hi labug. You're always so good at having concise questions to my rambling.
I know I'm missing a lot of details here. After attending retrouvaille in september, I've totally backed off. The weekend was actually a wonderful experience, lots of vulnerability and sharing from him I never ever knew. But after 2 weeks he said he was too busy and needed a break from the dialoguing. Where we were having pretty regular communication, it basically stopped. And H moved to our area and dds and/or I have seen his car parked at the bar too often. His excuse was that he didn't have wifi at his apartment yet & was just using the internet. Lol. I even went in there one night late & subsequently got super drunk myself and we actually had a good time together. But then H had to bring me home and our dds were very upset. Upset with me for "encouraging dad to drink". H made promises to the girls about drinking then broke them, then he'd promise again & revise his promises, this went on for a couple weeks and we stopped talking and I started going to Alanon.
Then I sent my letter. The girls were very supportive but did not feel able to participate, but I did my best to convey how our lives were affected by his drinking. Especially on behalf of our dds, it was very painful to write and I'm sure it was worse for him to read. His response was 'I am choosing not to reply to your email. Nothing good will come of it.'
And I have effectively been cut off. I told him he couldn't drive the girls anymore when I saw his car at the bar starting at 11am for 3 days in a row. Beyond that, I don't enable, I don't have anything to do with him. So it feels very detached.
The drinking acceptance has been hard. Mostly because I have a hard time forgiving myself, it was there staring me in the face for the past 4+ years but I believed H's excuses and truly didn't realize the depth of the problem. He never parked himself at a bar all day or every night when he was home. It seems to have escalated to a frightening level.
Detachment feels hostile to me from my situation because, beyond doing everything I can do, the only way to further detach is to truly move on & shut the door on him. And I don't know if I can commit to that yet. It feels like I've done enough and I'm being hurt & punished by doing so. There's no co parenting, there's no relationship at all. So the 'detachement is neither kind nor unkind' is a hard concept to grasp because it feels pretty harsh. My actions were harsh, I struggle if it was really my place to intervene at all. It seems anti-db and I feel super guilty. The next level of detachement, for me, feels like telling him to f* off. And I can see how it'd be different in other households where the alcoholic is at home... one can set their boundaries and say that they don't condone but it's up to that person to make choices for themselves. And I can say that too, but that's kind of what I've been living for 18 months now. H definitely makes his own choices. It's really confusing to me.
That, mixed in with the 'extending frienship' and everything else I was trying to do for my marriage, makes me feel hopeless - which means I'm not detached. But I can't put the two + two together to get rid of my attached feelings, without filing for divorce, the f* you part, the true moving on.
The alanon meetings I've been to (and I've been to many different groups, I go one certain group regularly), seem to have a lot of wives in there with picture-perfect H's in long standing recovery. Like H's been sober for 15 years... or the children of alcoholics are prevelent too. I haven't found the 'my H left us 18 months ago & i'm a hot mess' examples yet. Most people seem to have their alcoholics in their lives except me. So it's hard to figure out how I fit in in that way.
You're always so good at having concise questions to my rambling. 