Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Spin.

I've left my husband for the first time since he's been out of the hospital to go spend time with family. I'll be back with him tomorrow night. This brief separation has reaffirmed for me how awfully attached I am.

I am struggling with first step stuff. I believe that I am keeping my husband sober. It would seem that all the ample evidence I've collected over the last few years that it is not possible for me to keep my husband clean would be enough for me, but apparently, it's not. Apparently, I am powerless over my husband when he's using, but once he gets clean, I believe that I am the magic glue holding his sobriety together. I'm the clean troll guarding the bridge to his sanity, warding off fiendish mothers and Mexican drug dealers. My love is the anti-heroin, and without it, my husband is certain to fall into disrepair.

It's particularly hard because he doesn't have a phone anymore, so I can't expect to hear from him. If I do talk to him, it will be due to a fluke, and probably due to a scary one, like that his mother dropped by to investigate his methadone take-homes.

He has fed this beast of mine as well. He's told me that he appreciates how much time I've been willing to spend with him while this recovery stuff is new because it keeps him safe.

Sigh. It makes my control-loving heart skip a beat.

I wish my mind-control powers worked long distance. I wonder how many times I have to work through the steps to get state-wide mind control?

He has been doing really, really well, though, and I can take comfort in it. He has a higher power who has taken good care of him in spite of my husband's best efforts to destroy himself, and I trust that if he isn't done researching his first step yet, he's getting closer.

Something really nice happened as I was leaving yesterday...or maybe it didn't properly happen. I felt something nice. I didn't want to leave him. I've forgotten what that feels like, not wanting to leave. A part of it was my fear of losing my delusion of control and being too far away to monitor him properly, but most of it was that he's back. He's really, really back. He's not perfect, but he's the man I fell in love with instead of his evil twin, almost all the time.

He's been talking a lot about how he's going to feed what's good in himself and starve the rest, shrink it away and keep it in a little cage. One day, his addict will be a mousey little thing, and we'll pull it out to laugh while it spins in its pointless wheel. Maybe one day. Today, though, it's a long way from funny for me.