New to the boards. I come from a big family, some are in recovery, some are still drinking and some are very co-dependant. I have been sober for 18 years, married for 15 years to an amazing fellow sober traveler. We both have prior families with ex’s and grown children. We lived 2000 miles away from our families for our entire marriage. Collectively we have 9 children, 14 grand children and 10 siblings. We recently retired and bought a house back in the area where all of the family is. This has been stressful with a capital S. Everybody is in our business, we now have two grandkids and one of my son’s who is recently sober living with us. The two grandkids are 17 from two of my kids. We went from this idyllic life with work, friends in the program, service work and very little chaos to too many voices, lots of family gossip, and a feeling of being run over daily. My newly sober son has little children who are being dropped at our house weekly for 3-4 days a week. My husband told me over the weekend he loves me, but he needs to get a job and find an apartment away from all the crazy here. We have discovered that while we have been sober for close to two decades we did it in isolation without having to develop skills like saying no to family, or what to do when other people are trying to tell us what to do.
I have decided to keep one of the 17 year old grandkid, who really can not go back into his mom’s situation, and tell the other one who really doesn’t need to be here to go home. My son is also in a wheel chair and freshly sober can stay but his kids can only be here every other weekend with strict drop off and pick up times. And set rules of how people are treating our home. I worked this out with my sponsor, and have committed to if this doesn’t work my son will have to find some kind of other living arrangement, like government assisted living. The two things I will not give up is my sobriety and my marriage. I made the mistake of telling my closest sister this. Well the phone has been burning up, I tried explaining myself at first, and now I’m just getting angry and telling people to mind their own business. For ten years I bounced in and out of sobriety, I was so focused on my own stuff I never really realized how dysfunctional my family is and especially how they engage with each other that way, even the ones in recovery who seem normal out side of the family but become some kind of crazy hive people when dealing with family. 15 years living 2000 miles away seems like God given now, I don’t think I could of stayed sober in this environment and I needed that break. Now I need to develop some tools for living amongst them.
