Jails, Institutions, Death.
Monday, May 5th, 2008- (posted by JunkysWife)
2 responses- Categories: Building the Road
My husband seems determined to be a living example of the recovery dictum: Find recovery, or find jails, institutions, or death. I am afraid of the things that are happening in our lives, but I don’t know that anything short of being locked away is going to make him wake up to how much of his life he’s missing.
He is doing a good job of staying clean, if staying clean means not doing heroin. He hits a meeting about twice a week, and he frets a lot about how he’s wasting the limited amount of time he has. He has transferred his energy to a rapidly accelerating shoplifting habit. This weekend, he stole plants, clothes, books, shoes, art supplies, gardening tools, and a string of decorative lights.
We keep pretending that we’re going to spend some time together. This weekend, for instance, we went for a walk in the center of the city we live in, and it was lovely for a few minutes. We talked about what’s to come, held hands, and enjoyed the cool spring evening. Suddenly, though, we found ourselves in a city garden, and he got very tense and distracted by his urge to take plants. I tried to suggest that he might not like it if someone took the plants out of our garden, and so maybe he shouldn’t take the plants that belonged to the city. He scoffed at my naivete, found a box in a dumpster, and started digging up plants to take home. I ended up sitting in a swing, enjoying the night by myself.
And I had a lovely time in that swing. The night was still beautiful, and I like being in a swing. That’s one thing that helps me…my recovery has helped me be able to soothe myself when he’s acting crazy, to enjoy spending time with myself when he’s not able to be with me fully. It still is so sad, though. He’s leaving in a week, and we’d meant to make some memories that we could both cherish. We’d meant to spend some nice time together…and it is frustrating that anytime we go anywhere together it turns into a shoplifting bonanza for him. It makes me really uncomfortable, and there’s no way that I can see to reconcile it. I can’t control his behavior.
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I was once him. I turned out ok, I hope he does
I am an avid reader of your blog. I know what it is like to love someone deeply yet be disappointed in their actions. I hope one day he can get past this and be the man you deserve.