I've been thinking...
He and I first met on January 7, 2006. My ex-boyfriend and I first met on January 7, 1996. When he pointed it out to me on the phone a couple of months ago, I thought that was an interesting coincidence.
I have been doing A LOT of thinking since I received his first letter. When he are back, we’ll have a lot of things to talk about. I want to hear what he has to say about what happened. I want to understand. And, I want to figure out how to proceed, and where I want our friendship to go, if it is possible.
I tell myself that our knowing each other is too recent for it to be part of the problem that sent him into his spiral. I don’t even know him well enough to know what his history is, and what precipitated this. I don’t know if it has happened before. I don’t know a lot of things… Many of them aren’t really relevant. The past is the past. And, except in as much as we need to understand the past in order to gain more full comprehension of who we are now and how we came to be, it is also necessary to let it go. If you cannot let go of the past, even when that letting go is horribly difficult and heart-wrenchingly painful, then you cannot truly experience the full extent of your feelings, and you cannot move on with your life so that you are able to live it.
We still have our memories, and we will always share those beautiful moments and feelings. But, if at all possible, I want to start our friendship over. There are some things I want to approach differently. There are things that, while I acknowledge that I cannot undo them, or change them, or that I would necessarily even want to, I do not want to do that way again. To be frank, some of what I observed in him when he started drinking, or when I think is when he started the cycle that led us here, well, some of that scared me. Not because I thought he would do anything to me, but because it was so out-of-control. I was not afraid of him, but I was afraid for him. I did not know what to do. I did not know him well enough to know the history, so could not know whether this was something he just do sometimes, whether it was a life-or-death situation, or what. I did not feel able to say what I was feeling and thinking. I was afraid to anger him, and then, even when it didn’t matter any more if I angered him, I felt the situation dire enough to remove myself from it.
I don’t drink. Although I have no moral opposition to alcohol, I just don’t like a lot of it. I will occasionally have a drink, but I probably have less than five alcoholic beverages in any given year. That has always been the case. I have never liked the taste of beer. I don’t like most wine. But, more than anything else, I neither like the way people behave when they drink, nor do I like the extreme damage that has been done, to me and to other people I care for, by alcohol. Honestly, when it comes down to it, while I do not like it, either, I would rather see pot legalized and alcohol made illegal, again. When I see what alcohol and alcoholism has done to people, I am horrified. And not just in what it does to the people who drink, but also to anybody who cares about them, or tries to.
I don’t like alcohol. I rarely buy it. I have never been drunk (a bit tipsy a couple of times, but never drunk). I have never had a hangover. But, I have been very, very hurt by alcohol. Because of that, I choose not to drink. My ex-husband is an alcoholic who has let alcohol, alcoholism, and now, AA be his reasons, excuses, and rationalizations for never turning his life around, keeping a job, paying his bills, being a father, etc. If I have ever hated anyone, and I am not sure that I have, it is he. Not because of the mistakes he made, but because he refuses to take responsibility for them, and he refuses to change. He went from being addicted to alcohol to being addicted to AA, only it’s worse now, because he is sober enough to pontificate about how he’s changing his life around. Give me a break, how many years does it take to get a job?! Anyway, that is neither here nor there; the point is that his behaviors affected me.
Of the seven men that I have been relatively seriously involved with in my life, besides my father, 5 were/are alcoholics. One would be, except that he has a pancreatic disorder that makes it that, if he drinks, even only once a month, he would likely die within a year. So that leaves 1 out of 6 ~ not the greatest track record, huh?!
But, anyway, knowing what I know about the devastation imparted by alcohol, I have chosen not to drink, and I have also chosen not to pursue relationships with people who are active drinkers. With him, when I asked if he was drinking, that day in his bedroom, it was before I saw all the cans and stuff, and I could just tell, by the smell and his emotional downward spiral, etc. At that time, I decided that, if this was a regular part of yourhis life, than I could not be.
I did know, however, that I couldn’t live with that in my life. My intention, at that time, was to give it a few more weeks, so that I could get to know him better, but to take a giant step backwards, as far as allowing myself to be emotionally vulnerable is concerned. I saw in him everything that I have always hoped for in a man ~ he is sweet, gentle, kind, compassionate, passionate, gorgeous, insightful, strong, sexy, and, the most important thing of all, intelligent. One of the few. But I also saw a problem that neither had anything to do with me nor was within the realm of my ability to resolve. Especially given the relative newness of our relationship. If nothing else, I figured that I could not handle the stress of coping with such things, and that I had no right to tell him what to do, didn’t know how he would react to my “advice,” and that I as going to have to let it go if things didn’t change very soon, so that I could take care of myself the way that I deserve to be taken care of, and so that I could take care of my children, so that they are brought up the way that they deserves to be. Children who possess a supposedly-recovering alcoholic father, don't need me to knowingly enter into such a volatile situation with another man.
