Jenelle

Jenelle

“To My Husband,

There was a time when I could have opened this document and filled the pages with anger, sadness, and disappointment 1000 times over. There are so many examples of how your drinking has impacted our lives. But surprisingly, to me, I am struggling to find the emotion that should be behind them. I feel empty and detached, having untangled myself from a relationship that was hijacked by alcohol and robbed of all of those foundations that have to be present for two people to thrive: trust, honesty, presence. You never noticed the untangling was happening because you were never sober.

The thing we always had was love. I never doubted how much you loved me. In turn, I think it took you some time to truly believe that I loved you, that you were worth loving, that I was your best friend, your number one supporter, and that you were loved and adored and respected by our kids. But it wasn’t enough.

Why wasn’t it enough?

It should have been enough!

Every time you poured a drink, I felt that you were choosing it over me, over us. I am not an addict and I don’t pretend to understand the overwhelming desire you would wake up with every morning to find a drink. But it’s hard to separate my head and heart, and every day that you drank, I felt betrayed that you didn’t fight hard, or at all, that you didn’t fight for us or, even worse, you didn’t fight for you!

I have literally lost count of the number of times I tried to get you help, to go to meetings, to get a sponsor, to talk to a counselor, to go to CADDS, to go to the Dr. But you always managed to convince yourself that you had it under control, that you were different from those others at AA, that you didn’t need help, that you didn’t have a problem, that you were “an island”. For such a smart man, I often wondered how you could be so bloody stupid.

The thing about living with an alcoholic is that when a disaster occurs, you think ‘well perhaps that’s it, perhaps that’s the worst that can happen’. Except it’s not; there is always more to come.

I have used weeks of my own sick leave to stay at home and detox you when all the services turned us away. I’ve fed you soft foods like a baby, showered you, dressed you, put you to bed, held you for hours on end, tended to your wounds when you have fallen and ripped open your head or fallen asleep against the heater. I have refused invitations from our friends for years to the point that we stopped being invited anywhere. I have made up more excuses than I can remember to protect you. I always wondered when people asked how I was, were they really asking about me, or asking about you? I have stopped you killing yourself from carbon monoxide poisoning in our garage whilst our kids were home. I have kept all the car keys hidden for months at a time. I have found you in my emergency room, full of the people I have worked 30 years with, fully clothed and standing in a pool of urine, listened to the story of how you fell through a ranch slider window slicing open your face. I’ve had to ring your boss (a man who has bent over backwards to help and support you) to say his work vehicle has been impounded as you have been caught DIC. I have been woken after nightshift from the sound of you crashing into and wrecking our letterbox, again drunk and again in a brand new company car. I have had to receive the phone call of how you have been drinking at work and have now lost your job. I have had to ask my family to help pay our mortgage. I have had to tell our kids that we have to sell our house, the house they grew up in because I cannot pay all the bills alone. I have had to pack up our house and move into my mother’s house, who is 93 with dementia, with our 19-year-old daughter and two cats and two dogs. I have spent hours searching for your latest hiding place for gin bottles. I have poured thousands of dollars of alcohol down the drain. I have worked hundreds of hours of overtime to support your habit indirectly. I have listened to the vile names you have called me, the accusations that I was having affairs. I have taken calls from our kids saying they were frightened of your behavior. I have been hospitalized with stress-induced gastritis with pain so bad I needed a morphine infusion. I have had to message your mother saying how I feared for your life. I have come home after days sitting with my dying father to find you drunk and incoherent, not able to offer me any level of support. I have had to have you committed to the mental health unit. I have used the people around me as a constant support, my family, our friends, my work colleagues – sharing the latest saga but usually finishing the conversation with my hope that perhaps this time will be different. But it never was. And it never will be for me and you because I choose not to have alcohol impact my life and the life of my children anymore! I am not going to spend any more of my life waiting for the next disaster.

You have to know how much it kills me to say that. I married you, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. I married you, you had me, I was all in, all yours. Because we had something that not everyone finds. We had that connection, that fabulous ability to look at each other and know each other’s thoughts, we had the laughter, we had the tenderness, but I could see your high level of daily distress, that there was something bad and powerful and underlying that was fundamental in how you lived your life, but you could never share that with me so I could never help and for that I am sorry. And now each of us is alone, and it’s such a fucking waste, and I hate that this is where we have ended up.”