My Story - Separated 1 Month

[bluMorn]

Here is my situation. We've been married 13 years (actually, 13 years on May 1 this year). The past two years have been bad; we had not been intimate in 2 years until March this year. He has major alcohol/substance abuse problems, which were under control for a while, then in the past two years they got really bad. In January, he went on an antidepressant called Effexor for anxiety, and that seemed to trigger something in him. Drinking got way worse, he was up all night long playing pool on the phone (he never did this before, hated phone games), and stumbling around like a zombie all hours of the night cooking, urinating on himself, and generally doing strange things. One morning there was powdered sugar all over the place and he had no idea how that happened. In mid-February, he started texting a girl at work way too much. I found this out because on the night of 3/3, he went out to a bar and didn’t come home. I found the evidence of the texting while trying to find him. I don’t know what was in the texts, but he insists it wasn’t a thing and he never cheated on me. He finally stumbled in, still obviously drunk, slept for an hour and went to work. We had a fight that evening when he came home from work, and he said that he thought we should live separately for a while, because he no longer thought we were ‘in love’ and we needed to see if we’d miss each other, and started looking for apartments. We have 3 kids, one of mine (D18) that he adopted (which over the past couple of years has been an absolute hellion, and she and H have particularly butted heads), and 2 of his (D19 & S15). His have lived mostly with their mothers, and the 19 year old is now on her own, but have lived with us on and off over the years. I feel like as much of a mom to his as I do my own.
Over the month of March, it was a roller coaster. I had actually been pushing him away a lot up until then, and thought that I did want him gone, but when faced with him actually leaving, I wasn’t sure. We had ups and downs, some days hanging out like old times, sometimes crying fits from me and arguments, not much emotion from him (except anger). We were intimate 3 times in March. He still moved out on 4/3, into an apartment with his cousin and her son (she was facing foreclosure in Louisiana and needed a place to go, and had deposit money). She is an alcoholic too, so I don’t see much success happening with the apartment long term. He is from Louisiana, but didn’t choose to go live at her place to help her save her house; he stayed here in Alabama, about 15 minutes from me.
Since then, we haven’t had much contact. He picks up mail here and stuff like that about once a week. I read so much advice about no contact and stuff like that, and it made a lot of sense. I certainly accomplished nothing throughout March with all my contact. Up until 4/14, I was bawling crying pretty much every day, but I think I’m getting better now. I went to an Al-Anon meeting, and I’ve been just trying to work on myself, my school (I’m one semester away from a Masters), and do things that make me happy. I’m not interested in dating anyone as long as I am still married. Don’t know about him. I am cheerful and upbeat whenever we talk, and he does seem to respond to that.
I really don’t want to end the marriage, but I’m still kind of on the fence because of his issues. He would have to show improvement there – he was sober for 2 years a few years ago, and our relationship was wonderful. I miss that a lot. I think this may be a MLC (he’s about to be 42, I’m about to be 40) in addition to a drug/alcohol episode. I do know there are things that I have to change, not just to be happy with him if we do reconcile, but to be happy in general and able to have a good relationship with anyone in the future. I should be getting the DR book tomorrow, and the DB book next week or so from Amazon, and I’ve really been trying to learn from this situation.