Addiction

Back when I was 17 I met and ended up casually being romantically connected to another 17 year old who lived very out of town. We connected in a great way, as much as teenagers can connect. Of course that relationship ran its course when we realized that living in two entirely different provinces was not remotely feasible for two teenagers to maintain. The friendship stuck around though. It was on his last visit to my town before we both graduated from high school that I saw the first signs of his potential addiction. Years and years went by, I moved to a different country and we lost touch. It wasn’t until I was about to move back to Canada that I decided to look him up and found him on facebook. I had a gut feeling that he was either dead or an addict of some sort. Turns out it was the latter. Once I was back in Canada our friendship grew to a close bond. He called me his angel as I stuck by him through his battles with alcohol and drug addiction. He would disappear when he would go on benders and then reappear. I stuck by him. He would have manic episodes that involved police being called. I stuck by him. He was admitted into a mental hospital. I stuck by him. Because all of this, it wasn’t him….it was his addiction and his mental health struggles. The real him was a kind, gentle, insanely intelligent, friendly and loving soul who had a passion for life and music. Eventually though, his addiction caught him and at the age of 31 he left this earth. I miss him every day even years later.

On Thursday night I received a phone call that was a serious cry out from someone else in my life saying he has an alcohol problem and needs help. That someone is my ex husband. I won’t get into the whole story of why it came to the point of him admitting his addiction because it’s not pretty and it’s his story to tell…not mine. The next day I went to his house right away after dropping my son off at school and sat him down for a serious talk. Maybe even one of the hardest ones I have had in a long time. It was over an hour of him pouring out how many years he had been hiding his alcohol consumption and dependency on it. How if he felt he was starting to be discovered by someone and he just got smarter at hiding it. He talked about his alcohol consumption while we were still married. The lying he did to me about it. So many things. Now, I won’t be ridiculous enough to say that I haven’t been aware of any of it. I have watched him virtually our entire relationship not being able to stop at one or two glasses of wine. Or drinking it all so fast it might as well have been water. I voiced my concerns a few times to him. At one point he told me he was going to stop drinking for a few months and focus on his health which he did….or so I thought. I brought that up with him and he looked me in the eye and shook his head sadly and said “I still drank…just not at home.” He found ways to hide it. I was oblivious. Call it being trusting. Call it being absorbed with working full time and parenting a toddler. Call it whatever you want, but I was totally unaware. There were many moments that were cause for concern regarding his drinking. Even once we split I knew that he was drinking regularly but I never realized the extent of it. Once we both moved to a new town, after being knocked down in life a few times I finally convinced him to seek out therapy and a trusted friend of mine referred him to a great therapist. He lied to his therapist about his drinking. He told me that once his (then) girlfriend dropped him off at a session after lunch and he sat in that session drunk and pretending. He told me on days he knew he didn’t have to pick our son up from school he would spike his 10:00 coffee with whiskey to help him get through the day. It was bad. And I’m only grazing the surface of everything. But on Thursday night his world came crashing down on him because of a bad choice he made. Now he’s facing the consequences for his choices.

I honestly didn’t think that I would be in the position again to support another friend through their addiction. But here I am. I’m sure it’s not going to be the last time either as addiction is so prominent in society.

The situation that led him to this point enrages me. I have told him that. He has owned it and says he understands. I have told him that my feelings on it are something I will work through with my therapist. I was given good advice from a police officer that now is not the time to focus on what happened but it’s the time to focus on the steps forward. I have kept her advice at the forefront of my thoughts when they start to get angry. I’m angry that his bad decision has once again affected my life and our son’s life. Which I have also told him. I told him exactly how everything is going to go for the next few months if it relates to our son. He knows that me putting these boundaries and plans in place are consequences of his choices so he is not battling me on them at all. He reserves no right to battle me on them. I’m not being unfair. I am simply ensuring that my life doesn’t stop moving towards happiness because of what he chose to do. And ensuring that our son still has time with both of us.

