and child endangerment."

After that, I never left H alone with the kidlet for more than a few hours during the day on weekends while I studied.

Even tho he said AA wasn't for him, H did stop drinking, and he promised that he would consume zero alcohol as long as we were together. That sounds fine in words, but there was this undercurrent to it about how it was mostly to shut me up about the alcohol and he was going back to the bottle the minute I left.

Oy, not confidence-builders for me, hmmm?

Ok, so there's the alcohol part. I don't see any alcohol problems now. He's not completely abstinent, but I don't think that every single person who's ever had a problem with alcohol has to be completely abstinent. I think moderation is fine for some people. We shared a bottle of wine while I visited that I brought as a bit of a 180 and a peace offering. I knew he'd gone back to light, social drinking, so it's not like I brought wine to a hardcore alcoholic to sabotage his recovery.

Thanks for reading everyone. I appreciate the eyes even if you don't leave comments.