Part 4, My Life Had to Get Worse Before It Got Better

I don't even know what to title this portion of my life. Total insanity.

We did this swapping partner thing for about a year and what happens next is so horrible I am not sure I can ever forgive myself for what I had turned in to and what I did. I still feel shame to my very core and only one person in the world knows about this part of me. I haven't finished my 4th and 5th steps and am pretty sure this will have to be included in it. I am praying for the courage to do that.

At this time we were having some financial difficulties, not totally broke, and probably not much different than other married couples with kids, car payments and a house. It wasn't as though we couldn't pay our mortgage or put food on the table but money was very tight.

One day when we were alone and having a rare, quiet, happy moment together my husband suggested that if I was already sleeping with men why not do it for money.    My first reaction was disbelief that he would suggest such a thing.   I told him that I would absolutely never do such a thing. 

But the seed had been planted and the next time he brought up the topic I was more receptive to listening to him.  It was the summer of 2004 and I remember this because there was something in the news about escorts and prostitutes at one of the politcal conventions.  He had done some research and some of these women were making thousands of dollars a day. 

Somehow he convinced me that it was ok and that I was doing it for my family.  No one would ever know and that it was a temporary solution to our money problems. I want to add here that he never forced me to do this. I agreed.

And so for the next year that is what I did. He helped me set up a website and took pictures and voila, men were emailing and I met with them in hotel rooms and sold my body for money.

It’s not easy leading a double life full of secrets and shame. But, today as I reflect back on my life I can see that pattern started at an early age with my family of origin. Years later I still had that fake smile plastered to my face pretending to the world, and sometimes to myself, that all was fine. Even when the pain inside was too much to bear.

Faith

At last night's meeting the topic was faith. Our lack of it, how it's helped us in recovery, how we found it. As usual I heard some great shares and while I didn't get a chance to speak it made me think about how far I've come in believing that there is someone, something out there in the universe that is looking out for my best interest. There has to be because I was close to death at the end of my drinking when I was so out of control and unable to stop.

I didn't immediately have faith in AA. In fact, the first few weeks I didn't believe anyone had been sober as long as they claimed. They had to drink on the weekends or when alone. Because that's all I knew. But I came to believe when I saw these genuinely happy people whose lives were no longer focused around drinking. And I wanted that.

The last share was the best of all. A man, probably in his early thirties, and who has been sober 7 months told us about his last "run". He had been living in his car for a few weeks while on a drug and alcohol binge. He wasn't eating or sleeping much. His wife found him by the GPS chip in his cell phone. She knocked on his car window and asked him if that's how he wanted to die and if that's how he wanted their young daughter to remember him. She took him to a treatment facility and when he got out he had to deal with outstanding arrest warrants.

He went to court last fall and the trial was put on hold. He went back in December and again it was put on hold. In late February he faced a prosecutor who wanted the state to give him the maximum sentence of 5 years (he didn't say what the crime was). But after the judge saw how he was turning his life around, he gave him probation instead. This man was back living at home, he was active in AA, and he had a job he showed up for everyday.

His voice cracked as he said that faith is what saved him. He knows he didn't do this alone. It was the fellowship of his program and a loving God who gave him a second chance at life.

That was a powerful message.

My Story, Part 3 continued

Upon my urging my husband went to marriage counseling with me. And it doesn't work when one party doesn't want to be there. (Karma?) He felt like the therapist was taking my side and the sessions were all about me bitching about his porn use and lack of attention and him relunctantly agreeing to stop.  I think we might have gone to 3 or 4 sessions and then stopped.  It was around the same time I also stopped going to my own therapist too.

He was miserable, I was miserable and on top of that we had a busy and stressful life between work and the kids (my daughter from my first marriage, and our two together, and he had two sons  from his first marriage). But such is life and people have gone thru worse, yet I had a hard time coping with all of this.

His porn use continued and eventually if I thought if I couldn't fight it why not join in. I offered to watch it with him and went too far: losing a lot of weight (and I was never heavy) getting cosmetic surgery and highlighting my hair blonde. I thought if I could look like the women in the movies he watched he would be more attracted to me.

It was a temporary fix.

I think we were married about 3 or 4 years when my husband suggested that we experiment with an open marriage. I am ashamed to say that I agreed to this. I was so afraid of losing him, so scared he was going to have an affair. Who was this man I had married? It wasn't easy for me to watch him with other women and I pretended that it was all ok but deep inside me I was so sad. I didn't want to share my husband and I didn't want some strange man touching me.

Also, around this time he admitted to me that he had had numerous affairs while married to his first wife and told me that when he married me he promised himself that he would never do that again  He wanted this marriage to work and regretted what he had done.  It made the swinging/open marriage make more sense.  They way he described it was we could both explore our sexuality in a safe environment with out any secrets.  Everything would be in the open. 