For the first day of him making the steps towards his new sober life I ensured I was at his house. Just to be a presence. I worked from my laptop and was simply just around. I sat next to him on the ground when he bawled his eyes out about everything and his regrets and fuck ups. I just sat there quietly knowing nothing I could say would fix anything so I was just a physical reminder that he’s not alone. I didn’t offer up motivational speeches. I didn’t tell him what he needs to do. I didn’t do anything besides be there. As a friend of mine (who might be reading this) said, it’s not up to me to make him do this. It’s up to him to get himself going on his sobriety.

He is now on day 6 of sobriety. This is the longest he has gone since his early 20s with not having a drop of alcohol. For reference, he is 37. He asked me to box up all of his alcohol and remove it from his house. I told him that he needed to box it up himsel and I will take it away. On his own accord he booked an emergency therapy session. His therapist is an addictions specialist and right away linked him up to a virtual recovery meeting. He has now attended two virtual meetings. He has a large yearly calendar on his bedroom wall where he is putting stickers on each day he doesn’t drink. A physical reminder of the battle he is embarking on. He has reached out to other sober friends or to friends who he knows have sober friends and has created a small trusted group to lean on. Each day he chooses another non-sober friend to tell them about his sobriety. I told him that he does not need to tell his whole story of how he has ended up here, but he needs to slowly let his closest people know the basics.

I am a mixed bag of emotions on all of this. On one hand, I’m angry. On another hand, I’m relieved. It was only a matter of time before his drinking caught up on him and here we finally are. But my anger is going to have to be dealt with on my own. I’m here for him, but I have spent too much time helping him get back on his feet again and again and put my own life on hold because of it. I’m tired of it. So damn tired. So I’m finding my ways to work through this while maintaining my happiness, mental health, physical health and to not stall my life because of him yet again. It’s hard.

So here we are. Another new life adventure that wasn’t chosen by me. But it is what it is and as usual I will roll with it as best as I can.

When Does It Turn Around?

Back in the summer of last year my ex-husband and I made a decision to both relocate to a new town. Both of us had a variety of reasons for wanting to leave the town we lived in and the fact that both of us were ready to leave at the same time is some kind of miracle in the wild world of post-marriage co-parenting. We both settled on a town and by August the move happened. I drove into town with all my belongings in a trailer and felt this optimism. I thought a fresh start in a new area was exactly what was needed. New job, new home, new options in the dating world. Everything seemed like it could finally come up roses for me for once.

After a few months of being here I learned that you can’t outrun the things that you haven’t dealt with. No matter where you go, things find you. So by November I found myself on the couch of a new therapist. Ready to start tackling a lot of different things head-on. I loved my sessions with her. She got me (she still gets me) and in a short amount of time I learned some things about myself that deep down I probably already knew but I had never been able to piece together. The number one thing was finally the recognition that I suffer from anxiety. The number two thing was that I struggle with “cognitive distortions” which is where I take a situation and instead of focusing on what good can happen, I instead distort it and think of what can go wrong and what might happen, or put my own thoughts about myself into other people’s heads when they likely haven’t even thought it. I assume the worst before anything has even happened. We are working on this regularly.

By February, after a short 2 months of seeing “The Pilot” which ended in some pretty heavy heartbreak for me, I finally realized I was exhausted of trying to deal with my anxiety on my own. I was tired of always being negative. I was tired of fighting a battle in my brain on my own. I called my doctor and asked to go on an anxiety medication. I started taking Citalopram the next day. Within 3 weeks I started to feel a shift in myself. Sure, I was still tired, but I felt my body calm. I felt happier. I felt like I was spending less time over-thinking everything. I felt like I was starting to get a version back of myself that I hadn’t seen in a long time. I even noticed that it helped me become more patient in my parenting my son.

These are the great things that happened because of my move to a new town.

But those things that I wrote about above. The ones I was thinking about as I drove through the town for the first time with all my stuff….the ones about more options for dating and finding my own home and having a great job. Those ones aren’t going as I had hoped. Those are the ones that just followed me from one town to another.

