Married to a Drug Addict

Married to a drug addict,

by Stephen Aycock:

The woman stood facing her husband, though they were separated by only a few feet it might as well have been miles.  It was the same battle ground they had been on for years.  She stared at him from a distance, barely able to focus on him, seeing him but not seeing him. 

The air seemed stale to her, there was no energy, she felt like she was knee deep in mud trudging through a stagnant swamp. All of these years it had been her misguided but well-intentioned belief that somehow it was up to her to fix him, she thought that with her love, with her kindness and most of all with her forgiveness, she could get him to see that she was worth changing for, she could make him clean. 

He stood in front of her a poor replica of what he once was, a petrified man, made so by years of drugs streaming through his veins, changing every cell in his body until he eventually calcified into a new creation, something hard and calloused. Only the man’s shell remained, what was inside had changed into a selfish shadow of what he once was. She loved him still...or at least she thought she did. Years of nursing his addictions, dealing with catastrophic financial failings, fixing his problems, running interference between him and the kids so that they would not truly see what their father had become, had taken their toll on her. She was an exhausted caregiver, she smiled to herself sarcastically and wondered if this revelation made him her patient. 

Did she love him or was the routine so deeply ingrained in her that she knew no other way to live?  Had misery become so common place in her life that even the preverbal rock in her shoe was a mere annoyance compared to the daily torment she lived with? And the drama…it never seemed to end, and in a way, it always seemed to facilitate another episode. It followed a predictable pattern, 1st there was the act, each more terrible than the one before.  He spent the house payment money on Methadone Oxy and alcohol, so now they were three payments behind and only one payment away from losing their home.  There were the multiple credit cards, all maxed out, some even in her name. There were the many reports from the children themselves that he drove them around when he was barely able to walk. There was also the money missing from an already bulimic account and the many lost jobs that were never his fault, and the ever popular falling asleep at the dinner table, complete with food falling out of his mouth.

These were the ever-present and increasing events in "the days of her life". She chuckled uneasily at her own reference to a soap opera, but that’s what her life was, wasn’t it? 1st comes chaos, then comes admission, then follows begging, crying, statements of regret and vows of a better future. There were even times that in clear view of the children he would throw himself to the ground and upon his knees hold his hands high up towards the heavens, praying for GOD to take this addiction from him. She believed it was partly true on some level, that he really believed this, but she also knew it was another form of manipulation dressed up in Sunday clothes.  Never really in recovery, never actually letting go so that GOD could truly handle it, just dipping his toe in the water just enough so that everyone around him would let their guard down, …just one more time...and begin to trust. And after the begging, pleading, and of course forgiveness, he would present the magnificently orchestrated story of what now would take place in their lives. Like a poet Laureate he would stand in front of his family and deliver a grand speech with grandiose gestures describing the man he would soon become, the NA meetings he would attend, the new job just on the horizon that would soon be his, and what a father and husband he longed and planned to be.  

Like his addiction, even real life had to be all about him. For him it was a high of a different kind, even on the smallest stage he was surrounded by people that were urging him on, the center of attention…you could almost hear the Star-Spangled Banner playing behind him, if it wasn’t such a tragedy it would be funny.  What a picture he could paint of a Pollyanna future. If he had a gift, that was it.

He stared at his wife from across the room and wondered what could have made her smile at this particular point and time. Shaking his head in exasperation he said, “It’s like I’ve told you before, you can’t understand what I’m dealing with here!  You can’t possibly relate to the pain I’m in or how my past history has affected me”.  

The husband had been up for days and was in no mood to attend another lecture from his wife. But for some reason today was different. She had a look on her face not unlike those soldiers returning home from early wars, “I think they called it the thousand-mile stare”, he muttered to himself.  “Yes”, he admitted to the wife reluctantly, “I’ve taken a little more of my pain medicine than I should have, but don’t I have the right to feel good like everyone else, I mean, haven’t I earned it?  And yes, once again you’re right, I’m gonna run out of my meds way before the end of the month, but I have a plan for that, I can fix this”.  

The wife struggled to convey her emotions, sought to articulate her words so that they could have the most meaning in the least amount of time. She knew she would not win, could not win, just like a hundred times before. She had heard all these words before and marveled at the fact that there were only 26 letters in the alphabet to describe what she was feeling, and yet she had heard the same arguments with different renditions a thousand different ways.  

The wife simply looked at him with a sad empty face and said in a monotone voice, “I’m done, I’m through with you”.  Watching his shocked expression spread out on his incredulous face she continued, though she thought it odd that this was the first real emotion she had seen him exhibit in years.  “My leaving you is not because of my lack of love for you or because I’m developing a hatred toward you. It’s not because I’m angry or because of your arrogance; it is not because of your denial or my years of enabling you. It is not for the benefit of the kids or because of the danger you have placed them in from time to time.  It is not because I don’t believe that you can beat this or that in some superficial way you still love me and the kids.  It is not because of the past that you took from me or the future you will deny me” …  “It is because my dear husband you are indifferent to me, and the site of you inspires nothing within me”.  

He looked at her as if he did not understand; the wife continued kindly, which in itself alarmed the husband. “Let me explain the term indifference to you in words that you can understand. When I watch a movie, it can make me cry, when I hear a beautiful song, it takes me to where the music wants me to go. When I read a poem about the road less traveled it brings to mind all the possibilities that life could have presented me if I had only chosen to put one foot in front of the other…it makes me smile.  But when I see you, I feel nothing.  Your words have no meaning and when you talk, I think about the grocery list or how am I going to get that nasty stain out of your shirt. Your words reverberate off the wall like some annoying sound that needs to be blocked out of my head, like the alarms on a garbage truck or the sound fingernails make when they’re scrapped across a chalk board.  When you walk through the door, I see only a shadow and the world for me becomes black and white, bleak, and void of any real substance. You actually have the ability to suck colors out of a room whenever you are around me.

The man stood in utter profound silence; never before had he heard such terrible hurtful words emanating from his sweet wife’s mouth. She continued as if she was giving an analytical review of how grass grows instead of stating her feelings toward her long time husband. The words flowed from her curved lips now as if a dam had burst, hurling polished pearls of wisdom at him that had been held back for what seemed like an eternity.  “For years I have lived with true loneliness”, she said. “Do you know what that is”?  The man only stood silent in the center of a vast living room that seemed to close in around him by the minute.  “There is a kind of loneliness that one feels when there is no one in their life.  It comes with a longing and a sadness that for many is hard to describe, they only know that there is a need to connect with another individual, to be part of something greater than themselves; it is a basic need for all of us. That connection comes with a desire to give not take, to share not consume, to feel irreplaceable not expendable.  True Love does not exist by itself my husband; it is made up of four components, trust, honor, integrity, and sacrifice. Without any one of these four you cannot have love.

She made the short walk across the room toward her husband and cupped his chin in her hands. Pulling his face close to Her’s she said in a seductive whisper, “True loneliness my husband is not the lack of having someone. True loneliness is lying next to someone, and yet you feel nothing for them. What you do feel is a constant unexplainable loss that is akin to grieving, like when someone dies.  It is with you when you first open your eyes; and it is with you at the end of the day when you close them again. It permeates every fiber of your being and takes on physical shape, an almost touchable tangible black entity that wraps itself around you and casts a cloud over everything you do and feel. Then you wake up one day and realize that someone has died, and that someone is you, and I have been dying for years.”  The women walked out of the room leaving the shattered remains of what use to be…someone she once knew.

 “The worst day in a drug addicts life comes not when they’ve lost everything, but when they realized they have lost everyone”-S. Aycock