COMING HOME

Coming Home

At last, or finally it happened. And what was I expecting to happen? Something magic?

After two years of false hope and false expectation and false starts and then false hopes again you then pretty much sort of just give up and let go. And that is a good thing. It teaches forbearance and patience and decreases levels of expectations and  makes gratitude all the more precious when it becomes apparent.

If my return had happened on my terms, it would not have been successful. I was not ready. I had to be  mellowed. At that time, I had too much edge, too much edge for easy and early acceptance. Acceptance on my schedule was a recipe for failure.

But I feared that if too much time passed, passions might die. Not just the passions fed by anger, frustration and fear. But the passion fed by love, fondness and caring. I was unhappily fond of saying that absence would make the heart grow absent. Passion would, if not die,  certainly become so dulled as to be bland and without care. Maybe boredom would set in. But just because passion has been curbed does not mean that one is left without contentment.

You could not have told me that, then! Time. I needed time. My fury needed time to marinate in the knowledge of who I was; I needed to fully apprehend what being an alcoholic is. And then of course it would not do to tell her how healed I had become , I needed the time to demonstrate that I had become healed; but only at a distance, not something to be paraded in front of her but to be observed out of the side of the eye, at a glancing view. It cannot be seen by looking at it straight on. For like that feint star that one sees out at the periphery of the field of vision on a bright night, it gets lost as soon as one looks directly at it. Tenuous truth can rarely bare direct scrutiny without withering.

The histories of the lives of alcoholics are littered with false starts, harrowing careering rides of trying to capture “lost” time and the consequent crashes that attend when exceeding the speed limit of attempted recovery. It is a common malady and oft repeated fate that the rush of optimism at the too early return to the family redounds to the rack and ruination of relationships. The fallout is often worse than when the initial separation was caused by just the alcoholism itself. Raw feelings stripped of the veneer of alcoholic booziness,  are just disasters in waiting for the unprepared spouse and family against a raging dry drunk.

So when I left High Watch, I truly thought that I had my problem licked. I ‘understood’ what was wrong with me! Really I did! No, really!

You don’t seem convinced. And surely you should not be. Because that is only the “pink cloud thinking” speaking. When we first realize that we are drunks, we are so relieved to understand first that we don’t have to lie anymore, to ourselves, to our families, (as if we could really), to the world at large, that we want to shout it to the world. We want to first apologize to everyone we hurt as a substitute for true amends to those we have done dirt to. And by the latter I mean, lied to, cheated on, about, stole from or otherwise acted poorly to.

But amends are not apologies. Apologies we gave by the gross to all those who trusted us the most. We promised time and again to stop drinking, lying, stealing or whatever and of course, we broke those vows over and again.  Pledges meant nothing. So what were and are we to do to make it better?

An amend is an affirmation that one is ashamed and sorry about one’s behavior and that there was and is no excuse for it. That you cannot promise that your behavior will not be repeated because you understand that your word does not mean very much. But to the extent that you have done material harm, you will try to make it up. As to the rest, you can only let your sincerity be judged by your actions not your words. 

An amend is not an apology.  You have to make it known that you understand that your word is worthless and that you understand that if your word is to gain any currency in the future here is the plan that you have set out that will improve the value of your reputation; by deeds, actions and not words.

But that doesn’t necessarily get you back home.  And it did not get me back home. And in fact those fine words about amends I could not just sit down and say. It had to develop out of actions, actions that arose out of isolation, anxiety, rejection and almost repudiation. I was practically persona non grata at the house. Not invited to family functions, to holiday functions, pretty much cut off.  I had no optimistic expectation that my marriage would be saved.  

Early on with this type of rejection, I got so angry that I just removed my marriage band to show the level of my depression and disgust. The only glimmer that I understood that there was some hope was that the wife continued to wear hers. My assumption was that it was out of habit. But as it continued for more than fourteen of those twenty-four months of exile, I took this as a vague but positive message of hope.

Time, as I have written before, has a way of making the cloudy sediment settle. And as the silt from all that muddied water from that turbulent life finally settled with the passing months and your new calmer selves have finally floated to the top, old resentments could be washed away so that new clear thinking could bring new resolution to bear upon this old relationship. And if those calmer selves are what you want to live with, then opinions can be changed and reconciliation can begin.

But that’s where things just begin to begin. Because time, remember that old goat time? hasn’t been standing still for either of you. You have been individually changing. You have learned to live apart and independently. And two once co-dependent lives are now independent and they now have new habits and skills.

Making that work in this new relationship, now that’s the new deal. How that will work out for the two of you on this homecoming, that will be the trick.

For she has no longer depended upon you for so much, not the least of which is the day to day handout of money. She had to make do by her own wits without that for which she was most reliant upon you. How handily she did may be beside the point because she is no longer afraid of doing it without you. She knows that she can do it by herself and doesn’t really need you around.

And you, you have learned that you can get moral support from other people in this world.  When she was no longer around for you, seemingly not caring what was going on in your head, you had to do for yourself and find others to commiserate with you and guide you.  And you did.

You finally learned to become independent of her good opinion.  You learned not to need to wake up in the morning with her beside you and you learned to not have to turn to her when something was keenly painful that you needed her knowing comfort to help resolve. She wasn’t there. And that was by design. She chose to absent herself from your life and you made do. And you did.

So she finally did ask you to return to the home, she from a position of emotional and financial independence and you from a position of  emotional strength. 

But you finally decided that if you were going to move back and make this marriage work you would symbolically acknowledge it by putting your wedding band back on.  And you did. 

But six weeks  after your return you find that she seems to have forgotten about her wedding band, it was taken off at some point and it fails to make a reappearance on the hand. Ennui? Or a symbol?.... Time…..

It takes time to destroy a marriage as it does to reintegrate one. But as I have described the “facts on the ground” as it were, I can understand that I may see the seeds of dissolution of this union having been sown by the act of the separation and the need to survive that separation with personalities intact.  And that very need to keep body and mostly soul intact may spell the end to the union.

It will do that because, simply put, the separation has made us individually stronger people, less codependent, freer and more single minded thinkers.  Therefore the bonds of codependency that may have been indeed pathologic initially,  may have been permanently undermined by this whole past two or more years.

And who is to say that that, in the long run, it is such a bad thing?

© res 10/26/11