Living With Addiction- Part 7

I woke up way too early this morning, and started thinking about something that had once happened and I just had to get out of bed to write about it.  If this is your first time reading this page called Living With Addiction, there are 5 other parts to this story.  This is the 6th.  I would suggest that you go back and start from the beginning, but that is up to you.  This is my true account of my marriage, and subsequent collapse of my marriage, to a man who became addicted to drugs.

When I left off, I had told you about the worst fight we had ever had.  I also told you about what finally led me to basically kick him out.  I told you that was not the end, that it was really just the beginning.  I have also explained how my memories are fleeting and I will think of different happenings out of the clear blue that I had not remembered in years.  The following account is one of those.

This goes back to before I gathered his stuff into garbage bags and placed them on the porch.  That happened when my son was probably two weeks old.  But let’s go back a little while to when I was about 7-8 months pregnant with my son.  My ex husband was a mortgage loan originator at a bank here in town, and he did very well for himself.  He was making in the 6 digits.  Every year, the top 15 performers in the company got to go on a really nice trip.  This particular year, they went to Las Vegas and Palm Springs.  I was ready to pop at the time of this trip, and I begged him not to go.  Of course, you can probably guess how that went.  I was the very least of his worries.  And he went on the trip.  I had a 4 year old and was hugely pregnant.  I remember having to have a friend come and stay with me because I was afraid I was going to go into labor while I was there alone.

I forget how long the trip was, something like 4 days.  The entire time he was away, I don’t think I heard from him more than a couple of times.  It was time for him to come home, and on the day he was due back, he called me and told me that he was going to be delayed.  That the flight was over booked and he was going to be bumped and it would be about 24 hours.  Well, I was not buying that for one second.  I was furious!  I needed him to come home!  I threw a huge fit and told him that he had better find a way to be on that flight, or not to bother to come home at all.  I explained that there were 15 other people on that flight with him who did not have wives who were due to give birth at any moment.  One of them could be bumped.  I knew in my heart that he was lying to me, and that he just wanted to stay an extra day.  Somehow, after my fit throwing, he managed onto that flight.  It was a miracle!  (yeah, right)

I tell you this story as a point of reference for how quickly his life unraveled.  One minute, I was pregnant with our son, and he was in the top 15 in his company, and within one year from then, he was fired, and his life had spiraled so far down that there was no coming back.  I will never forget that after he had moved out for good, finding the little magazine from that trip he took.  It was a pamphlet type of thing that had bio’s on all of the people who were on the trip.  I was cleaning out his closet to give the rest of his things to his mother.  Because he never even bothered to come and move out.  I had to pack his things and have his mom come and get them.  He was so far gone by then that he didn’t even care to get his belongings.

Anyway, I was packing his closet up, and I came across this magazine.  That was from this trip he had taken not even one year previous.  I sat down to flip through it, and I found his bio.  It was a few paragraphs long.  I was horrified when I read it.  The memory of it sickens me.  Now, you know how a bio goes.  You talk about your education experience, your work experience, and your family.  When I read his bio, there was no mention of his family!  No mention of being married at all.  No mention of his beautiful 4 year old daughter, or his pregnant wife who was due to have his son at any moment.  It was as if we did not exist.  As if that bio was about a man who was completely single, no family to speak of.

That really hurt me, especially when I compared his bio to everyone else’s and they all mentioned their families and their children.  He later admitted to me that he had taken off his wedding ring that weekend and did not tell a single soul that he was married or had children.  As a matter of fact, he made that a habit, not mentioning us, as if we did not exist.  I think that is just so very low.  How low do you need to sink to leave out the fact that you have a family?  How sick is that?  It was the first of many times that I found out he did just that.  That is scraping the bottom of the barrel in my opinion.

So, I kicked him out when my baby son was only a couple of weeks old, and I was on my own.  He had stayed out all night long, into the next afternoon actually, and that was the final straw.  He had been making a habit of it, and I was done.  I needed to teach him a lesson.  He needed to get his priorities straight.  He needed to put his family first, and be a family man.  He needed to realize what was important in life.  So I kicked him to the curb.  He would be sorry.  I would make him stay gone for a while, until he realized the error of his ways, and then we would try again.  That is what I was thinking at the time.  That I needed to show him that I was serious, and that there were boundaries is life.

Only it didn’t work that way.  Him moving out was probably just what he needed to fully feed his addiction.  I think that it is what sent him over the edge into oblivion.  He no longer had anything to hide from me because he wasn’t living with me, so he got heavier into his drug use.  That is my guess, but he would probably confirm it if I asked him about it now.

As I hinted to, this separation was not permanent.  I had never intended it to be.  I had intended it to be a lesson to him.  It did not work out that way though.  Join me next time and I will tell you how it happened that he moved back in, and what ensued.  Trust me, it is only the beginning.