I'LL NEVER FORGET

How long has it been since I realized my husband is an alcoholic?

Well, the sad truth is I knew it within weeks of returning from our honeymoon so over 20 years.

But how long has it been since that first (metaphorical) punch in the gut?

How long since the first wave of searing shock as my husband screamed at me, "SHUT THE FUCK UP?!"

How long since the first time I felt the nearly indescribable emotional aftermath of one of his alcohol-infused rages?

How long since first time I sat alone in the middle of the night, feverishly typing "alcoholic husband" and the likes into a search engine in the hopes of finding some kind of salvation from the lonely land of the internet?

It sounds good. This new website of mine. All "outside my comfort zone" and such that I write about. It's promising. A new website to chronicle the new life that I will live as I come fully into the new (old?) me. By my own words, this website will be about MORE than the alcoholic husband, MORE than the pain and the grief. It will be about living BEYOND that pain and grief. BEYOND his compulsive drinking.

And yet, here I sit, once again, in the middle of the night, "feverishly typing." This time it may not be to find solace, but to offer that solace I once hungered for but that doesn't change the fact that living with an alcoholic husband is one of the most toxic, emotionally crippling and mentally debilitating existence on can know.

I mean, it IS that bad.

And I don't want anyone who may be in the early stages of this painful evolution to think that I have forgotten or any of this is easy. I've seen other alcoholic-wife websites. Slick and glossy and all sanitized, it seems to me. No one really talking about what is happening. Husbands calling their wives vicious, vile names. Fathers screaming at their children vile, heinous things. As a wife and mother, it guts you. It really, really guts you.

And so if you are here - as in on the Internet - looking for comfort, guidance, support, camaraderie. God smacked by your husband's behavior. Wondering what in the name of hell just happened. A vacant feeling in the pit of your stomach like nothing you've ever felt before. If you are sitting for the first time, eyes swollen, tears so dried up that you are convinced you will never shed another one again. If you are holding your head in your hands, thinking, "I can't. I just can't." Then I want you to know:

You're not crazy.

You're not "blowing it out of proportion."

You're not "imagining" it's that bad.

You're not responsible.

And you're not alone.

It's a long road.

It's a hard road.

(If you can turn back, I'd highly, highly advise it.)

But you can make it.