Part 2: Despair
DE·spair
(noun): “the complete and utter loss of hope.”
In January of 2019, I walked through the doors of my first Al-Anon meeting not knowing at all what to expect. I had finally gotten desperate enough to seek help on how to deal with my husband’s drinking because I could no longer deal with it on my own, but I still wasn’t fully convinced that he was an alcoholic, I wasn’t ready to surrender, but I desperately wanted to talk to anyone who would listen to what was going on in my home. I walked in a broken woman, full of nerves and emotions that were threatening to break loose at any given moment.
Through the lens of insecurity, I saw the world, and the bigger struggle it became to keep up my façade that things were fine and I was handling life’s challenges with grace and dignity. I knew I wasn’t, but I didn’t want anyone else to know that. I couldn’t accept that’s where I was and that I didn’t have the picture perfect family that everyone saw on the outside because that’s what i showed them. I couldn’t let that veneer crumble, because if it did, it would reveal the secrets that I was trying so hard to keep.
With hunched shoulders and dark circles under my eyes, I sat down at an empty chair around the circle and stared at the cracked plastic of the table in front of me as someone read the first step. “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives have become unmanageable.” I knew the second half of that statement was true without a doubt — I knew my life had become unmanageable because I felt unmanageable, but denial kept me in the belief that I had the power to control someone else’s drinking if I just had the right training and tools.
When it came my turn to speak, I broke down in tears and choked out incoherent words and incomplete sentences between sobs that had long been suppressed. The people in that room let me sit there and cry for a long time. My runny nose, red face and onslaught of tears didn’t seem to bother them or surprise them at all.
They surprised me.
I knew I had been near my breaking point for a while, but I never cried in front of many people, especially strangers. All of my sadness was wrapped so tightly in feelings of anger and betrayal that no other emotion ever had a chance to surface. What I didn’t realize until that day was just how hopeless and desperate I had become, because stuffed down under all of that anger was terror, grief, and a complete and utter loss of hope that things could ever be better. My marriage felt too broken, too damaged, and too far gone to be repaired unless I “fixed” him. Al-Anon — in my mind — was my last hope to find the answers to “fix” what was so wrong in my marriage: him. When I learned in that first meeting that I can’t, and never could, control someone else’s drinking, I can only control myself, I left feeling defeated instead of freed. The irony is, I was alarmingly aware that I didn’t feel in control of myself, but I still believed I could solve this problem.
I left that day still believing that if he loved me enough, he would stop drinking.
If he loved our kids enough, he would stop drinking.
If he wanted our family to be repaired hard enough, he would stop drinking.
When all of those theories soon proved me wrong, I sunk deeper into my despair.
I came to Al-Anon to find answers about how to stop my husband’s behavior, but I stayed because I began to find answers about my own. They told me at that first meeting to “keep coming back,” and I thank God every day that I did.
Go to Part 3.