My job is good. I’m happy with it. But lately I have been struggling with motivation on it. For a variety of reasons. In January we were all sent to work from home because of Covid reasons. It’s now the end of May and I’m still working from home because we are waiting for our new office building to be completed. It seems as though this move to working from home has set me back a bit on my learning and expanding as I’m not always around people who can teach me. I’m finding myself going and watching TV at 2:00 in the afternoon instead of working or struggling to get out of bed and sit down in front of the computer for the day. This needs to change as my boss is starting to take notice somehow. And I will change it. But my enthusiasm that I had early on is wearing off. I miss that version of myself.

I’m still in the small apartment that I really don’t love. This place was supposed to be a temporary stop over until I found a place to buy. It was supposed to be so temporary that I kept all my home decorations in boxes in storage. Well….a few weeks ago I hung up a painting that I was gifted for Christmas. The housing market boom seemed to follow me from one town to another, and it turns out banks don’t love giving mortgages to single income moms. I was approved for a mortgage that is less than the rent I pay on my current apartment. The bank decided for me that I can’t even afford what I somehow manage to pay every month without issue. So it’s been back to square one of trying to figure out what I am going to do regarding housing. I can stay in this apartment as long as I want….but I don’t want to.

As for finding love and that one person who makes me feel happy? Well, let’s just say I have learned how to appreciate and enjoy being alone. They say that if you can enjoy being alone then the right person will one day enter your life and close that circle of happiness. I am doubtful that it is ever going to happen for me. I am content being alone. But there are times where I yearn to have someone who I can spend time with. Someone who I can get excited about when I see their name come up on my phone. Someone who cares for me and makes me feel important. I thought that maybe I had recently found that person, but today that illusion I was starting to create in my head got shattered in one polite, but upsetting phone call. So instead of going to his house where he was going to cook me dinner and I was going to bring over a nice red wine, I am now sitting in front of my computer, eating a frozen pizza I cooked up, and writing this. Frustrated beyond belief about how difficult it is to meet someone who wants to stick it out and create something with me. They all say that I’m amazing, that they really like me, that I’m a lot of fun…but then they all have their reason to not actually want to continue dating me to enjoy those things about me. So how much of that is actually true? I’m getting to the point where I think that even though I know I have a lot to give to a relationship, that I don’t think I’m destined to be in one.

Life has a funny way of bringing me up just a little bit and then sends things crashing down some more. Just as I start to find my happy footing, something happens and I’m reminded that life can take me down again. So I have to crawl my way back out of it, over and over again. I’m doing my best to focus on those little moments of happiness. But life has taken a lot out of me over these last few years and I’m tired. So incredibly tired of pushing forward and waiting for things to fall into place for me.

Dating As A Single Mom

It has been almost 3 years since my ex and I split. It’s been insanely fast, but at the same time, incredibly slow.

About four months after we split, and an evening with friends and too much wine, they convinced me to put Tinder and Bumble on my phone so I could see what’s out there. Within a couple of weeks I started talking to a guy named Mike. We then met up and hit it off. For just over 2 months he was the perfect guy in a lot of ways. Attentive, kind, supportive, fun, interesting, respected my rules about only seeing each other when my son was with his dad and was happy to wait until I was ready for him to meet my child. But he fell pretty fast for me and within 3-4 weeks he told me he loved me. I admittedly panicked. I started to spend my time trying to come up with every reason why he wasn’t the right person for me. I created mountains out of molehills in order to get myself to push him away. I wasn’t ready for what he had growing in his head as I was still battling all the demons in my head relating to the failed marriage. So, like a coward, I ended it over text. He deserved more than that. Have I waffled back and forth over the two years about if it was the wrong decision to make? Absolutely. Even today I had thoughts about him and how, in my head, I turned him into a person he wasn’t and how maybe if I had just talked to him about how I was feeling, maybe we could have kept going with things. I broke his heart though. We have messaged a bit lately and I have apologized for my approach on things. I explained my side a bit better. He said he understood. We talked about maybe having a drink via facetime one day soon since we don’t live in the same town anymore.

