Read Part II First
I remember telling my best friend, a few weeks before I asked Carrie to marry me, "Carrie has no baggage. She's unlike any girl I've ever dated. She has absolutely no baggage that she drags with her everywhere we go."
How could I have been so blind?
While we were dating, and throughout our engagement, Carrie was very laid back. She was cool. There wasn't anything about her that I didn't like.
But on our honeymoon, things immediately changed. She suddenly showed a darker side to herself. And I remember thinking to myself, "This is not the woman that I married."
I chalked it up to stress from our marriage and the changes we both had to go through in the transition from engaged to married. Either she got better, or I bent my reality to think things got better. I now suspect it was the latter.
Soon Phoebe came along. Carrie did stop drinking for the pregnancy and didn't start back up after giving birth. However, she displayed some troubling signs: she wouldn't wake-up with Phoebe at night to nurse. I would always be the one to go to the bassinet or crib, take Phoebe, place her on Carrie's breast so the baby could nurse, and then take off her and burp her. It was bizarre. Right? But I tricked myself into thinking it was fine and moved on with my life.
And that sums up a lot of our marriage. Bizarre things. Me normalizing them, rationalizing them, and tricking myself into thinking I was happy.
We had a second child, Ellie, and Carrie was a much more caring mother this time. However, when Ellie was 3, Carrie started drinking again. It began with a bottle of wine a couple nights a week, and then went to every night, and then to at least 2 bottles a night. At the height of the drinking Carrie would go until she passed out - wherever she fell.
There was more than one night when I would be banging on the bathroom door at 3 or 4 am. Not knowing if my wife lay dead on the other side. There was also a night when I couldn't find her anywhere inside the house. So, I eventually flipped on the back door light, and there Carrie lay, spread out on the patio beside the picnic table.
My routine for the summer of 2009 was to go to bed, wake-up around 3 or 4, and find where Carrie passed out so I could get her into bed before our girls woke-up and found her. By the end of the summer, I was completely consumed with putting Carrie back together and trying to get her not to drink. I was powerless, but I still fought tooth and nail against a disease I didn't know much about back then.
Just after Labor Day, Carrie went to detox and then entered an outpatient rehab program. It her first of many attempts at getting well. None of them would work because she refused to do any real work.
And mixed in with the drinking were infidelities to our marriage that would eventually end our marriage. I tried to stick by her - to love her selflessly and eternally - but eventually I was forced out with my girls. When Carrie came home from her 2nd attempt at rehab and told me she had met a crack addict in rehab and was "seeing him," that's when I knew it was time to leave. And when she took a bus to go see him just a week after I brought her home from rehab, that's when the girls and I finally left.
And that's basically the quick, quick version of our history. It's an overview anyway. I will get more and more into detail throughout other posts. But first I thought it would be a good idea to have a reference point to start with, and now we all have that.
I remember telling my best friend, a few weeks before I asked Carrie to marry me, "Carrie has no baggage. She's unlike any girl I've ever dated. She has absolutely no baggage that she drags with her everywhere we go."
How could I have been so blind?
While we were dating, and throughout our engagement, Carrie was very laid back. She was cool. There wasn't anything about her that I didn't like.
But on our honeymoon, things immediately changed. She suddenly showed a darker side to herself. And I remember thinking to myself, "This is not the woman that I married."
I chalked it up to stress from our marriage and the changes we both had to go through in the transition from engaged to married. Either she got better, or I bent my reality to think things got better. I now suspect it was the latter.
Soon Phoebe came along. Carrie did stop drinking for the pregnancy and didn't start back up after giving birth. However, she displayed some troubling signs: she wouldn't wake-up with Phoebe at night to nurse. I would always be the one to go to the bassinet or crib, take Phoebe, place her on Carrie's breast so the baby could nurse, and then take off her and burp her. It was bizarre. Right? But I tricked myself into thinking it was fine and moved on with my life.
And that sums up a lot of our marriage. Bizarre things. Me normalizing them, rationalizing them, and tricking myself into thinking I was happy.
We had a second child, Ellie, and Carrie was a much more caring mother this time. However, when Ellie was 3, Carrie started drinking again. It began with a bottle of wine a couple nights a week, and then went to every night, and then to at least 2 bottles a night. At the height of the drinking Carrie would go until she passed out - wherever she fell.
There was more than one night when I would be banging on the bathroom door at 3 or 4 am. Not knowing if my wife lay dead on the other side. There was also a night when I couldn't find her anywhere inside the house. So, I eventually flipped on the back door light, and there Carrie lay, spread out on the patio beside the picnic table.
My routine for the summer of 2009 was to go to bed, wake-up around 3 or 4, and find where Carrie passed out so I could get her into bed before our girls woke-up and found her. By the end of the summer, I was completely consumed with putting Carrie back together and trying to get her not to drink. I was powerless, but I still fought tooth and nail against a disease I didn't know much about back then.
Just after Labor Day, Carrie went to detox and then entered an outpatient rehab program. It her first of many attempts at getting well. None of them would work because she refused to do any real work.
And mixed in with the drinking were infidelities to our marriage that would eventually end our marriage. I tried to stick by her - to love her selflessly and eternally - but eventually I was forced out with my girls. When Carrie came home from her 2nd attempt at rehab and told me she had met a crack addict in rehab and was "seeing him," that's when I knew it was time to leave. And when she took a bus to go see him just a week after I brought her home from rehab, that's when the girls and I finally left.
And that's basically the quick, quick version of our history. It's an overview anyway. I will get more and more into detail throughout other posts. But first I thought it would be a good idea to have a reference point to start with, and now we all have that.
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