A writer that I read daily wrote something that got me thinking today. He wrote "I want to know why you got separated from your spouse. People always say, “It was amicable.” No it wasn’t. Don’t lie. Tell me. Please." Funny that this line hit so close to home for me, since he wasn't really writing about relationships. He was writing about his curiosity and just giving an example of what he finds interesting sometimes.
His name is James Altucher, and he regularly lays his thoughts out for all to see. He writes about the good things in his life and the bad, but his writing usually has a point to it. I like that. Well, his quote above got me thinking because after I got my divorce I sometimes told people I didn't know well that our divorce was amicable... It wasn't really. And so, without further ado, I'll tell the story. My wife and I got a divorce in 2011. In a nutshell, our divorce was caused by addiction. My wife and I first started dating in July, 1999. She was 23 and I was 33. We had known each other for a few months prior to starting dating. She had been married, but her husband had died. We started chatting at a party and when we started talking she told me he had died a couple of months prior. We really hit it off and started dating soon after. About two weeks after we started dating, Sharon told me she was an alcoholic and asked me to help her stop. I gave up drinking on that day, and have not had another drink since. My wife, on the other hand, was never able to give up alcohol for any great length of time. In fact, her longest time sober was when my first daughter was born. She stopped for about two years then... the nine months during the pregnancy and an additional 18 months while she was breast feeding. Soon after, her parents came from England to visit her and the stress of the visit, coupled with depression started her drinking again. Over the years, we went to AA meetings, in-patient re-habs, outpatient programs, Psychiatrists psychologists, and to numerous social workers. None of them could do it for her, and she just couldn't do it for herself. Sharon was a sneak drinker, and Madison was young, so she never realized that her mommy had a problem in the early years. By age seven, this was changing. (I worked from home on and off starting in 2001, and then started my own business in 2003, so I was home to make sure Maddie was safe.) Sharon was not a social drinker and had a tendency to drink quickly but heavily when no one was around to see her. She was very hard to catch, and only regular sweeps of our house and property kept some sort of limit on her drinking. Her tolerance was very high, and she could go for long periods where she fooled me into thinking she was sober. Even so, Maddie knew from a very early age that she was not allowed to drive with Mommy. Daddy did the driving whenever Maddie was going out with us. But I digress. In 2009, Sharon and I decided to have another baby. Sharon's drinking had been getting progressively worse and she thought that she would stop if she got pregnant. Maddie was seven, and by this time she already knew about Mommy's drinking problem. Sharon started lying about the drinking to Maddie, something she never thought she would do. It scared her, and she thought that the pregnancy would force her to stop since she would never willingly drink with a baby inside her. Unfortunately, she was unable to stop. At one point, she was found unconscious in the parking lot at our dojo, and we called an ambulance for her. Believe it or not, we thought it was anemia having to do with the pregnancy. In fact, the doctor at the emergency room actually said that is what it was. After speaking to her at the hospital, though, I began to suspect that she had been drinking and I told the nurse to tell the doctor that she was an alcoholic and that I believe she had been drinking. He tested her blood alcohol content and found she had a .42! This is well above the legal limit of .08. The doctor was stunned. He had had a conversation with Sharon and she had been coherent, so he never even thought to check her for alcohol use. He was astounded that she could even talk at that level of inebriation. At that time, he told me he couldn't tell me if there had been any damage to the fetus, but he thought that it was likely. I was crushed! After that Sharon was charged with drunk driving and I plea bargained with the DA before her court appearance. I told him to tell the judge that I would have her plead guilty and that I would pay all fines at the maximum rate as long as he court-ordered that she enter an in-patient rehab facility. Sharon would never willingly go for an in-house program. In fact, I could barely get her to go to an AA meeting. She was 7-months pregnant and I figured that an inpatient program was the safest thing for the baby. The judge did even better than that. Not only did he court order the in-patient program (and take her license) but he lowered her fines to the minimum that he could, since I was paying for the in-patient program out of my pocket. Sharon entered a program at Phoenix House in Keene. She did well, and it ended about two weeks before she was due to give birth. Unfortunately, Sharon got drunk again on the first night she was back and fell and broke her ankle. I had swept the house and knew it was clean. She had somehow gotten alcohol in Keene and brought it back with her in her bags from the in-patient facility. The doctor recommended that she have a cesarean birth the next day, to help protect the baby. Ashleigh was born on January 18, 2010, two weeks premature and suffering from alcohol withdrawal. She spent the first nine hours of her life in an oxygen tent. At that point, I felt Sharon was too dangerous to be around the girls and I pressed child neglect charges against her. I brought Ashleigh home alone when she was four days old, and I have raised her and Maddie ever since. At that point, I had no intention of divorcing my wife. Sharon went back into in-house therapy, and we tried to get her drinking under control. At one point, (in July) the courts allowed Sharon to come back to live in our home, but she quickly began drinking again. One night, when I called the police to help me with Sharon, (she eventually passed out right in front of the police man), he recommended that I go in the morning and get an ex-parte separation. This would allow me to continue to live in the home, while limiting her access to it. Without that, the police could not remove her from the home since she was legally allowed to live there and drink. I had her taken to the emergency room that night, and first thing in the morning I hired a lawyer and got an exparte separation. Given the circumstances (the child neglect charges, the history of alcoholism and alcohol related arrests, we were only in front of the judge for five minutes. In all, Sharon's stay in our home lasted about three weeks. We paid for a one-bedroom apartment for Sharon and we continued to see doctors and social workers to try and get her to stop drinking. It was at this point, that one of the psychologists told us that Sharon was actually suffering from Addictive personality disorder. (Sharon had eating disorders that we were trying to deal with and other things as well. After ten years of seeing doctors and psychologists, one finally hit on the fact that all of her compulsions were tied together. Sharon continued to drink and I eventually filed for divorce. Of course, there were other things impacting that decision. It's just none of your business. Two years after our divorce, Sharon drank herself to death. She developed esophageal varacies in 2011, continued to drink. After a two week stay in the hospital in a coma, her life support was removed and she died in my arms. Of course, there is more to the story than that. I write about Sharon from time to time. If you look through the archives, you can likely piece together a lot of the story. Some things I just won't or can't write about though. Sometimes, I wish I didn't know... and sometimes, it is better not to know. So, while the divorce wasn't amicable, in time, we both realized that it was the best thing for our girls. Sometimes we need to think about things other than ourselves. Sharon missed our daughters dearly when she was away from them. But because she could not stop her drinking, it was safest that she did not live with us. With that said, our divorce led to a lot of heartbreak, but was the best thing for our daughters. Now that I have written this, I think it is just best to say that our divorce was painful, and just leave it at that.
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