I then took a break from dating for a bit for about two months. I went on to Hinge this time and ended up talking to a tall and handsome Croatian man named Rad. The first time I saw him I was absolutely attracted to him. He had two young kids and had been split from his ex for around the same amount of time. We went out for nice dinners, had fun exploring dates, I went to his place every now and then and hung out. Things seemed to be going well to the point he suggested we go away to a little surfing town together. So we got it all planned, booked an AirBNB and traveled there together. It was a weird trip. He had a cold so he wasn’t himself but I was picking up on some other vibes too as he wasn’t being affectionate like, at ALL, and didn’t talk much and when he did he seemed irritated with me. The drive home was a bit awkward. I barely heard from him for the week after until I finally called him out on his BS and he phoned me later that day and essentially dumped me because while he really liked me as a person, physically it wasn’t there Aka, he wasn’t attracted to me. I was pretty hurt by that. I’m all for honesty, but when it comes to someone’s appearance…don’t basically insinuate that you think they are fat/ugly. He asked to be friends. I said no. Within a few months, after some facebook creeping, I saw that he was with another girl who weirdly resembled me and their posts were all about how in love they were. Funnily enough….about 6 months ago I got a text from him saying hi and seeing how I am. I asked him if his girlfriend would appreciate that he was messaging women he formerly dated. He was a typical male and said something about their relationship being in a weird place and that there was no harm in him saying hi. I basically put him in his place and then peaced out.

I then took a break from basically February to September thanks to the ol’ pandemic hitting and dating was a stupid idea.

In September I started talking to Rob. Rob lived an hour away from me. We went from texting to phone calls, and some of those phone calls were ultra marathon long calls. We connected faster than I ever have with someone. He eventually came to meet me and we had a great first date. The one issue I had with him is that he’s a smoker. A pretty heavy smoker. But he didn’t ever stink of it so I was able to look past it. For about 5 months we hung out whenever we could when we didn’t have our kids. His kid schedule ended up changing and he wasn’t able to come to my town as much and I started going to his more. It started to get tiring for me to constantly be arranging a dog sitter and do the driving. I also slept terribly at his place. But we were still so strongly connected feeling that I didn’t want to give it up. Eventually I did and started to make an excuse that the dog sitter couldn’t take my dog. I was tired of being the one to make the effort. Even though I knew he appreciated it and felt bad. So after a few weeks, we had a conversation and mutually agreed to end it because it was just too much distance between us and neither could move because of our kids. But….the pull to each other was almost too much and every Monday we would still meet up and get dinner then watch a movie. There was no more intimacy beyond cuddling up on the couch. It was both of us getting our needs for touch and company met. It was weird, but it worked for us. We kept the tradition alive from January until July, when I moved away. He is still someone I talk to almost daily and we now are at the point where we can talk about our current dating lives. He gets me like no one else has. He calms me down and knows just what to do/say in some of my moments. I do miss him and I do consider him a bit of a high bar for new datees to meet.

I did try to go on some dates even though I was having the Monday hangs with Rob. I met up with a guy named Steven who I had a fun date with, and an incredible kiss with. But he wasn’t looking for a relationship. In fact, he never wants to settle down. He has a pretty messed up family background, and he served in the British army for 9 years and has some pretty bad PTSD that make him know he’s not capable of being a partner. Which was fine. Props to him for knowing that about himself and being upfront about it instead of leading girls along. We kept in touch and met up about three more times just to hang out and chat. Usually over a beer. There was some making out because…why not lol. We have had lots of disagreements over the course of our “friendship” and he has made some questionable choices with things. But he keeps on coming back to me to ask for life advice and to bounce things off of. Which I am fine with. He knows that I won’t take his shit and that I have no issue with telling him to leave me alone when he’s crossed a line. It’s a weird friendship. I think I’m one of the few people who actually doesn’t let him mess with me.

Then there was Dan. We went on about five dates over the course of a month. Again, a nice guy, but there wasn’t any connection with him. I tried to convince myself that there was but after our first kiss and how epically bad it was, on his part, I knew that if I’m at the point of straight up avoiding kissing a guy, that I need to end it. So I did. He tried to push the friends thing but I knew he was doing it in hopes of me changing my mind. So I let that fizzle out.

