Life With An Addict

Last week I got a phone call from a friend that is staying with me--the cops were at my door. Apparently someone had reported their lawn mower missing last year and this summer as they were driving through our ally they noticed a lawn mower that resembled theirs. They called the police and said they believed that Brian had stolen their lawn mower last year. I just sat there at work and cried. I could not believe this was happening just two months after losing my husband. I was happy and enraged to get another phone call stating that the serial numbers did not match.

Let's begin with the fact that I BOUGHT a lawn mower last summer, at ACE Hardware. It ended up not working properly, however, it was the only model they had so we got an upgrade when Brian took it back for an exchange. So, of course my first thought was, "Did he do this?" I am angry at myself for even questioning it.

There is the constant stigma that addicts have that they are violent, thieves, liars, and pretty much scum. Here is a little bit of a heads up, there are more addicts out there than you realize. Some hide it better than others. There are doctors, lawyers, cops, businessmen... your next door neighbor, your aunt, your uncle, your brother, your friend. You just have not had your eyes opened up to it yet. Now that I got that out there I will tell you what it was like living with an addict.

Was my husband violent? Yes.

Did he lie? Yes.

Did he steal? Yes.

Let us first discuss the violence. He has hit me. Not during the entire course of our relationship. Really I have never been afraid of him. Neither have my kids. Okay, I take that back. In the beginning he yelled and threw things and at first they feared him, then they realized he was all talk and all show. I have never witnessed him hurt a fly! I heard all these stories of his street fights and to me it was strange, because I never witnessed anything more than yelling and throwing.

So when did he hit me? During the year that he was completely out of control--reference my first blog "We Lost A Person Not An Addict". I knew he was out of pills, and the night before he hit me he was very agitated. He told me he was going to bed and not to wake him the next day. He has done this many times before--stayed in bed an entire day, sometimes two. I slept on the couch that night. The next day I was upstairs watching television with my daughter. His friend had called, I will leave names out, and I of course did not answer the phone because I was told to let him sleep so I did. Awhile later he got out of bed to use the restroom and his daughter told him his friend had called. He came upstairs in the living room and asked me why I did not tell him that he had called. I reminded him that he had told me to let him sleep all day.

I don't know why he snapped, he became someone completely different. He flew at me pulled me up off the couch by my hair and started punching me. It was almost like he was someone completely different. He then threw me on the floor and called me all kinds of horrendous names.  So I got up quietly went down to our room and started packing his things with tears streaming down my face. He asked what I was doing and I told him he had to go. He kept telling me to stop and when I did not he began kneeing me in the head bouncing my head off the shelves behind me. I would just get up and keep going and at one point he pushed me over and started kicking me in the head and my head hit the door jam of my closet. At this point his daughter wanted to protect me and she came down to our room knocked on the door and begged her dad to go. She kept telling him "Please dad, let's go, I don't want to be here anymore. I want to leave. Let's leave." I knew she was saying this to protect me. He shattered our mirror and left me laying in the broken shards of glass on his way out the door.

Immediately his daughter came in and knelt down beside me to see if I was okay, as I laid there sobbing. She told me she didn't mean what she had said, she didn't want to leave me, she just wanted him to stop. I told her I knew and I hugged her. As soon as I was capable of getting up, I sent a text to Brian's friends, that I knew he would be going to and told them what had happened. I was horrified to later find out that they never even really talked to him much about it. They just talked about drugs, needles and getting high. That moment I cut association with them. I had two black eyes, a fat lip, and knew I had a concussion. I did not go to the hospital, I did not want Brian to be charged with domestic violence, and knew the doctors would never believe any story I had to come up with. So, I did nothing...

What did I accomplish out of this? Do I advocate for people to stay in violent relationships? Absolutely NOT! In the five years Brian and I were living together I never saw this side of him. Never was I in fear of him. In seven years of a relationship I have never seen what he had become in that exact moment. Have I endured a lot over the years? Yes.

I ended up in WBI at one point with a major anxiety attack. This was a result of the things he had said to me, but they were issues I had been battling for YEARS! Hearing them out loud from the man I loved, was devastating. After a week in WBI I actually came to terms with my life and my situation and no longer allowed it to control me. No longer was I going to allow someone to ever tell me I did not protect my child from the actions of others. Let me straighten one thing up, this was not the result of Brian but a past I could not escape. What he did say to me was wrong, however I learned to finally heal from that past.

I have no wedding ring because one of the times he had switched medications, in a fit of rage in the mountains he threw my ring out the window, because I had taken it off so I would not lose it in the lake.

I have had to walk with my kids in some of the most ridiculous of situations when he would get into his fits of rage and left us stranded.

Now let's move onto the lying...

Of course he lied. He lied a whole heck of a lot. He lied time and time again about what he was doing, where he was going, what he was taking.

One point I was paying for outpatient care for his Suboxone treatments and he was lying to me for months about what he was doing. I had not realized he was trading them for the "good stuff". I had risked everything I owned to pay for the treatments. I lost my car, damn near lost my home.

He would lie about what he needed money for. He would convince me that a pair of earrings he bought me were $300 when I knew for a fact they were only $90. He couldn't exactly just ask me for money for drugs, so he lied.

Now as far as his stealing goes, I will tell you one thing, he did steal, but he stole from ME! He did not believe in stealing. He would constantly take money out of my bank that was for bills. Eventually I had to make the embarrassing decision to take him off my account so that he could no longer take out the money we needed for the house. He would take my things and sell them or trade them for drugs. He would steal my medications that I needed for anxiety or my pain.

