Strap in folks, this is a long one. I’ll tell it in three parts.
I grew up around alcohol. I can count on one hand the number of drinks I’ve seen my mother take, and the reason for that is that she too grew up around it. Her father was a lifelong alcoholic, and so was the man she married, my father.
He was a loving father. I never doubted he loved me, despite the way he became verbally abusive when he was particularly far in his cups. Every day, right after his cup of coffee, the beers came out. He would drink from 9 in the morning until he went to bed at 2 the next morning. He drove with an open beer between his legs, and us kids thought nothing of it. That was just Dad.
Reading all the success stories by happy AA’s in the Big Book, I kept thinking, I wish my dad could’ve had this. I wish he had loved himself more, that he could’ve found the desire to stop drinking, so that he could’ve found happiness, like I have since I quit. But his drinking, along with a three-pack-a-day smoking habit, is what took him from us at age 65. He would’ve been 77 this October.
But I know he’s looking down on me from the hereafter, and he’s proud of me for getting to a place he never could. He would never have wanted me to follow in his footsteps.
I had my first drink at 17, a mudslide. I don’t remember being particularly impressed with it. At the time, I was more interested in cigarettes, weed and boys. My 21st birthday was spent at a casino with my then fiance. I fell in love with alcohol then, and I began showing the first signs of an alcoholic-to-be, though it would still be some time before I hit that mark. During that first marriage, I drank often, but never much at a time.
After that marriage ended, I started dating a raver. We rarely drank much, because we were too busy partying that that special guest present at most raves, ecstacy. After that ended, I had a glass of wine most nights and felt a little weird if I didn’t, but it wasn’t an obsession.
For the first five years of my second and current marriage, we were social drinkers. We would go out with family or friends, and we might get pretty drunk occasionally, but again, it wasn"t an obsession. Then our first out-of-state move happened.
We moved to Bismarck, leaving our entire family and all our friends behind in Seattle. It was then, when I was 33, that full-blown alcoholism quickly descended on both of us. We became each other’s only local companions and support system, and that put a lot of stress on us. We started drinking more and more, for entertainment and to deal with that stress and the added stress of my husband’s job. The drinking culture is heavy in North Dakota and in radio, which was the industry my husband was in, and also vodka is cheap, so it was easy, even though we never went out. We had two small children (they’re teenagers now), and no one to babysit, so we did all our drinking at home, but we did a lot of it.
It didn’t help that I was living with severe depression that turned out to be bipolar (I wouldn’t be diagnosed for another 10 years, so I didnt know it yet). Depressives tend to isolate anyway, and I’m a withdrawn drunk. In sharp contrast, my husband is a needy drunk. You can see where this is going: we never left the house, and we were all each other had, so I felt like I was overdosing on my husband. I became severely absent from him. Meanwhile, he needed more from me, especially when he was drunk, which was every night. When I was drunk, which was every night, I became more absent.
It wasn’t long before we suddenly turned from the couple who never fought (we were the envy of the couples in the parenting class we took while I was pregnant with our son) to the couple who always fought. He needed too much, and I wanted too little. So we drank, which made both his neediness and my absence worse, so we fought about it and drank more.
This vicious cycle went on for 10 years. We would ocassionally sober up, and things between us were better when we did. But we always went back to the bottle after a couple weeks at most, even though we knew it was the source of so many of our issues. Without it, we could have worked out the differences in our personalities, just as we had in those first five years. But we were addicted, and we had contracted the disease, so we kept seeking answers in the bottom of a glass of vodka. Answers we knew damn well wouldn’t be found there.
My bipolar diagnosis and the spiritual experience that led to our suddenly deciding to quit drinking more-or-less coincided with each other. My husband’s journey with sobriety and mine, while both successful, have been a little different, so I’ll just talk about mine here.
(continued in part 2)
Both my babies that are still at home are in high school now! 
