Sunday, September 27, 2009

New day, Same BATTLE

(wife posting)

I have been meaning to post for awhile now but life has been so busy that I haven't had much free time. Our family is ALL together again and it has been really nice to have us all under one roof. The kids have missed their daddy SOOO much and it is great to not be single parenting anymore. The first couple of days that we were all home together things between my husband and I were wonderful, then slowly the 'honeymoon' effect began to wear off and we have been struggling with re-adjusting to living together again. I knew that this would be a hard adjustment but I guess I was just really hopeful that my husband would be a changed man after almost 3 months with out his family. I felt so much humility from him while we were apart but now that we are together again I feel like he is right back in his comfort zone and isn't appreciating what a GIFT it is to have his family back. I by no means expected him to completely change, but I really thought that maybe things would 'sink in' a little deeper. To his credit things have been CRAZY with work, with the kids, one of our cars completely died, etc... etc... We are experiencing many more trials on top of our marital problems and my husbands addictions, but still I am finding my self puzzled that he isn't making a bigger effort to show me that he is grateful that he now has his family back in his life.

Our marriage has been made up of broken promises after broken promises. My husband gets caught in addiction, promises to stop and change, then things happen again. I do know that he wants to stop, he wants to be free of these addictions, but I don't believe he knows how to stop. I really don't know where to go from here. I want to stay, I want things to work out, I want our family to be together but yet I don't see my husband doing anything to make those things possible. Yes he is a great dad, he is helpful around the house, he works hard to provide for our family, but what he doesn't do is actively DEAL with his addictions. He thinks that just because he isn't currently looking at pornography or gambling that he doesn't need to daily deal with these things. I truly believe that if you struggle with addiction of any kind that you MUST work on controlling those addictions EVERYDAY, because if you don't they will just creep right back into your life in one form or another. This blog is a PERFECT example of my husband promising to do something and not following through with it. We set this blog up as a tool for HIM to work on actively dealing with his addictions, he promised to write here regularly, but that has obviously NOT happened. I am tired of broken promises, I am tired of my husband not dealing with HIS addictions, I am tired of being the one to always SAVE him. I just want him to follow through with his promises, I don't want to have to ask him to write on this blog, I want him to do it because he knows it will help him work through these things. I don't want to have to ask him to go to counseling, I want HIM to set up the appointment. I am tired of carrying all of the load on my shoulders!!!

I have done some pretty serious soul searching these last few months and have decided that I will no longer let my husband hold me back from MY healing. I will no longer wait for him to make the counseling appointment, I will just go alone because it is something that I need to do for ME. I am also going to go to a meeting once a week for women that have been through experiences similar to mine, this is something I am VERY nervous about doing, but I believe that it will help me. I have also done a lot of research about depression recently and I really think that there is a very good chance that I have been suffering from depression for a very long time. This is not something that I want to admit, but I know that the only way for me to get help is to deal with MY issues head on. For now I am going to stop trying to 'fix' my husband and work on fixing ME.

I want to encourage those that are personally struggling with addiction or those that are struggling because they love someone who has addictions to get the help that THEY need. I'm not sure we can adequately help those in addiction until we help our selves, learn tools to deal with these trials, and educate our selves on addiction.

PLEASE feel free to anonymously leave your comments, questions, advice, concerns, etc... I TRULY want this blog to be somewhere people can come to OPENLY talk about addiction and to help each other.