My drinking picked up a little. Whenever we went out we drank. However, he was handling it a lot better than me. I always felt crappy the next day and had bad hangovers. We never drank at home but dinners out were always a few cocktails before and a bottle or two of wine during. Ironically, it was these nights out when I felt closest to my husband.  Alcohol was my escape and I could pretend everything was alright and it felt like we were going out on a date like the times before we got married and we didn’t have all this extra strife and stress in real life. I could pretend for a few hours out alone with him that my life was just fine.

Today as I write this with almost 11 months of sobriety I wonder if I have some deep emotional or mental issues because what sane, normal, respectable woman would agree to something like this and not put limits on what is acceptable behavior?

My Story, Part 3, The Grass Is Not Greener!

I ended up marrying the guy I had an affair with about 8 months after we met. He was the opposite of my first husband: grounded, reliable and financially secure. But as I would soon find out that cliché about the grass being greener is so not true.

A few months into marriage #2 I found out that my husband was viewing a lot of online porn.  I was devastated because I compared myself to those women and knew I could never look like them.  It made me feel so inadequate.  He promised to stop viewing it.   He did not.   Maybe he couldn't?

I got pregnant and we had a son. Two months later we had a surprise and found out I was pregnant again. We had a daughter. I want to add here that despite all the drama/chaos/insanity I have created in my life I am the blessed mother of 3 beautiful children all of whom are happy, healthy, well adjusted and doing well in school.

The divide between my husband and I was getting wider. I was resentful of his lack of affection and porn use and he was angry about my snooping and nagging.  I was so desperate for love and attention and I wasn't getting it from my husband.   Sometimes I felt like I was married to my father and in many ways we assumed a parent - child relationship. He made a lot of the decisions and I agreed to them.  Partly because I didn’t like arguments (I have always and still am bad at handling confrontations) but also because it was just easier to not have to make decisions.  He had some similar personality traits to Dad, ones from the onset I had admired, but the distant, unemotional side of him was difficult for me to accept.  I was depressed and I felt doomed. I wanted so badly for this marriage to work out.  What kind of a loser gets divorced twice?  What was I doing wrong that I was so unhappy again in a relationship?

I started obsessing about the porn and all kinds of thoughts flooded my head. What if he took it too far and met someone from the internet? He was becoming quieter and more secretive so my snooping just increased.
One night after he was asleep I took his keys, drove to his office (he owned the business), and went onto his computer. The stuff there was more graphic then what he had viewed at home but what amazed me most was the amount of time he spent looking at it. I mean, if someone is horny, and they choose to look at porn, they get off on it and then they are finished until the next time, right? This was hours and hours per day. He was an early riser and usually left home at 5 or 5:30 am and I just assumed it was to get a head start on his day. But every morning for 2 or 3 hours until his employees showed up the computer history showed him on all kinds of porn websites.

At one point I considered suicide and I remember clearly that night sitting alone in my kitchen after everyone had gone to bed pouring out a bottle of over-the-counter sleep medication into my hand. I put the blue pills in my mouth and then spat them back into my hand. Something stopped me from swallowing them.

I went to therapy for my depression and was prescribed anti-depressants.  It took a few months to find the right medication and dosage but they did eventually help.  Things at home really weren't much better but the talk therapy helped me to see that I really didn't have control over what my husband did.  But I did have control over what my reactions were.  It also helped me to realize I was very co-dependent too. 

My Story, Part 2 Teens and Twenties

When I graduated from high school with mediocre grades and all my close friends were headed off to college I decided to find a job in New York City. Heck no, I would not attend a community college as my parents suggested. We lived outside of New York in a suburb so it was an easy commute. I was lucky to have found a good job considering the only work experience I had was part time retail during high school and a few months as a bank teller.

But it was the mid 80's before the stock market had crashed, the economy was good and Wall Street was hiring.

It didn't take long for me to find the happy hour crowd at the office and Friday evenings were bar hopping around downtown Manhattan and in the South Street Seaport. A lot of places did not ask for ID, and I think wearing a suit and being with older co workers there might have been an assumption that I was of age. I'm not really certain why but it was rarely was I asked for proof of age.

Alcohol was my social lubricant. I was no longer the shy girl no one noticed. It made me feel
prettier, smarter, funnier, more at ease. My friends thought it was funny how I could flirt with men and laughed at my antics.  So different than the girl they knew in the office.

In the present day I try not to romanticize drinking because it’s not a type of thinking I can have anymore but those times for me were fun. Yeah I did a lot of stupid things when drunk but I was out in the world, away from my childhood home and actually did do a good job at work.

I worked at the same company for a few years and was offered a promotion if I could pass a test. It was brutal and I had a hard time studying and taking the prep classes needed to pass the exam. The first time I took it I failed by 1 point, the second time was even worse. I think I failed by 10 points. So I gave up and decided to look for a new career. Not that they were going to fire me but I was so disappointed with myself for failing. Little did I know at this time it would only be the start of many jobs to come. And I dumped the boyfriend too, thinking I could do better. Wow, I was arrogant back then.

