Tag: marriage pain

Rejection

Alcohol, Alcoholism, Marriage, Recovery By Barbara 2 Comments

Wedding Rings on an Anniversary Cruise

June 22, 2019, dawns beautiful, clear and bright in our corner of the Mid-Atlantic, calling to mind the day of our wedding twelve years before. The second half of those dozen circuits around the sun have been hard. Today, we’re barely seven months post-transplant. My single liver we now share between the two of us, his own having been incinerated with the rest of the biohazardous waste accumulated by the hospital that day back in November. I’ve had plenty of chances to think that we’d never see another anniversary together.

 

He’d told me, a week or so earlier, “Don’t do anything for the anniversary, I’ve got something planned.”

 

It felt like the first good sign since our transplant team had diagnosed him as rejecting the new liver graft. Maybe we were finally getting the rejection under control? Maybe we’d finally gotten the meds right? Except for his waxy skin, and his drifting in and out of vacant stares, and the yellow tinges to his eyes coming and going like I might be imagining them…

The Drinker Returns from Rehab: Now What?

Alcohol, Alcoholism, Marriage, Recovery By Matt Salis 5 Comments

Time to Feed the Bison

A little over two years into my sobriety, I chaperoned a week-long church youth mission trip to a Native American reservation. We fed a huge bison, built a fence, learned about the culture, and met a lot of interesting people (side note – if you want to see the impact of terrible government policy resulting in rampant alcoholism throughout a community, chaperone a church youth mission trip to a Native American reservation).

 

I returned feeling really good about myself. I had given my time and energy to two of my kids and the teenagers in our church community. The kids got an exposure to addiction that no amount of talking could have equaled, no one was trampled by the buffalo, and no digits or limbs were lost to the novice operation of power saws. The worst thing I did all week was eat at McDonald’s. Twice.

 

I felt really good about myself. That is, I felt good until I reunited with my wife.

The Cost of a Perfect Wedding

Alcohol, Alcoholism, Family, Marriage By Barbara 4 Comments

Barbara on her Wedding Day

June 22, 2007, dawned beautiful, clear and bright in our corner of the Mid-Atlantic. A perfect day for a little bit of a sail. A perfect day for a little bit of a wedding.

 

John and I had been living together for most of a decade. We’d always made a big deal about the anniversary of our hooking up, I guess you’d call it, romantics that we were. In thinking of how to celebrate our 10th, getting married seemed like the obvious choice.

 

There was only ever one consideration for a venue. She was one of a gorgeous pair of 72-foot schooners, operating in town, berthing at night in the slips right outside our apartment complex.  Surprisingly affordable, she offered many things, including an organic constraint to the size of a wedding party, and extra conversational points for having been featured in a big-budget movie. Those are just minor details for flavor, though. All we really wanted was to get married on a boat, on the water, with plenty of booze.

Who’s to Blame?: The Ownership Conundrum

Alcohol, Alcoholism, Unashamed By Matt Salis 4 Comments

The Ownership Conundrum

There is no better indication of strength, integrity and intelligence than a person who owns his mistakes and takes responsibility for corrective action. It’s why I prefer stand-up comedians to politicians. I’d take Stephen Colbert or Dennis Miller for president over any denying or deflecting boob who actually squirms his way into the job.

 

Honesty, humility and vulnerability are admirable traits. They are the reason we have thousands of listeners and readers (although this particular sentence isn’t very humble). Taking ownership is a sign of confidence.  A mistake can’t take me down! We admit, we fix, we learn and we do better the next time. It’s a sign of maturity.

 

All of these lofty philosophical ramblings about ownership make my position regarding the culprit responsible for my alcoholism kind of surprising.

The Prompt

Alcoholism, Marriage, Recovery By Barbara 9 Comments

The Prompt

Lately I’m seeing, from a social distance, conversations about our potentially post-pandemic summer that can be summed up as: It’s going to be Sodom and Gomorrah out there. If you can’t get laid this summer, just hang it up. Meanwhile, six months post-divorce, my reflexive gag is that not only am I not dating, not even looking, I’m building a moat.

 

It’s a joke. (Mostly. At least partly. A bit, anyway…) I think it’s funny. But here’s a great tip for free: never tell your good jokes to your therapist. They’ll wreck ‘em. They just can’t help it. I gave mine the whole moat bit with a nudge and a wink (or the Zoom equivalent), and she told me, rather seriously, “Barbara, you’re not keeping others out, you’re keeping yourself in.”

