Feeling Froggy.
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008- (posted by JunkysWife)
one response- Categories: Temporary
I was at a yoga class a few days ago when the teacher reminded me of a nasty science experiment with boiling frogs that I’d forgotten all about. If you throw a frog in boiling water, it will jump out immediately. If you put a frog in tepid water, however, and slowly raise the heat to boiling, the frog will stay in the pot and let itself be cooked to death. (Yes, I know that Snopes says it isn’t so, but let me have the metaphor for a moment, ok?)
At a Nar-Anon meeting a few weeks ago, a woman who is the mother to an addict was praising those of us who are partners to addicts for sticking around, and she said she doesn’t think that she would have done it. It made me think about how I’d done it, and why…and I think I’m something like the frog who has been slowly cooked. If someone had thrown me into the worst of my husband’s addiction and its impact on me–my good looks lost, my heart hurting, my goods stolen–I probably would have jumped right out of that boiling pot, too. It didn’t work like that, though…
At the beginning, it seemed like a phase…like a difficult period that had to be gotten through. It seemed like just around the bend, there would be good times. I married a wonderfully creative, loving, handsome, talented man. I knew he had it in him to be my perfect partner. I knew it! I knew that if he could just beat this addiction thing, we’d be able to get our lives back on track and move on with what we’d had planned for ourselves before we got all sidetracked with his addiction.
I thought he’d get better…and he did get better, for a while. He’s been better lately. He gets better just long enough, just often enough to make the life bearable, to keep me from jumping.
Sometimes, I feel like my recovery is in a race with his. I am growing and growing through working the steps, through yoga, and through a lot of intense self-reflection and writing. He’s not growing as fast…and I fear that I will outgrow him, outpace his baby steps. It saddens me to think about jumping out of the pot. It scares me to think of boiling to death. This life scares me, where there isn’t a right answer.
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I feel the same way on a daily basis. I thought the way I was feeling was wrong. I wanted to jump ship so many times but something keeps telling me to hang on. I married my husband knowing that his past had a lot of drug use in it. But I guess I hoped and prayed that this nightmare would never come back. But it did.
You are right it seems like a phase but the phase seems to drag on longer then I wanted it to. He does get better for awhile then something happens that he sets back. That then becomes the time when we are broke and get even buy food. The sad part is that there is a wonderful man inside that would and could be the ideal husband. I have seen it in him and know that it is there. Hopefully one day he will be that person but only time will tell.