I have been doing A LOT of thinking since I received his first letter. When he are back, we’ll have a lot of things to talk about. I want to hear what he has to say about what happened. I want to understand. And, I want to figure out how to proceed, and where I want our friendship to go, if it is possible.
I tell myself that our knowing each other is too recent for it to be part of the problem that sent him into his spiral. I don’t even know him well enough to know what his history is, and what precipitated this. I don’t know if it has happened before. I don’t know a lot of things… Many of them aren’t really relevant. The past is the past. And, except in as much as we need to understand the past in order to gain more full comprehension of who we are now and how we came to be, it is also necessary to let it go. If you cannot let go of the past, even when that letting go is horribly difficult and heart-wrenchingly painful, then you cannot truly experience the full extent of your feelings, and you cannot move on with your life so that you are able to live it.
We still have our memories, and we will always share those beautiful moments and feelings. But, if at all possible, I want to start our friendship over. There are some things I want to approach differently. There are things that, while I acknowledge that I cannot undo them, or change them, or that I would necessarily even want to, I do not want to do that way again. To be frank, some of what I observed in him when he started drinking, or when I think is when he started the cycle that led us here, well, some of that scared me. Not because I thought he would do anything to me, but because it was so out-of-control. I was not afraid of him, but I was afraid for him. I did not know what to do. I did not know him well enough to know the history, so could not know whether this was something he just do sometimes, whether it was a life-or-death situation, or what. I did not feel able to say what I was feeling and thinking. I was afraid to anger him, and then, even when it didn’t matter any more if I angered him, I felt the situation dire enough to remove myself from it.
I don’t drink. Although I have no moral opposition to alcohol, I just don’t like a lot of it. I will occasionally have a drink, but I probably have less than five alcoholic beverages in any given year. That has always been the case. I have never liked the taste of beer. I don’t like most wine. But, more than anything else, I neither like the way people behave when they drink, nor do I like the extreme damage that has been done, to me and to other people I care for, by alcohol. Honestly, when it comes down to it, while I do not like it, either, I would rather see pot legalized and alcohol made illegal, again. When I see what alcohol and alcoholism has done to people, I am horrified. And not just in what it does to the people who drink, but also to anybody who cares about them, or tries to.
I don’t like alcohol. I rarely buy it. I have never been drunk (a bit tipsy a couple of times, but never drunk). I have never had a hangover. But, I have been very, very hurt by alcohol. Because of that, I choose not to drink. My ex-husband is an alcoholic who has let alcohol, alcoholism, and now, AA be his reasons, excuses, and rationalizations for never turning his life around, keeping a job, paying his bills, being a father, etc. If I have ever hated anyone, and I am not sure that I have, it is he. Not because of the mistakes he made, but because he refuses to take responsibility for them, and he refuses to change. He went from being addicted to alcohol to being addicted to AA, only it’s worse now, because he is sober enough to pontificate about how he’s changing his life around. Give me a break, how many years does it take to get a job?! Anyway, that is neither here nor there; the point is that his behaviors affected me.
Of the seven men that I have been relatively seriously involved with in my life, besides my father, 5 were/are alcoholics. One would be, except that he has a pancreatic disorder that makes it that, if he drinks, even only once a month, he would likely die within a year. So that leaves 1 out of 6 ~ not the greatest track record, huh?!
But, anyway, knowing what I know about the devastation imparted by alcohol, I have chosen not to drink, and I have also chosen not to pursue relationships with people who are active drinkers. With him, when I asked if he was drinking, that day in his bedroom, it was before I saw all the cans and stuff, and I could just tell, by the smell and his emotional downward spiral, etc. At that time, I decided that, if this was a regular part of yourhis life, than I could not be.
I did know, however, that I couldn’t live with that in my life. My intention, at that time, was to give it a few more weeks, so that I could get to know him better, but to take a giant step backwards, as far as allowing myself to be emotionally vulnerable is concerned. I saw in him everything that I have always hoped for in a man ~ he is sweet, gentle, kind, compassionate, passionate, gorgeous, insightful, strong, sexy, and, the most important thing of all, intelligent. One of the few. But I also saw a problem that neither had anything to do with me nor was within the realm of my ability to resolve. Especially given the relative newness of our relationship. If nothing else, I figured that I could not handle the stress of coping with such things, and that I had no right to tell him what to do, didn’t know how he would react to my “advice,” and that I as going to have to let it go if things didn’t change very soon, so that I could take care of myself the way that I deserve to be taken care of, and so that I could take care of my children, so that they are brought up the way that they deserves to be. Children who possess a supposedly-recovering alcoholic father, don't need me to knowingly enter into such a volatile situation with another man.
posted by Nana @ 00:45
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