One Day It Will Be Too Late

He will win.

The alcoholism will win.

The despondency and the grief. The anger and the regret. Oh the regret. They will all win but especially the regret. It will wrap itself around you like serpentine seaweed stretching up from the bottom of the sea, rooted in the deep, dark salty floor. It will twist and ensnare you and drag you down to be consumed by the beast of time lost, years gone. All of it. The darkness. The ugliness. The absurd.

It.

Will.

All.

Win.

And you will lose.

No one really talks about this.

What the spouse of the alcoholic loses.

She loses her life.

Maybe not her physical life but certainly her spiritual, emotional and mental life.

No, what everyone ("everyone") wants to talk about is what she is SUPPOSE to do. The boundaries she is suppose to establish. Then enabling she's not suppose to engage in. The co-dependency she's suppose to oppose. The love she is suppose to give but also detach from.

The alcoholic is sick.

The alcoholic has a disease.

Addiction is a mental health crisis.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Do I sound bitter?

I suppose I am.

I've been married to an alcoholic for over 20 years and have yet to discover any sort of "program" or protocol that REALLY calls out what living with an alcoholic spouse does to the sober spouse.

I was going to be that voice.

But now I understand why that voice is hard to find out there amongst us.

We silence ourselves.

Fatigue.

Hopelessness.

Brokenness.

It rains down on us til there is nothing left of that fire in our belly.

How can I offer solace or support to other women when I can't comfort or support myself?

Physician heal thyself.

It's nearly too late for me.

I can feel it.

Fuck it.

Just live out the rest of my broken life in a loveless marriage.

What am I going to do?

Start all over?

I'm nearly 60!

Am I to walk away from the benefits of sharing his pension and retirement, a paid off mortgage after spending my peak earning years raising our children?

I go where I want to go, do what I want to do. Money is always an issue - as in him controlling it but like any "good" (i.e woman in a dysfunctional marriage) wife, I have ways to hide spending as well as other times I just spend it and let him bitch about it. You know, mix it up. (That's not at all degrading and humiliating to admit.) The drinking is just back ground noise to me now. I barely notice it. Like I barely notice that he doesn't kiss me good bye in the morning or hello in the evening.

Barely.

Staying means financial security.

Of course, it also means never buying my dream house or living at the beach or having a hobby farm with animals I rescue. It means never really living as a writer or artist. It means watching the same couples who enjoyed healthy marriages when all our children were growing up, enjoy those healthy marriages as "empty nesters." It means the same grief, the same emptiness, the same longing, the same anger, the same regret for the next 20 years that has defined me these past 20.

I may have mentioned this Aesop's fable before about the two frogs who fall into a vat of buttermilk. They cannot hop out because the sides are too slippery. One frog immediately declares their doom and sinks to the bottom and drowns. The other frog says "I don't know what I am going to do but I'm not going to give up." She swims round and round through the night and by morning, she has churned the buttermilk into butter and hops out.

I was the swimming frog for so long.

So. Long.

But now I feel myself letting go. Sinking to the bottom. It's getting harder and harder to muster up the energy to care many days.

But what will I feel in one year? Five years? Ten years? At the end of my life?!

It's all hard living with an alcoholic husband. One period isn't "harder" than another - just different. And I will tell you the way 50's+ is "different" is you look back and think "how the hell did 20, 30 or more years pass already with me living like this?" Why? Why, why, why, why, WHY didn't I do something? Leave? Save more money? Get a better job? Go back to school? The 50's+ is different because it almost feels "too late."

Almost.

The truth is "too late" is only when you decide it is too late. You may be 30, you may be 60. You may be 25 or 95 but too late is not on the calendar. It's in you. I can't let it be too late. I just can't. Somewhere inside me I have to find the willingness to keep swimming.

Somewhere.