I keep trying to quit drinking long-term, but life keeps making me want to drink. Then I go to sleep and dream the fucked-up imaginations of my bored and bourbon-soaked brain.

Case: dreaming about my kids again, and they’re still children, and at this juncture I am being “allowed” to have them in my home overnight. O is in the bathroom with his music blaring from his phone and V has burrowed into her bedroom. It has all the feels of “right” but a foreboding hangs over it as I know their father will take it all away again. And the children refer to ex’s wife as “Mommy.” I’m on the phone with mom who tells me how wonderful it is to have them here and I practically scream back, you don’t understand – it’s much worse than I thought.

Case #2: Todd has “had enough” of my bullshit and needs some “space.” Now we’re months incommunicado and another man overhears me lamenting this to my mother and grabs my hand as if to claim me, dragging me to places he is eager to show me and I’m trying to be polite but I. Don’t. Want. This.

Sidebar: You might find it interesting to know that on that same night, Todd dreamt of me having had enough of him. Perhaps we need more us time. Or, perhaps, we need to lay off the bourbon for a while. Especially after…

Case #3: This one’s a doozy. I’m in this AirBnB that you have to climb up the outside of the building to get into and it’s a studio. I pull back the shower curtain and there are dozens of little black pubic hairs all over the tub and a soggy washcloth covering the drain. Now thinking this room hasn’t been turned over before it was given to me, I pull back the sheets on the bed and there are dozens of little black balls all over it. I can’t stay here! But wait – it gets worse.

There’s this guy in my room that has severe PTSD from combat and, apparently, a really bad relationship, who is freaking the fuck out and starts committing physical and bloody violence to the room. He’s not there to harm me so I’m trying to handle him like a person trying to handle a grenade.

By contrast, Todd’s dream had something to do with a very bad headache and not being able to find Aleve anywhere. I’ll take that over shattered glass and pubic hairs any day of the week.

SO. I don’t know about dream interpretation but at the very least I think anyone would recommend laying off the bourbon for a while.

I’m in a very interesting mental space right now. I’m not sure I can formulate the words to adequately describe it. I haven’t spoken to my counselor in over a month and perhaps it is time for a catch-up.

At the risk of sounding like life is too rosy, I must say that I am at peace with life as it is today. While I will forever be that person who remembers the past with a mixture of fondness and horror, depending on the memory, I don’t live there. Yes, I have “been through a lot” but who hasn’t??

I wish to God that I’d known a lot sooner, some of the things I’ve learned. I’ve spent a bit of time reading about that human condition that caused me so much harm and that continues to harm the people I love most in this world. I have some understanding of how it happened and why I cannot blame myself for that.

I understand that there is abuse that does not leave bruises, and that I am a victim of those abuses. That that abuse also manifested in physical harm that no one could see. That that abuse left me feeling unstable and emotional and with a sort of “accommodating” behavior that I carried into my relationship with Todd. Todd, after all, was the one who first said to me – “that is abuse.” I didn’t know. I didn’t yet have the words, the clinical understanding, of what it was that happened. Was happening.

It took me ten years to even begin to understand, even as the abuse continued – albeit in a very different form. I never believed myself to be a victim. I just didn’t want to be “that.” I thought divorce and looking ahead and living in my future was all I needed.

Divorce with someone like that is not a conclusion. It’s only the apex. You know when you’re watching a movie and bad things keep happening to the main character and just when you think it can’t get worse, they get arrested for a crime they didn’t commit?

Narcissistic abuse is the gift that keeps on giving. It took me twelve years – the same amount of time it took him to whittle me down to a shell of what I was – to flush out the rent-free noise he created inside my head. Sadly, I think the exodus of my children both abetted the noise and also aided in its eventual silence.

How he controlled me long after the divorce: my daughter has type 1 diabetes. When we were married, it was my job to do the practical work of it while he did the “managing” which really meant he would tell me what to do and when to do it. I was not to make decisions without running it by him first.

I had to wake up every two hours throughout the night to check her blood sugars and report them to him. Then he would tell me what to do with that number – correct with insulin (to bring the number down) or give her juice (to bring it up). This was every night from diagnosis in 2007 until we were no longer living together in 2011. EVERY NIGHT.  

These numbers were recorded in a log, which he would study over and make miniscule adjustments every day. “We” kept these logs until she moved out of my house in 2021. All of those years I was getting up in the middle of the night, several times a night, to check her blood sugar and make corrections as needed. Except for the weekends she spent with him.

The first time I slept all night was something I couldn’t even put into words – it was filled with anxiety, exhaustion, and a joyful feeling that I couldn’t accept because of the guilt I felt that my daughter would never know sleep like that. She will always have to be on alert for changes to her blood sugar. She will never get a weekend off.