I was always looking for something better whether it was a new boyfriend, a better job and I am sad to say I even ruined friendships thinking it was time for new ones. I was restless, irritable and discontent.
I have always felt like there was a void in my life, even though I could never verbalize that. One of the first sayings I remember when joining AA was about the hole in the donut. Yes! That has been me for my whole life.

I soon got sick and tired of the commute, my failed career choices, bad choices in men. My drinking wasn't so bad back then but when I drank I drank to get drunk. Smashed, falling down, sometimes puking my guts out drunk.

I met my husband when I was 22 and he was 25. He was the opposite of my stern father. An ex frat boy, football player, life of the party kind of guy. At that time I felt that he was what I needed to feel good about myself. We were married within 14 months of meeting. My father passed away before I go married and while he didn't say much about it I had the feeling he didn't approve of my choice in a husband.

It wasn't a good match for a few reasons. I decided after getting married that the party was over. And without any kind of warning just assuming he would agree with me. It was time to settle down and act like grown ups. I wanted a husband who stayed home in the evening and spent a lot of time with me. I wanted a big house and social status.

But he had other plans and liked to go out after work with his friends and party all weekend. We disagreed on everything from finances to religion to the way to raise our future children.

We did have one child, a daughter, a few years after we married. I was still in my good girl phase and rarely drank. I was disgusted with my husband's out of control drinking so I think that played a big part in me not drinking as much. Besides I could never rely on him to drive as he was always drunk after any kind of social occasion.

8 years into this union I wanted out.  I am ashamed to admit what follows next but I need to be honest here. I started acting extra bitchy, distancing myself from him and devising a plan to get a divorce all the while making me look like the good one. He knew something was wrong and would always ask how to repair the damage, begging at times to try and work it out. We tried marriage counseling (it was a sham as I had no desire to work it out). He promised to stop drinking but he couldn't. I had a feeling he was an alcoholic but at that point didn't know much about AA.

Then I had an affair.

He never found out but because things were so chaotic at home and I was uncooperative he filed for divorce. My daughter and I moved out and I continued the affair.

I really thought all of this was ok to do. I justified my actions thinking I had been wronged by marrying an alcoholic, irresponsible man. I deserved better! Boy, talk about selfish.

 

Step 4

A few weeks ago my sponsor gave me worksheets so I could start working on Step 4.  I still haven't started although I've read them over.  I feel overwhelmed at what will follow in Step 5 where I have to spill the beans and tell her all of this crap. 

It's all fear based and I guess I'm worried about her reaction to some of the insane things I have done in my past.  She's so nice and normal and had a high bottom .... she didn't lose her marriage, job, family.   She knows the basics of my story but I haven't told her any of the really bad stuff because I'm embarrassed. 

I've heard over and over again  in AA that I am only as sick as my secrets.  And I've been warned that I have to do the program the correct way in order to stay sober.  Not my way, taking little bits that are easier for me, but the way it was written in the Big Book.  And Step 5 clearly states I have to share my complete story with someone. 

The Insanity Of My Disease

By the summer of 2009 I was a slave to alcohol.  It had complete control over me and I was drunk more then I was sober.

One night after everyone was in bed I noticed all the wine I had purchased the day before was gone. (The boxed kind, cuz I was a classy girl).  How could that happen? I looked at my watch and it was well after 11pm; too late to go to a liquor store.

I was feeling panicked as I always did when I was running low or out of alcohol. Then I remembered there was a six pack of beer hidden in my bedroom closet. I only had to slip into the room quietly, but open the closet door which was only feet away from where my husband slept.

Of course the door had to creak when I opened it. I waited and listened for his steady breathing before I quietly walked across the room and slid opened the closet door. I had to turn on the closet light to see as the hallway light was not enough.

He rolled over towards me and I quickly crouched down on the floor peeking up to see if he was awake. Thinking it was ok I rummaged thru the closet finding the paper bag with the six pack in it. I slipped the bag out and turned around. His eyes were open and he was looking at me. Ut oh.

He rolled over in bed and I quickly left the room wondering if he had seen me or if I had imagined that. No matter, I brought the beer downstairs and opened the first one. I didn‘t care that it was warm.

I don’t recall what happened after that but I’m sure I finished most if not all of them and slept on the sofa that night. I don’t think my husband said anything to me the next morning or it might have been one of the days he searched the house before I woke up and found hidden alcohol. Usually when he did he’d put the bottle on my desk (we both worked out of our house) saying nothing until the kids had left the house. That waiting time was pure agony as I’d pass by my desk and see the bottle waiting for what I knew would end as a screaming match once the kids left and were on the bus.

And on and on went this routine would go for several more months.