Drowning

 “I feel like I’m drowning…

You’re holding me down…

And killing me slow…

I feel like I’m drowning”

~Lyrics by Two Feet

I am the wife of an alcoholic. There. I said it out loud…or wrote it out loud, rather. It’s not something I say often, and I certainly don’t try to claim it as an identity. But there it is. 

“What’s it like?” You ask? Most people don’t quite get the distinction between being married to an alcoholic vs being married to someone who just likes to drink. 

But the difference is vast.

Being married to a bona fide alcoholic (meaning someone who can no longer function without their booze) is like being in a permanent state of drowning. You are always underwater. Always fighting against the current that is holding you down. Always fighting to get that one breath. 

And when you do get that one breath? You have forgotten how to relax into it. You look around, in a panic, for that hand that will almost certainly come to shove you back down under water. 

There are a lot of us…wives of alcoholics. We are quiet for the most part. We are unseen and unheard. Because when we do speak up, we are met with questions like:

“Why don’t you get him help?”

“Why do you stay?”

“Why would you have had kids with him?”

“Why do you let him speak to you that way?”

“Why do you let him abuse you? Just call the police!”

As of the complexity of our existence and the scope of our trauma could be solved easily with any of that advice. And it misplaces the blame. We, the wives, bear the responsibility for the misdeeds of our husbands. When he downs that fifth of vodka every night, or plows through that 18 pack of beer in a day, that somehow we could have and should have stopped it. 

We are here. And we are drowning. And this place, this little spot on the World Wide Web, is where I tell my story. MY story.