It is important to note that I never truly slept through the night for many years – I would routinely wake up spontaneously by 3 a.m. all the time, even when she wasn’t here. That seems to have been replaced, in these last couple of years, with a bathroom break in the middle of one of those lovely fucked up dreams I’ve mentioned.

Anyway – back to the log. There were nights when I slept through my alarm or checked her much later than I was “supposed to.” Five years divorced and I would panic about having missed it. Literal, heart-racing anxiety… because of him. What would he think of me for sleeping through a blood check? He would surely judge me and I couldn’t let that happen. How could I have let my daughter down like that? What kind of mother was I? I would enter numbers in those slots just so there wouldn’t be empty spaces. Hear me – I made them up! I. Made. Them. Up.

I made them up to avoid the perceived wrath I knew would come from him. Five years, six years, eight years post-divorce. I want you to know that she was always safe and that those numbers were as close to what they would be without correction. But the guilt and the anxiety I felt over it ate me alive. The very fact that I have to follow up with the previous statement is a testament to the damage he’s done.

(Fudging logbooks aside, the real numbers came from her pump when it was uploaded at her endo appointments. I knew this too and was always waiting to exhale at those appointments.)

Anyway, this is again a long-winded path to another revelation. While my children choosing to shun me abetted his agenda to punish me, their decision ultimately – in choosing to cut off communication – led me to slowly release that breath I was choking on in the center of my chest. They left me no choice and thus I was forced to face my life not as mother/wife but as a revision of who I was.

That man continued to send me updates via email, thankfully no longer texting and most definitely no phone calls, until she graduated from high school. And then the communications just…..stopped. That was nearly three years ago and not long after I recognized that I was breathing free in a way that was wholly mine. He is not a part of the conversation anymore. He exists in an entirely different dimension for me and I cannot adequately express how fucking wonderful that is. Finally.

My counselor assures me that I’m likely never far from another attempt – kind of like that other shoe I wrote about once upon a time. Which is one reason why my children stay away and why I have come to accept what they are comfortable giving and not push for more than is “safe” for them to do.

That is the other piece to my understanding of where we are. Where I am. And this husband of mine – Todd – who has loved me through all of this and never once left me feeling alone in my trauma. He has boundaries though, that is important to acknowledge. But I can’t imagine any other man who would still be holding my hand after all this. (Except rando dream man.)

One of the hardest things I’ve had to come to terms with now is that I cannot protect them from him. That second round of custody battles over Veruca – I was engaged in it because I feared what would happen if I let her go. That is, until I realized the lengths to which he would go to win this time, and I wanted to spare them that irreparable wound. And look what happened! Lo and behold, what I feared came true anyway.

I hope they know, deep down, how hard I fought for them. How much I love them – more than my own life. They know I love them. I know they know and I don’t need to explain how I know. I am still protecting them, even if it doesn’t look that way. The only thing that matters is that love … and how transcendent and utterly safe it is.

Aunt Dianna once said to me that trauma rewires the brain. I understand that now. The seeds of doubt don’t grow in the dark, but letting the light in is dangerous sometimes. Do I have regrets? Oh hell yeah. Am I the same person I was in 1996, when I met this bad dream? I’m not, but I’m not NOT that person either. It’s a slow rediscovery.

Writing this post has given me anxiety. Maybe it’s the pot of coffee I drank. Maybe because it’s after noon and I haven’t showered and I’m not dressed. Shouldn’t I be doing something? Should I have said all those things? Will this hurt me in some way? I have a non-descript fear about it. Maybe because I admitted something I had never admitted before, until now. It may not seem big to you, but it is to me. And there it is.

I stumbled over a post, not unlike many I wrote in the early post-divorce years, from over ten years ago where I was all, yeah I made mistakes but I’ve learned from them and now I can live a happy ever after with my kids and the only one I was meant for, and my current takeaway from it is that the Nex* was all, Hold My Beer. He never wanted me to be happy. I mean, he doesn’t want me to be happy. It’s okay to say that in the present tense, even as he remains in my rear view mirror and I rarely think of him anymore. Knowing this affirms that that is where he will stay, forever. Until he dies. Then I’ll go to his funeral and poke him, just to be sure the fucker is dead. Did I say too much?

Still, the anxiety. What if he finds out these things? What are the consequences of my free speech? I fear those, even today. But not enough not to post this.

I’m going to end this now. I’ve gone on too long. I’m sorry.

I’m grateful for the friends and family who have given me the grace and space to heal and learn and be better. Thank you.

*Nex – narcissistic ex.

*Thank you, Aunt Dianna, for your love and support, and for today’s title.

*Fun stuff coming soon. I hope.