Milestone
Aug 21, 09- (by Mama MPJ)
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- Sober Salon
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The anniversary passed quite unnoticed this year; the days slipped away, and months went by before either of us realized it. Somewhere along the way — on some routine day — my husband and I passed a milestone in our relationship and our recovery and didn’t see it.
One Saturday night, years ago, the world as I knew it feel apart and recovery from sex addiction and codependency began. But at the time, it just felt like the end of everything, not the beginning of anything. One month in, two months in, six months in, Mark would note the date and proudly announce that he had this much recovery and that much sobriety now.
I don’t remember when it was that he told me he wanted to do something special to mark the date for himself and asked if I wanted to join him. “Why would I want to do anything to remember the worst day of my life?!” I spat. But time passed and slowly that day did come to mark a beginning rather than an end; it wasn’t the day my marriage died, but the one on which we each were reborn. And more than that, we stopped measuring time by it, stopped thinking — as recovery became our lives — that there would be a time when we could bracket it with another date that would mark the end: perfect, fixed, recovered.
This year, it was a month after than anniversary date before I realized it had passed, and when I did, I realized that, this year, there was something more to it. Because this year, before we reached that date, we would have slipped past the day that marked our halfway point: the fulcrum on which “marriage in a time of active addiction” and “marriage in recovery” sat perfectly balanced. And I realized that, with the passing of that anniversary date, I know that we have now spent a majority of our married life in recovery.
Yet somehow, it seems that letting that day pass — unnoticed and just like any other — was the perfect way to have celebrated it.
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Congratulations MPJ to you and Mark on that passage from more despair to more hope. I am forever grateful to you for sharing your story and forever grateful to your husband for his living example.