Some of the most horrific things he did were flat out disgusting and desperate. I had blown out both of my knees and was in severe pain and took my entire bottle of pills and left for awhile. Another time I had damn near died from my kidney stones that caused a blockage and an infection and I had to get a life flight to receive proper care. I had the strongest medications a person can have prescribed to me. I remember Brian almost foaming at the mouth, he wanted it so bad. I paid no attention to him, for I was in ridiculous amount of pain. Before getting my prescription I insisted on buying a safe to lock the medication away. Brian had broken into the box and took all of my medication and swapped them out with laxatives, that were very similar looking in color and size. I instantly knew and I confronted him, he was able to give me back half, and the rest I had to endure. I was in pretty bad shape, but I lived through it not reporting it.

So yes Brian did steal, but he stole from me, he stole from our family. He was very sick...

Here in lies the problem with an addict, everyone assumes they steal strictly because they have a drug problem and they don't know how they come up with the money for drugs. Well I will tell you the one problem, he had a prescription for his drugs, doctor written, legal prescription--drugs. Then of course the insane amount of other addicts merging together, finding each other in every dark hole imaginable. I call it this crazy cesspool of drugs and addicts, that just dump their pills and they go around and round in this pool while they are hovering over it waiting for their dip. They buy, they trade, they sell, they borrow, from each other.

Brian had a tendency of stealing stupid stuff from other addicts when he was ready to break away, not drugs but things, dumb things, like video games, and stuff he thought the kids would like and his way of saying sorry and making up for what he had done. I always returned the items if I could because I don't want stolen property and even if it was from another addict it was still not something I wanted. I also knew he was not completely right mentally in the head at that time. He never stole big items, money, or anything serious.

I may have been wrong in a lot of my decisions, I enabled him--I know I did. Why? Because I believed in him. These things that happened they all happened during the worst year we had, the year that he had a ridiculous amount of prescription drugs prescribed to him. I knew that the person I loved was still in there. The person I married and spent several years of my life with.

After he beat the crap out of me, after all of the things he said to me and put me through, I lost a LOT of support from friends, family, for our relationship. His own mother told me I needed to leave him. I couldn't though. For one I loved his daughter like she was my own, I used to struggle calling her "his daughter" because for years I believed she was mine. I didn't want to lose her, didn't want to abandon her. Never did I realize it would be her that would abandon me, abandon us...

What he did, and the person he became, devastated him. He could not even look at me while I was healing without crying for what he had done to me. He hated himself. He vowed to never do anything like this to me again and he didn't. This is when his struggle began to try and get better, and the real fight began. At one point in April, he felt himself losing, and he was so afraid of hurting me again, that he left for fear of himself. He did not trust himself using around me anymore, he did not know he could trust his actions.

People don't understand the chemical imbalance that comes with using. It is dangerous, you lose control. If you have ever experienced a chemical imbalance at anytime in your life you will understand. He knew what he was doing was wrong, but he couldn't seem to stop.

When he left he realized he was miserable without me, without our family. He would not sleep. He would spend day and night sending me messages. Sometimes we fought sometimes it was "what do we do". Eventually when he ran out of excuses, he came home. This was when we started his more serious path to recovery. He waited for his daughter to go to be with her family in Ohio for the summer, and then he checked himself into WBI to get the help and treatment he needed.

So what is the point of this blog if I am just "confirming" all the stigma that comes with an addict? I stated he was violent, he lied, he stole.

He hurt me, he lied to me, he stole from me.

Everyone consistently judging him drove him to give up on life, to give up on growing outside of the stigma of an addict. The battles he had to endure with himself, did not need to be fought against the outside world, yet, the outside world invited themselves in...

I do not live in denial over who my husband was and what he did. But, he was tired of being defined as nothing more than an addict--a violent abusive, thieving, lying addict. No one gave him a chance, suddenly it appeared the world turned against him. He was bettering himself, he had been clean, he was staying home, being a good father doing what he was supposed to be doing.

Then suddenly people used those stigmas against him. He was being accused of being an abusive father, nothing but a drug addict that needed "help". Even though he had gotten help, they used that against him. Consistently broken down in every single meeting that was had. He even endured my frustrations and pain. We were in this together but somehow he felt very alone, because it was him they were after. Because he was an addict. Because he had hit me. Because he had a past.

No matter how much I tried to pull him out of himself, to believe in what he was doing with our lives. No matter how much my kids told him he was a great father and they loved him. No matter what we did or what we said he could not ever break away from the past and the decisions he made in his life they used against him.

Drugs change people. I have witnessed it time and time again. I watched people I was very close to become people I did not recognize. Parents that were solid good parents, losing their children due to bad choices. I have witnessed first hand the transformation the person they were to the person they had become. Some have won the fight to get better, to change, some have rooted their path, and I am not sure they are ever coming back. Either way I don't judge. Addiction is an ugly, ugly demon, that roars it's horrendous head, if given the opportunity, and it takes a hell of a person to fight against it.

The one thing I never have done, nor will I ever do, is forget that there is a person behind that addiction. There was a person that was good, that is loved, and that is worth holding onto and giving them hope--they can be brought back. They could use our faith, they could use our hope, our strength and encouragement.

I will not spend the rest of my life dwelling on the year my husband was out of control, and what I had gone through--I will remember that through it I still loved him, I still fought for him, and I still held onto hope until the very end. I will remember the good times that WAY outnumbered the bad times. I will remember the love. I will remember what all he did to help our family, not hurt our family. He was a good man, with a problem, some of us will never understand, just stand from the outside looking in. I will never regret staying with him, I will never regret loving him--because the addiction did not define him...