Trickery

I spent most of the weekend picking up around the house and spending quality time with the kids. Sunday, I got up early with Camden and we made some chocolate peanut butter muffins. While they were in the oven, we put on Chris Tomlin and Hillsong. We painted our fingernails and toenails sparkly pink and got prettied up for church. It was a fun girls morning. Then we went and peeled my son out of his bed and shook the smashed Good N Plentys off his back, basically dressed him and marched him to the car for church. He complained the whole way that he didn’t want to go and shouldn’t have to because daddy wasn’t, and saying he wanted to stay with daddy.

I got there and chit chatted with some friends and took Camden to her classroom. Then I got some iced tea for me and Cage and we went to worship. It is really nice to have him in there with me for worship. The service was really great. I like the series they are doing right now. It is about sin and how we all try to fix ourselves but we are so messed up that we can’t fix it alone. He talked about how we lay in bed thinking "Man I said I wasnt going to do that again" or we turn off our computer and sit there beating up ourselves, saying "I promised I wouldn’t do that." You can tell half our congregation is addicts.

I’m so sick of addiction. I spent between two and three hours on my phone yesterday talking to my sponsor and an S-Anon friend. I am dealing with so much shit. I went months without the urge to snoop and obsess over his behavior. I had given control up to my Higher Power. I have taken two steps forward and ten back currently. I am fighting constantly with really horrible crippling anxiety the past few days. I lay in bed and toss and turn and try to force my breathing to be normal. I sit up and pace. It feels like only finding "proof" of what I know is going on will take away this anxiety in me. Do you know how hard it is to fight against that? It feels like I’m going to die sometimes and that something huge is sitting on my chest. 

At our last meeting we talked a lot about whether people were still "in love" with their spouses, whether they still had "hope," whether they had moved on completely. We have a big mix of people in my group that are divorced, married, and separated. A lot of people still have a whole lot of hope. And the sad thing is, they all share the same sentiments…. that they shouldn’t have hope, that it’s hard to say goodbye to their dreams, that they wish they could stop caring so much. For the 30,000th time, I think… I don’t want to be a part of a relationship where it’s better to not have hope or to care. How can I live my life with someone I can’t love or have hope with? What will happen when we face the tough life challenges that come our way? When we lose parents, when we lose our health, when we lose jobs, our home? I would rather be alone than to be with someone I can’t share hope with. And it’s even harder to have hope when he isn’t even working a program. I honestly can’t see the hope for a future unless we are both working a program. 

Yesterday I talked with my sponsor about how I felt that I was being tricked every day. He says things one way but never lives up to them. What he says and what he does is like two completely different people. I feel like I’ve been tricked by him since the first day we met. He told me he was single, in reality he had been living with a girl for four years. He told me he wanted to have a monogamous relationship, and there has never been a single day in our relationship that it was monogamous. He told me he didn’t want to spank the kids and that parents that spank were uneducated and abusive, but he is quick to raise his hand at our kids. He told me that his kids will have a better life than he did, but he will loudly call Cage a "dumb ass" and put him way down. He says he wants sobriety, but doesn’t work a program or even seem to try for sobriety. He tricks me by dressing up in rank that he lost a year ago, changing out his rank before he gets home. Tricks me by the way he hides his cheating. Tricks me by saying if I leave him, I will have no money from him, when an e8 told me that I can and WILL get BAH. I feel really angry about this trickery on his part, and I pray about it a lot. It helps to meditate and acknowledge that we are all broken and imperfect and that he doesn’t do these things TO me because he is a BAD person or that I’m a bad person who doesn’t deserve better treatment.

I feel panicky because I see us falling apart. I am trying, and there’s times I feel like I’m going to die just from the effort that it takes to work on my life. I can’t share that with him because he’s not giving that same effort. I pray and let go, knowing I can’t change him. I go to church with the kids and try to teach them that they are children of God and oh so very special and important, and I see him dismiss them or call them names like "dumb ass." I know Cage is going to struggle for the next 14 years with school and keeping up with the other kids, and it kills me to hear daddy call him a dumb ass. In my head I’m shrieking no, no, no…. please don’t do this… he’s smart, he’s important, he’s good! Then I’m fighting myself not to admonish my husband at the same time, because that is the behavior I’m fighting against every day. It is so complicated. I understand that he is not a Christian and every Sunday we would go to church, he would act out. People were noticing, but it was luckily a fellow S-Anon-er and she just said she saw him in the truck and recognized the behavior so she just tried to gather me and the kids up and go in, all smiles and chatting. And it helped and I thank her. I understand that he doesn’t want to go to a Christian church with us, but I wish he would find a higher power and put some effort into this with me. 

I need to rethink this diary as a place for sharing these things considering he has access and reads this. Part of the "right" thing to do in my program is to not admonish or talk down to him, and if he reads this I effectively have done that. Urgh. It is hard to keep all of this inside and not have a friend to share with. Dear God, again, right? If nothing else I can certainly say that this addiction led to a serious relationship with God.