This Is For The Woman Up At 2:00 am

It's been a long time now, well over ten years, but I can still feel that night as if it had been yesterday.

Where I was sitting.

The churning nausea paradoxically mixed with the heaviness of lead in my stomach.

The utter disbelief at what I had just experienced.

And the nearly impossible task of reconciling it within myself.

"SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

"YOU'RE SUCH A FUCKING BITCH!"

"FUCKING BITE ME!"

Had that really happened?

Had my husband, the father of my children, actually screamed these most vile among vile things at me?

Of course it had happened.

Of course he had.

I questioned it rhetorically while I tried to grasp it emotionally.

I didn't - or couldn't - even cry so great was my shock.

I knew he was an alcoholic.

That had become apparent the first week we were home from our honeymoon.

And I knew it was a problem.

But not this kind of problem.

Not THIS big a problem. Despite his more than obvious alcoholism, during the first years of our marriage, nothing like this had ever occurred.

But now it had and there would be no going back.

The alcoholic never retreats and his behavior is never stagnant.

But that first night, that first incident, I didn't know anything.

The Internet was still an oddity to a lot of us and all I really knew how to do was type a few key words into the search bar of the search engine, those terms still new and awkward.

Alcoholic husband.

Alcoholic marriage.

Married to an alcoholic.

I tried an assorted variety of terms and phrases on that singular theme.

Nothing much came up.

Silly tests to see "if" your loved one is an alcoholic. Funny, no where did it ask, "does he scream shut the fuck up at you? Call you a fucking bitch. Tell you to go fuck yourself?" I think that might be the one and only question a woman needs.

Ads for treatment centers and articles about "detaching with love" and "hating the disease not the man."

And a few blogs.

But none of real significance.

That had stayed current.

Most of the blogs I found written by the wives of alcoholics had long ago been abandoned, their efforts crushed under the emotional anvil of life with an alcoholic husband. I get it. I've lost count of how many times I've tried, hoped, thought about and intended to resurrect my blogging efforts.

But there is another thing, besides the shock and disbelief, the churning stomach and the sinking feeling and the bewildering Internet that I remember about that night.

Sheer alone-ness.

It was as if his ugly words and cruel behavior had detached me from all other living entities on the planet. A boat set adrift, haplessly finding its way to the middle of the sea, surrounded by a vast emptiness.

That's why I started a blog initially.

That horrible, horrible sense of loneliness and abandonment.

And that's why I am continually revisiting my efforts - whether by actually blogging or only in my mind - to establish my own blog. Because I remember. The pure, unmitigated loneliness.

It's nearly 2 am and somewhere out there is a woman who has been called a fucking bitch or told to shut the fuck up or admonished to go fuck herself. Somewhere out there is a woman sitting alone in the basement or bathroom, garage or backyard while her husband snores his drunken snores, oblivious to the unfathomable pain he creates for her, within her. Somewhere out there is a woman who can't stop crying. And another one who no longer can cry, the tears dried up long ago. To these women I say,

You are not alone.

I know you're there.

I know your pain.

I know you are wondering how on Earth you can even go one more day baring the burden of his drinking.

Because you are here, reading this, searching for something. That's proof the beast of his drinking has not destroyed you yet.

And It never will, if I can help at all.