Cue another 3-4 month break from the dating apps

And theeennnn I moved to a brand new town and after a month here I re-installed the dating apps and got to talking with a guy named Craig. He was tall, husky built, cute and fun to message. My warning sign should have been that it took him over a month of messaging to go out with me…and it was ME who initiated the date. Before the date I was housesitting a house that is off-grid living. The place is run by solar panels and a generator. The generator kept dying and Craig ended up offering to drive 40 minutes and come take a look at it. I was crazy to let a stranger do this but I was desperate. Craig was quieter and shyer than I usually go for. But I figured that is ok. Our first date involved him doing an oil change on my truck (he’s a mechanic) and dinner after. Then after that we hung out whenever we didn’t have our kids. Most of the time it was hanging out at his place. In person Craig was a great guy. He did all the right things. I saw something there and occasionally allowed myself to think of a possible future. But when we weren’t hanging out in person, he gave off a totally different vibe. He seemed cold and distant. It started to create an insecurity and neediness from me that I have never ever had before. He never initiated our meet ups. His lack of actions always had me questioning whether he was into me. I tried talking to him about it and it got nowhere. I was stressed every day because I had no clue where anything stood and he just stopped talking about anything at all. He ended up texting one morning and said that he thinks “with everything going on” that we should just be friends. I put my big girl pants on and told him that he ripped off the band aid that I was planning on ripping off soon anyway. I told him how he made me feel regularly. And then told him that if he was incapable of being a partner or friend to me when we were hanging out, that what makes him think he’s capable of continuing to be a friend. He tried to say he could be my friend. But I shut it down. No thanks. He created so much insecurity in me that it wasn’t healthy and I needed out.

Soooo I went back to the dating apps after a couple weeks of putting him behind me. There has been sporadic messaging with various people here and there but nothing was sticking. I started talking with a guy, 7 years younger than me, named Wes, and he asked me out. We went on a first date and while it was a fun time, I was convinced he didn’t want to see me again. He goes away for work for two weeks and when we said bye he said he would get in touch once he’s back. So I wrote him off. But, he surprised me by messaging later the next day once he arrived at work. And then he continued to stay in touch the whole time he was there. Prior to coming back he asked about going on a second date. That took place last night. He picked me up and we went axe throwing then to dinner. The conversation was fun and interesting. He brought me home and we did the awkward stand at the front door thing. He was going to go and I asked for a hug. So he gave a great hug and then went in for the kiss. He ended up coming to my place to hang out for a while longer. I don’t sleep with people that early on, but there definitely was some amazing kissing. He left and I went to bed. I messaged this morning thanking him for the evening and said I had fun. He sent a nice message back. There was a bit of back and forth but now it’s silence from his end. I don’t expect to hear from someone constantly so I’m leaving it be. But my old insecurities are creeping in and convincing me that he’s going to ghost me and I won’t see him again. I spend a lot of time convincing myself that I’m not a catch. I tell myself that I’m too chubby, since I’ve gained some weight over the last while. I tell myself that nobody wants a single mom who has to work her dating life around her kid schedule. I tell myself that my personality isn’t good enough. I self sabotage. Rationally, I know none of these things are true. But irrational brain is more powerful.

I fully intend to discuss this in counselling tonight. As I don’t want to be giving all my power to men. I want to be confident in what I bring to the table, and if someone isn’t wanting that, that’s on them. But it’s exhausting. I’m truly tired of wading through the sea of men to try to find someone who will stick by me long term. I am all for taking initiative and showing a man I’m interested in him. But it needs to be reciprocated. Plain and simple.

I can remember when I was newly married, how I would see what other friends were going through in the dating world and sitting there on my happy little pedestal thinking “I’m so glad I don’t have to worry about that anymore.” But the joke is on me now as I’m ten years older, nearing 40 and I have a kid. It’s way messier and complicated than it would have been back then. I will keep trudging through as, even though I am somewhat content being alone…I would really like to find someone to bring into my life.