It's Alright, It's Alright, It's All Right - He Moves In Mysterious Ways

In the rooms of AA and Alanon, there are many slogans. One is “don’t leave before the miracle happens.” I expected that the miracle would be my husband’s sobriety and the saving of our marriage. I remember a conversation with my mother when I told her, “I pray every night that God will restore our marriage.” She responded, “Eventually, you will ask Him to restore YOU. And when you ask Him to, He will.” That is perhaps the wisest advice my mother has ever given me.


In a marriage with an alcoholic or addict there are really 4 people - there is the addict spouse, the codependent spouse….and there are the sober and healthy versions of those people. When the addict steps into the boxing ring, the only choice for his or her opponent is the codependent, and vise-versa. The cycle is CRAZY. When one person recovers, one of 2 things happen - it’ll get better….or it’ll get worse. After all, if nothing changes, nothing changes.


When I dove into recovery, learned to set boundaries and detach with love, not only did I find that my empathy and compassion for addicts grew, I found that the space between my husband and I also grew. Our children, oblivious to the real reason for the chaos, began to bicker and isolate. The 2 sets of kids began to avoid each other and his oldest daughter openly defied and disrespected me - with her dad’s full support. Simple things, such as family dinners, became a cold war standoff.


Strangely, however, I was feeling better - stronger, more peaceful. I barely even flinched when - as a consequence of not being able to focus on work 6 months previously when my husband’s addiction was at its peak - I lost my job. I had total faith that God would use it and was even relieved to be away from a place I’d hated for years.


God did use it - my inability to bring home a large paycheck was apparently the last straw for my husband, who hadn’t worked himself in 7 months. Just like that, he stopped pretending to be my husband. He told me that my time spent in Alanon meetings, my refusal to continue to enable him, my alone and quiet time with God...were all my actions that showed him I didn’t want to be married. He even accused me of having an affair with his best friend. None of it was true, of course.


Memorial Day 2017, I told my husband that he needed to either get help or leave. He refused to do either. I was quickly going broke, and so I decided to file for legal separation, to protect what I had left. When he then told a mutual friend that “not a bone in my body wants to be married to her,” and that he had checked out of our marriage 8 months prior, I decided to let the marriage go, and filed for divorce instead. I immediately knew that was the wrong decision, but when I dropped the petition, he filed his own, divorcing me instead.


Now, I’m thankful that God didn’t let me stay in the marriage. He does, indeed, work in mysterious ways.