Hope, Recognized

Alcoholism, Marriage By Barbara 4 Comments

Hope, Recognized

Hope terrified me at the first sight of it. It froze me in my tracks, right there in the basement, the laundry basket on my hip.

 

I’d done everything I could to end it. I’d gotten the lawyer, gotten the agreements, and refinanced the house. I’d untethered phones, cable, and internet. I’d started in the tightest circle, telling the news, expanding it outward like a slow ripple. I’d packed everything I could from the parts of the house that were mine, the things that we’d agreed would be his, boxes stacked in neat rows as close to the front door as possible. Ready for him to take. Ready for him to go.

 

For his part, he had managed to get his own place. But he wasn’t leaving. Even with a literal key to his new, loudly-desired life in his hand, he sat, week after week, behind the closed door of his bedroom, drinking, not even hiding it anymore. Not taking. Not going. 

Suicides of Different Speeds

Alcoholism, Marriage By Barbara 8 Comments

Suicides of Different Speeds

It was early in June the day our friend Tom got out of bed, long before the sunrise, without disturbing his wife. He got dressed, went to the basement, and fed lettuce to his Russian tortoise Nadenka, as he did every morning. While she munched away in her pen, he wiped the hard drive on his desktop. Looking over his significant gun collection, a point of pride, he selected one of the pair of pearl-handled revolvers, loaded it, and pocketed it. He then stole silently up the stairs, grabbed his cell phone, his wallet, and his car keys, and left a note for his wife telling her where he would be.

 

He drove for a while that morning, about an hour, to a nature reserve that was one of his favorite spots. He parked along the side of the road, conspicuous, not in any parking spot. But it was still early, quiet. He’d have some time. He got out, left his cell phone and wallet on the dashboard and the keys in the ignition. He took the revolver.

The 5 Reasons We Don’t Know Sobriety is Better

Alcohol, Sobriety By Matt Salis 10 Comments
Cheers to our Alcoholic Ignorance
James Carville & Mary Matalin – Maker’s Mark Commercial

An alternate title for this article is:

“How Aliens Confirmed Earth is Devoid of Intelligent Lifeforms”

 

Think about it for a minute – pretend you know nothing about the role alcohol plays in our culture, or in your personal life. With a completely open mind, read my fair and honest explanation of alcohol as I would describe it to an extraterrestrial being:

The Angry Ghost that Lives in the Walls

Alcoholism, Marriage, Recovery By Barbara 11 Comments

The Angry Ghost that Lives in the Walls

At some point, I ceased to exist. 

 

It’s Sunday evening, 7 p.m., and he announces he’s going to a meeting. An alarm clangs in the back of my skull. I remember having mellow faith in fellow humans, enjoying the luxury of assuming you’re not being lied to, and being right. However, I tend now more to eternal, endless vigilance, and the trouble is, I know too much. There’s no meeting in our area at 7 p.m. on a Sunday evening. 

How did Our Alcoholic Marriage get this Great?

Alcoholism, Marriage, Recovery By Matt Salis 12 Comments

How did Life get this Great?

We have a detached garage behind our house that was built in 1915 and was originally intended to be more of a shed than a place to park cars. At some point in our house’s history, the garage was extended, presumably when a previous homeowner came to the conclusion that he needed to protect a car from the weather. We now jam two cars in the garage with barely a few inches between them. The garage serves two purposes: to protect our Jeeps, and as incentive not to gain so much weight that we can’t squeeze our fannies into the driver’s seats.

 

The path that brings us to and from the garage is a thin patch of concrete squeezed between the north side of our house and our neighbor’s fence. Backing down the driveway feels like threading a needle, especially where our house’s furnace exhaust makes the bricks jut out, or where the fence posts extend a few inches past the fence.

 

In the twelve years we’ve owned the Jeep that my wife drives (which, in my defence, is substantially wider than mine), I’ve bashed the rearview mirrors into the brick protrusion, or the fence posts, so many times that I’ve lost count. I’ve also detached two downspouts from the house so that they now dangle precariously from the gutters without a mooring to the exterior wall, so at least I spread the damage around.