You Are Stronger Than You Think

I have struggled to write this post all week. I didn’t expect it to be harder to talk about my life before things started to fall apart, but it is. My original thought was to make the posts somewhat chronological, but now I am rethinking that approach.

There are many things I have learned in these past 15 years about the nature of people and addiction. I have learned how all of the nuances of one’s life experiences result in decisions that are made that sometimes compound on one another to bring someone to a place that they never thought they would be. I like to think it’s objectively surprising that I am someone who would end up tolerating what I have tolerated. I am not meek and obedient, and I have no problem sticking up for myself. I have spent hours trying to answer the “why?” and I do have some theories…

I barely knew him as a friend of a friend in college. He came back into my life at a time when I was probably at my lowest point. I wasn’t in school and didn’t see a path to getting back on track. I was barely speaking to my Dad and the rest of my family. I was working two jobs and really struggling to make ends meet. Shortly after he and I reconnected, he deployed to the Middle East. I had a lot of respect for that, and I think there is a certain rebuttable presumption that someone who serves their country in that way is worthy of respect and admiration.

We stayed in touch throughout his deployment and became close. He treated me differently than others did, and about a year after he returned from his deployment, we started dating. Looking back, there are probably things I overlooked that should have been red flags, but that’s easy to say from the posture I sit at now. I try to give that version of me some grace.

I thought I was so very lucky to have him. I was certain I was the lucky one, and in many ways, I was for a long time. I think this can 100% be attributed to my own life-long insecurities that I had pretty much come to terms with by that point. I never thought I would get married or have kids. That is not how I saw myself. I had always struggled with my weight and thought that made me completely unlovable, especially at 23 years old. He loved me anyways, and I was so grateful for that, and overlooked and tolerated so many things for this very reason. I didn’t value myself enough to believe that I deserved better, or that I would ever get the chance at a marriage or family again. This was more than I ever thought I deserved.

That was the “why” that resulted in me allowing several toxic patterns to continue and get worse over time until they became “normal” for us. That was why I overlooked clear signs of substance abuse problems and a lack of impulse control. That was why I made excuses when he would drink too much and throw things and call me names and punch walls in the beginning. I also (naively) thought it was something he would grow out of in time. Eventually, though, there were more reasons I stayed as long as I did.

When you have been married for years and have kids, everything is so intertwined that it seems impossible to untangle everything. Kids, extended family, finances, mortgages, taxes, pets, and so much more are all joined, and it’s hard to see the path forward of separating things, and the uncertainty of it is terrifying. My biggest fear was custody and the safety of my girls.

Though random drug use was always present, I now know things began to escalate after our home flooded in 2016. We got 10 inches of water in our home, and that was the beginning of the end. He didn’t handle the pressure of the flood well at all, and though he has admitted this is when things started to get out of control, I don’t really know the exact details of how he went from occasional recreational drug use to full-blown addiction. He never told me that whole story. What I do know is that between the time we flooded (August 12, 2016) and the date of his first overdose (March 31, 2020), there was a slow but consistent descent into the most toxic home environment I have ever personally witnessed, and when I remember the things I tolerated, I feel hot shame come over me to this day.

Three and a half years is a long time to live in an increasingly hostile and abusive environment and not understand why and what is happening. The first sign I can remember that something was very wrong is that he started just not coming home from work. He would text me saying he was on his way home and just never show up until the next day sometime. He would walk in the door, refuse to answer questions about where he had been, and lock himself in the guest room for days without coming out. I was working full time and taking care of a newborn and a two-year-old by myself with the added stress of this going on. This is when he stopped substantively helping with the girls in any useful manner. I knew he was drinking, and I suspected more, but had no proof for a long time. When I would push for answers, he would get abusive until I stopped asking, or he would just leave again.

During this time, my biggest fear was sharing custody with someone I knew was so very unstable, but at the time I had very little proof of his instability. I knew enough from my family law class in law school to know I needed a lot of solid proof to deny him unsupervised visitation. I decided that continuing to raise the girls in this chaotic, toxic household was less of a risk than him getting time with them alone. I was terrified for their safety. They were so small and helpless and he was in no state to care for babies. I also knew I couldn’t support them by myself, so I made myself a promise that I would build a career that could support them and start building proof that it was not safe for him to have unsupervised custody—and so I did, though it took years. I documented everything and obsessively worked hard at finding a new job with more potential, all while trying to hide this from everyone I knew. From then on, I handled 95% of the care for the girls by myself. Looking back on it, I don’t know how I did it, and truth is, I was always a complete nervous wreck during these years.

When I brought up divorce, he would always tell me how no one else would ever want me and I would die alone. He used to say that he would have a new girlfriend within a week, but that I would never have anyone who cared about me again. I believed that in the state I was in, with my self-esteem completely destroyed. It scared me so badly to imagine me getting sick at 47 like my mother did and having no one there to help me fight cancer. Looking back, I don’t know why I thought he would actually be any help to me if something like that did happen. In 2013, two days after I had major surgery, he left me at home alone to go out of town to a golf tournament for several days. This person was never going to help me through anything.

In the last few years, I have come to realize that in part I gave up happiness in the present on the off chance that I would need him at some point in the future. I gave up holidays and birthdays and family gatherings. I gave up friendships and sacrificed the mental health of my girls and me because I was afraid of things that hadn’t even happened yet and that were hypothetical, at best. I was worried about custody and illness and dying alone. I didn’t think I could handle being a single mom, but the truth is, I had been a single mom for many years before I was ever divorced, and I was doing so while trying to drag another adult through life.

My life today is infinitely simpler than that time was, and I no longer live in fear of illness or dying alone. I will cross that bridge if it ever comes and not to sound bleak, but everyone dies alone. I thought of that in January 2024 when I held my Dad’s hand as he took his last breath. He had been unresponsive for a couple of days, and I have no idea if he could hear me. I have no reason to think he could. I was there, but he was alone in his dying process. I hope there’s someone holding my hand when that day comes for me, but the chance of being in that room alone is not worth me living every single day in complete misery, tolerating perpetual disrespect and abuse.

If you are living in a toxic situation yourself and are afraid to leave for any of the reasons I was—or even for other reasons—I want you to ask yourself a question: “Is the alternative REALLY worse than my current reality?” I thought it was, but I was wrong, and maybe you are too. I should have trusted myself more to make something beautiful for my girls. Maybe one day I will find myself staring down at a tragedy or diagnosis and wonder how I will make it through what’s facing me by myself. I am certain that it will never cross my mind that I would be better off if he was still by my side. My girls and I are better off now in all ways and I will never again trade happiness today out of fear of tomorrow. One of my main regrets is that I didn’t trust and value myself enough sooner than I did and I will never make that mistake again.

Until next time,

Brooke