02/25/97

"On Saturday DH got arrested for trying to steal liquor. It was an awful day. And the worst part is, I'm still with him.

I couldn't leave. Even after I swore over and over that I'd be gone, I'm still there.

You know I love him more than I've ever loved anyone else. He is SO important to me, which is why it just kills me.

Every time I think about it it's like someone taking a knife and carving my heart out.

It's not fair! Life is not fair! God tested him and he lost and it's not fair!

What's also not fair is that he is a good kid. I mean it's not like he doesn't know what he did wrong, or he doesn't regret it. I feel SO bad for him. He's just so depressed about it."

Alcoholism is a disease. A disease that touches every person who knows and/or loves the alcoholic. That's all I can think when I read that. How quickly I got sucked into all of it. How I knew then that there was something bigger going on. Some reason he needed to steal and some reason he felt remorse about it when it was over.

Yet, in the end, what I also see is a mother. Someone taking him under her wing and trying to fix him. How did I go from girlfriend to mother?

Parental Defiance?

There is a line from my journal that I just read that stuck out at me:

"DH will have been clean 60 days. The same 60 days that we get to rub in my dad's face."

I don't remember an overwhelming desire to stay with DH because I wanted to prove my parents wrong but I wonder if there was a part of me that did. And if so, that scares me because I want to know how to keep from making the same mistake with my son.

How do I make it so he doesn't want to prove me wrong? So he doesn't stay with someone that makes him miserable just to be the one who is right?