Let's Do This Thing 3: Blame Realized

So the Sponser challenge was to remain soul-full in relating to my husband.

"The step says 'restored to sanity'.  Is this part of your life sane and manageable?", she offered.  I ran the steps through my mind, substituting the word marriage for alcohol.  That's the thing about the steps, you can substitute any noun for alcohol and work them.  And the answer was no.  Not sane, not manageable, and definitely powerless.

At the end of August I had been sober 5 months.  Neither my husband or myself could tolerate our marriage.  We were seeing a counselor.  I saw a different counselor.  In couples counseling, he was still "kicking the tires" of counseling.  Still walking around the car, trying to figure out if he was going to really commit to participating (besides just showing up) to the process.  I was talking to folks in AA: what about no major changes for a year?  I talked to my girlfriends both in and out of AA, and they would ask me: do you still love him?  Do you still want this marriage?  I honestly didn't know.  I didn't want to be insane anymore, and I didn't see how the insanity would stop.

Then came the month o' silence.  It started with a huge blow-out with my husband that culminated in him trying to leave.  Doors slammed, the divorce word spoken out loud, drama over telling the kids.  He tried to leave, drove away from the house, came back an hour later, he couldn't leave the kids.  Later that week he read my blog, and the shunning started again.  No, we didn't talk about it.  Of course not.  And we kept not speaking for a month.

I looked at all my options for divorce during that time: keep the house, sell it, keep some acreage we have and build on it, move back to town, divide the debt.  And during that month, I really cranked up the   reading. More on emotional abuse, more on staying or leaving, more on what's his deal.  Every day I connected to soul-full away from home, every day I prayed for clarity of my higher power's will, every day I walked in the door and was suddenly empty,  soulless, ambivalent.  He would be angry and silent, and I would shut down.

I couldn't do it.  I knew I had married my father (or the potentially healing version of him), I knew I reacted to my husband like the ten year old girl I was facing her father's irrationality by refusing to engage with him,  I knew I wasn't afraid of my husband like I was my father (at least not physically) and I knew I didn't want my kids to think stony silence was what a marriage is.  Yet I couldn't break the insanity of doing the relationship the same way expecting different results.  So I gathered information on what divorce could look like, and waited for MORE information from my higher power.  If I saw a stick on the sidewalk, I tried to read meaning from the universe into its placement.

Then I got sick of it; the information gathering felt compulsive.  Let's return to emotional abuse.  Abusers, for lack of a better word, will tell their abusee what the abusee thinks, what motivates them, what's wrong with them.  In looking for labels, in seeking to name what was wrong with him, in trying to figure out what core issue he was trying to address in the marriage through the Repetition Compulsion, I was IN HIS BUSINESS.  I would say he starts the shunning, he would say he ignores me because I ignore him, so who was right?  Who was abusing who?  In a battle of perceptions, there can be no winner.

I have accepted that what other people think of me is none of my business.  As an alcoholic, particularly as a female alcoholic, I fix, manage and control.  I know I can't control other people, nor blame them for my reactions.  And yet that was exactly what I was trying to do.  I wanted him to change.  If I could name what motivated him, maybe I could maneuver him to do so.  If only I could make him "get it", everything would be sparkles and rainbows.  There.  There was my part.  I knew intellectually it was foolishness, but I still wanted it and the bitch Ism that lives in me was still trying to get it.

I hate that bitch Ism.  Winning or losing has no place in a healthy relationship, but I have no problem engaging in battle with her.  She's immortal in me, I'll never really kill her.  But when she shows up, I'll try.  Perhaps one day I will view her differently, but today she is still cunning and baffling, and she was out to ruin my half of this marriage in her sinuous, seductive way.