I know I have certain days set aside for certain topics, but, yeah. That really didn’t work out so well. Really it didn’t work out at all when I wasn’t blogging for the past month. But anyway, I guess it’s time to spill the beans about why I wasn’t blogging at all for a month, and not really so regularly over the past couple years or so.
The day after Labor Day, I drove my husband to a 65-day treatment facility for alcohol and drug abuse. He had started drinking again about 2 years ago, and it steadily progressed to the point where he was drinking heavily 5 or 6 days a week while denying it was heavy drinking and/or that he was really drunk. Also during this 2 year period I nagged him about it, fought with him over it, and threatened divorce. None of my tactics worked on him, and none of his denial and manipulation worked on me. All the while the kids retreated to their rooms attempting to block out the dysfunction around them.
In the meantime, we were all going through the motions, and putting on the masks of pretending nothing was wrong. He was leading a ministry and a small group at church, and I was standing up helping to lead singing every Sunday morning and many Sunday nights. Everything looked “normal” and “good” from the outside. But we were a mess.
I prayed and prayed, and was mostly left with silence and no change. I asked, “How much is enough?” The abbreviated answer was my wedding vow – “Til death.” Yet I still could not stop wanting a divorce, and finally had to share the full answer I got with 4 friends when I asked them to pray and hold me accountable. That’s when the voice telling me to push for divorce ceased. Not because of my prayer, but my friends’ prayers.
Gradually the fighting between us ceased, though each of us continued to hold our ground, and then the secret came out. He got drunk and took a sleeping pill and I couldn’t get him all the way awake so that he could make it to the Bible study he was leading. There I was left with spilling the beans to 2 couples why he wasn’t there, and what had been going on. I narc’ed him out, and it sucked. But, it didn’t suck near as bad as covering up the problem. He was confronted, held accountable, and rightly disciplined by being removed from leadership and teaching positions.
Still, he dug in, and finally decided he was going to confront back and argue his case. This put me in a very difficult spot as I neither agreed with nor supported his position, and prepared for opposing him publicly. But when we went to this meeting he called, instead of defending himself and fighting his position, he confessed everything and announced that he was going to rehab because he was not in control of his drinking. It was in control of him. We found a place, got him all set, and off he went. He only did about a month of the 65 days, but he came home a different man than I dropped off.
There will be more follow up to this, but in the meantime, here is the testimony the hubby gave at church this past Sunday. The audio is bad because he spoke without a mic and I recorded it with my iPhone, but I’m sharing it anyway.