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Saturday, Nov 22, 2008
What do you do when your wife punches you -- hard? I learned to cover my face and stifle my anger.
Apr 2, 2002 | During the darkest hours, when my anger burned hottest, I learned to pray. Surprisingly, for someone who never regularly attended church, the prayers came easily. "Please, God, make her stop drinking. Please God, don't let her get into another car accident. Please keep her from harming our daughter, or anyone else. Please remove this anger and restore peace."
When I recited my newfound litany of prayers, I closed my eyes and imagined addressing a person stronger than me, someone able to endure endless days and nights of tension, mistrust, disappointment and abuse. Someone possessing a magical arrangement of words or a secret phone number. Someone who knew a certain someone who could rescue a family that was drowning in a sea of alcohol.
Maybe these were the wrong prayers. Perhaps I should have asked, "Please God, save this precious soul so afflicted with the disease of alcohol, a disease now linked to other brain diseases such as Parkinson's. Show me a way to help her." But I was too filled with anger and disgust to think compassionately, to really believe that I was dealing with a disease instead of a poor life choice. And I was just beginning to learn how to pray.
God may have heard my prayers, but my requests appeared to be granted only on those occasions when my wife was arrested for a DUI and jailed overnight. Her confinement was my respite. I knew my 7-year-old daughter was safe at home with me. We could both sleep, and I could let my boiling anger simmer until the morning. Those few hours of peace were priceless.
Her drinking began about the time we stopped following whims and commenced being adults: the time our daughter was born. Life became serious -- as it should when you are responsible for the future of a child. She entered a rigorous professional program. I earned a college degree and went right to work. I was exhilarated; she was stressed. I attended professional conferences and won some honors. She sat in friends' cars and started drinking. I never saw her alcoholism coming until it was too late.
At that time we resided in a small town with a skyline of grain silos, church steeples and steep, grain-covered hills. Apple and plum trees shaded our yard. Train whistles and bird song punctuated the dry air. I could depend on pheasants calling in March, lilacs blooming in April and the cleansing rains of October. Shouldn't that have been enough to sustain us?
But like so many American families, we had no relatives within 500 miles and could rely only upon our marriage, our young daughter and ourselves to survive whatever life threw our way. Our margin for error was slim. The three of us were adrift in a lifeboat bobbing on precarious waters. When we sprung a leak and the raft filled with alcohol, no one knew how to bail and find land.
Anger is exhausting. I was tired all the time. I dragged my feet on the short walk home from work to our sinking ship, never knowing which spouse would be waiting: The doting wife and mother, the serious college student, the reeling drunk or (the worst scenario) a conglomerate of all three? I often paused at the edge of the driveway to contemplate our wood-frame house sitting so serenely on a spacious one-third-acre lot. Outside were signs of normalcy: the tree swing I built for my daughter, the bed of lipstick-red tulips that signaled spring and a south-facing garden plot where I once grew a gallon's worth of pinto beans.
As I looked at the house with its two glassed-in porches, I wondered, How could such a solid house hold so much instability? I waited for an answer that never came. Then I plunged forward into the chaos that my life had become.
Love led me to dysfunctional vigilance. At the onset of her newfound love of beer and wine, I believed I could control my wife's drinking and stay one step ahead of her. No matter what I tried, I was never prepared for her next move. I took control of the checkbook. She went to the bank and got more checks; soon the overdrafts came. She hid all the bills. I opened a postal box so bills and important correspondence would come directly to me. On my hands and knees, I sifted through the trash in search of grocery receipts, corks and bottle caps that would contradict her assurances about not drinking. Pleading and begging were also part of my arsenal. "Please seek treatment. You need help." "No," she said. "I don't have a drinking problem."
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