Just when I am getting comfortable and think that I have everything sussed, things fall apart. R goes out and gets steaming drunk. His relapse lasts for three days, and for some of this time he is at home, but mostly, thank God, he stays away.
When I used to obsess about his sobriety, I thought I had some control over his drinking. When he made serious attempts at abstaining, I worried that he was secretly drinking, even if he denied it. Then a friend with an alcoholic husband told me: “Just stand next to him. Even if he’s only had a couple, you’ll know from the smell and the sight of him.”
I’ve shed some of my controlling behaviours, but still: R – drunk – makes me very sore.
On this occasion, I don’t have to stand next to R to see how wasted he is. I am woken at 3.30am as he stands on our doorstep: his drunkenness is apparent from the clumsy turning of the key in the lock, from the uneven clack of his heels on the floorboards in the hall, from the clashing of glass as he fumbles in cupboards for a final drink.
When I enter the kitchen, his back is turned and he leans against the sink. He cuts a figure that is at once sad, daft and frightening, head flopped forward as if he is sleeping where he stands.
So what prompts me to leave him there? I know anything I say will be in anger. He doesn’t notice me, so I go back to bed, and when I find him on the sofa in the morning – the hood of his top pulled snug over his head, cocooned from everything – he is in the middle of an intoxicated dream, talking about erecting a shed.
I close the sitting room door (giving a vague explanation that “Daddy is unwell” when the children ask why R is not at work). Then I take them to school.
“It’s almost bound to happen,” my Al-Anon friend says. “Even if the bad days in your relationship aren’t related to R’s relapses, shit still happens.”
But I’m disappointed. I thought the reality of R drunk wouldn’t feel as shocking as it once did. He’s had a couple of relapses since he moved back in, but I haven’t been around to witness them. The idea of loving him when he’s in front of me, drunk, is not as easy as I’ve harped on about.
I’d like to say I’ve picked up all of my recovery tools; that I’ve called people up for advice; kept the focus on the children and me; planned to do fun things with my free hours. But on the first day of R’s relapse, I do something catastrophically shameful and, in terms of recovery, very regressive: he has left his phone at home. I park the children in front of the television with their supper, and check hundreds of his texts and recent calls. My reasons are ambiguous: signs of infidelity, lies, drug buying? The discovery of anything that will make me feel worse about the situation? I don’t find anything new.
R drinks and I act in an equally destructive manner. And then I feel awful. I want R to feel even more terrible too by telling him he is selfish (pointless when he is still drunk, and just nods in agreement) and I end up forgetting that alcoholism is an illness.
My friend tells me to concentrate on one day at a time; not to engage with R while he is drunk; to tell him to stay somewhere else. It doesn’t work straight away, but soon I think about things that will make me feel better; going to the park; finishing a work assignment, speaking to my sister. R is not doing anything to us: he is just getting drunk. My acrid thoughts are causing the real damage.
When R is finally sober and back, I tell him I’ve checked his phone. We apologise to each other. We even have sex, and it is not pining or needy and is actually quite restorative.
I am aware that crazy behaviour – even when it only lasts a short few hours – can still be as potent as overproof rum. The reality of this relapse, in a marriage that is slowly finding its way to contentedness, requires love, trust and courage from R and me, and I’m sure we have that.
To stay sane, I sometimes have to go back to the beginning of recovery. I won’t beat myself up for behaving badly, and I hope R won’t either.
