Now I admit, I did my share of drinking back in my 20s and early
30s. But it was mostly just to party and socialize… I don’t remember
ever CRAVING a drink of alcohol. I had other weaknesses, but alcohol
just wasn’t one of them.
I was 20 when I married for the first time… a big church wedding in
the Baptist church I had grown up in. Lynn and I went to the clubs and
partied. We had a son, Dale, in 1983. During Dale’s first year of
life, Lynn and I grew apart. It was mostly because Lynn would go out
drinking with his buddies and leave me at home with the baby. Before
Dale was a year old, we were separated. We divorced 3 years later.
I first met my 2nd husband, David, in a
treatment center
in the summer of 1992. He had been an active alcoholic since his early
teens and that was his 2nd time in treatment. Later, we went to some
of the same AA meetings and started dating. If I could have seen the
future, I would have run for my life. But that wasn’t God’s plan.
David’s sobriety lasted maybe 6 months after we married in Jan 1993. We
lived in an old, singlewide mobile home right next to my parents’
house. I can’t remember exact years or months that events happened
during those first 8 years. I do remember that David’s worst month of
the year was April for some reason. He seemed to drink more and all the
worst things happened in April.
David worked mostly in construction,
drywall finishing was his specialty. Before he fell off the wagon for the first time, he had gotten laid off from his job and started selling
vacuum cleaners.
He was very charismatic when he was sober and did very well with the
demonstration and selling the machines. His supervisor took him to a
conference in NC, where he persuaded David to drink with him. Thus
began a downward spiral for David into the pits of alcoholism that would
continue until April 2001.
As the wife of an alcoholic, I was as sick as my husband; just in a
different way. I was addicted to the alcoholic. I was seriously
codependent. I thrived on trying to control his disease. Writing this
blog has made me remember many of the alcoholic incidents that took
place during David’s drinking binges.
