Tag: family pain

Evolution Series: American Dream

Alcoholism, Evolution Series, Marriage By Kim 2 Comments

American Dream

I think it was about 4 years ago when I wrote my first letter – my first letter where I addressed the issue at hand. It was the first of many letters to come where I stressed how much I needed my husband, how much my kids needed their dad.

 

I begged and pleaded for him to stop drinking.

 

As the years continued, I continued to write my letters to him. I cried, sobbed, begged, pleaded and threatened, but it was not enough.

 

I changed through the years, and so did my message. Where the letters once started with, “I need you! I can’t live without you,” the sentiment slowly turned into, “I can do this on my own. The kids and I can no longer continue on this merry-go-round with you.”

 

They say you know when you know. It is 100% true.

 

This is the letter I read to my husband at his intervention. I thought it was the end.

 

It was just the beginning.

A Hunter’s Guide to Successful Gathering

Alcoholism, Marriage, Recovery By Matt Salis, MPS 2 Comments

A Hunter's Guide to Gathering

I’m a hunter. I’m married to a gatherer. And it’s really fucking hard.

 

Does this stupid analogy really explain why we find marriage to be so difficult? Do you also want to hear my regurgitated insight about the mixing of oil and water, the distance between Mars and Venus, and the oh-so-soothing conventional relationship wisdom about how opposites attract? Is it really so simple? I have been accused of oversimplifying before. Usually by my wife after I have hunted down a solution while she is still gathering information on the topic.

Sobriety Season: Is it “if” or “when?”

Alcoholism, Sobriety By Matt Salis, MPS 4 Comments

Sobriety Season

For us imbibers, the calendar can be divided into three drinking seasons.

 

The holiday season starts about mid October for most. I am an overachiever, both as a lush and as a lover of scary movies, so my holiday season starts on October first, sharp. The holiday season runs through the fourth quarter of the college football national championship game when one SEC team that I don’t care about crushes the year’s eager victim. Between the bookends, the excuses to drink line up in an organized, dependable, evenly spaced out succession making sobriety unthinkable, and moderation a celebratory faux pas. Drinkers have plenty of reasons to drink during the holiday season.

This Is Where I Disappear

Alcoholism, Marriage By Barbara 4 Comments

This Is Where I Disappear

I do the yardwork. I have since we moved out of our apartment and into our first rented house. By then, John was already sick, but we were still long months away from his cirrhosis diagnosis. He tried to mow the lawn once, in the early days at the rental, and gave up after five minutes. 

 

At the age of forty-four, his liver sneakily failing, he simply wasn’t physically capable of it.

Alternative Facts, Incompatible Realities

Addiction, Alcohol, Marriage By Barbara No Comments

Alternative Facts, Incompatible Realities

There’s no basement at Comet Ping Pong. 

 

Comet Ping Pong is a hip, family-friendly little restaurant in a comfy neighborhood in the Northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. There, you can nosh on wings and wood-fired pizzas while playing ping pong (surprise!) and listening to local indie bands. In a lovely alternate reality, this is all there is to say about the place. 

Kill Switch

Alcohol, Alcoholism, Marriage By Barbara No Comments

Kill Switch

 

He hates me.

 

Lots of why will be spun up around this in the future I’m falling headlong into (it’s the alcohol, it’s the disease, it’s not him, it’s not real).

 

But none of you are here right now. None of you can see the way my partner, my husband, is looking at me. We’re two decades past and three thousand miles away from when and where we first fell in love, but there’s a longer time, a deeper distance: both immeasurable. 

 

He hates me, and it doesn’t matter why.

 

Empathy, that putative ability to feel the emotions of others as if they were your own… well, you can see how that would be a dangerous prospect at this moment. A thing to guard against. 

 

I don’t need two people hating me like that.

Feeding Frenzy

Addiction By Barbara No Comments

Feeding Frenzy

You are not just an emptiness that breathes and walks and eats…

 

The melting point of chocolate is the temperature of the human mouth. It’s one of those happy accidents in the universe, like the apparent sizes of the discs of the moon and sun being the same, so that total solar eclipses can even happen at all.

 

I cook my own drugs. I confess that raw concoctions, like the batter for my chocolate chocolate chip muffins, are often superlative to the finished product. It’s the way they coat your mouth. The sugar, fat, and salt are just merging. The baking soda and powder are starting to fizz. The whole chemical reaction is taking off, right there on your tongue, studded with solid cocoa pearls that immediately begin their surrender. 

 

But you’ll get the jitters so quick. You’ve got to take the edge off, cut it with baking, or it’s too pure, too strong.

A Good Bye

Alcoholism, Family, Marriage By Barbara No Comments

A Good Bye

In January, I finally get the text from John’s dad that I’ve been waiting on for more than a year.

 

Oh, and the waiting. It’s astounding the stories we build up in our heads when there’s no intervention from reality to prune them into a sensible shape. I ask myself on a loop, how does he think this happened? Why does he think I gave his son two pounds of my own liver, and a year and a half later handed the same man divorce papers? Doesn’t he want to know? If I have an overactive imagination, I wonder, are some others’ atrophied, seized up and dry? Or is it worse: do they just not care?

 

Waiting, I compose in my head a pointed, yet directionless reply to a piercingly unasked question. The meat of it wraps around a spinal litany of near-funerals for his son that he doesn’t even realize he’d missed: five by my count, the transplant (the one everyone pays attention to) not even the last one, not even the closest call.