She wrote: “Please help me, My husband has been drinking for years, he drink while my children were at home. I stay with him for the children sake. We have grown girls now all married. I always wanted to leave, but he said I could never take his girls. He always told me I had nowhere to go, he would never let me work, so here I am stuck. I have no skills.”
“We have been married for 33 years. He is so abusive now he drinks around half a case a beer a day. That is when he comes home from work he starts drinking never eats supper he only drinks. I know that is hard to believe, but it is very true. He starts drinking when he gets home around 3:30 in afternoon and drinks till he goes to bed, which is around 9:00. Then on weekends he gets up around 9:00 and believe it or not he starts drinking and he drinks all day long, which is about a case of beer on Saturdays and Sundays.” “My children know how he is and want me to leave, but I really don’t have anywhere to go. They have invited me to stay with them, but I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be a burden to them and their families. It is so embrassing every holiday is the same he is so mean to me and my children. The girls and their families don’t come over much anymore, because of his drinking.”
“He gets so mean when he drinks, sometimes I have to go out of the house, because he curse at me and he locks me out of my house. One winter he lock me out and I had to stay in the yard in very cold weather for about 2 hours.”
“Can you help me! I am 54 years old I would like to live out the rest of my life in peace.”
I emailed a quick response back to her. It did not have a solution she wanted to hear:
There is nothing I can do to help you. You have been offered help by your daughters and you have refused it. You want him to be nice to you and to stop drinking. That won’t happen. You have grown accustomed to the life you have and you are afraid to walk away from it. That is your choice. No one else can help you, only you. It is never easy.
My response was short because I don’t think this woman was looking for help with her situation — not the type of help she needs. She already has been offered help out of this relationship. Her children not only want her to get out, they are offering her a place to stay. She refuses with an excuse that she doesn’t want to be a “burden” to them, these same children for whom she says she stayed married. The same children who grew up in a home with an abusive, alcoholic father because their mother was too afraid to leave.
She has lived a lifetime married to an abusive drunk. She knows no other way of life, no other way of relating. It is her comfort zone. Her husband is a mean alcoholic and she is an enabler.
It is unfortunate that she cannot see why her children don’t visit much. They don’t want their own children to be exposed to their grandfather’s alcoholism, to the abuse their grandmother allows him to inflict on her. Her children cannot make her leave but they can pull themselves and their families out of close contact with the situation to minimize the destruction to their own lives. They grew up in this situation, they choose to protect their children from it.
I would have liked to help this woman but I can’t help her. She must want to help herself. I don’t think she will.