I was browsing around Target the other day, when I came across the most fabulous book I have seen in a long, long time: How to Change Someone You Love: Four Steps to Help You Help Them. I laughed the kind of laugh that ought to have sent flocks of birds scattering in alarm. Instead just startled me, and I quickly ducked behind the shelves in embarrassment as I grabbed the book.

I wavered a little over whether it was more morally wrong to skim the book in the store without buying it (is that the literary equivalent of downloading music…

I was reading over some of the words of Martin Luther King Jr. today, and came across some that reminded me very much of something I used to repeat to myself and my husband in the wake of disclosure of his sex addiction: “There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.” Dr. King was talking about his love for the church when he wrote those words, while I was talking about my love for what (at the time) was my God and my religion — my husband — but they were true all the same.

I used to…

My husband Mark cannot take care of himself. Really, the man cannot even keep track of what he likes. I have to do it for him. I present as evidence the last few weeks of grocery shopping…

Last week, Mark was sick, and I (sweet and loving spouse that I am) asked him to make a list of anything special he wanted me to pick up for him during my grocery store run. So, he made a list of comfort foods, saying that if I was in a hurry, he really only wanted some Gatorade because he felt a little dehydrated.…

Our family keeps a pretty rigorous schedule, with nearly every night of the week blocked out for some activity or another, but rather than shuttling between soccer games and dance practice, like many parents in our social group, we’re shuttling between different 12 Step meetings.

So, a week ago, as I was lying in bed making the decision to try to attend my first Overeater’s Anonymous (OA) meeting, my first thought was: How am I going to fit this in? I mean, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights as well as Saturday mornings are booked. What if the only…

I remember the first time I ever saw my husband; I even remember what he was wearing. It was our first week of college, and he was standing in line behind me, wearing Coke bottle glasses, a white, retro (to put it kindly), marching band t-shirt with red trim and red polyester running shorts with white trim. I took one look at him and said to myself, “Oh my God! He’s, like, a total dweeb.” (We met in the 80’s. That was how I talked to myself back then.) So, yeah, not exactly love at first sight. He took some…

Before I knew my husband was a sex addict, I knew that he liked flirting with other women. Probably a little too much. I could tell he got a thrill out of it, and I worried that he would accidentally take this “entertainment” too far. He’d lead some poor woman on and she’d get aggressive and Mark would find himself in bed with her before he knew what hit him. So I had a brilliant solution; I would be the other woman. I would give myself a new name, a new e-mail address and a new look (complete with a…

Earlier this year, I read an article about technology that would allow us to record and store every moment of our lives. Imagine: our whole lives stored in a single searchable archive. We could settle those arguments with the boss by replaying what was actually said. (”See, you did tell me you wanted this by Thursday, not Tuesday!”) We could go back to that first kiss over and over again. In fact, if I were recording my whole life, I’d even be able to figure out where the heck I read this elusive article (The New York Times, maybe?) and…

Just days before I discovered my husband Mark’s sex addiction, we were shopping in Target, when we passed a young woman. “Hi, Mark!” she chimed, smiling brightly. Then she turned to her shopping companion, a man who was glowering at Mark, and said, “Jimmy, this is my friend Mark, you know, the one I’ve told you about. I’ve been having such a great time with him lately!” Then turning back to us, she introduced Jimmy as her boyfriend and chatted for a while before cheerfully parting with: “Well, it’s been such fun to run into you here. Bye, Mark! See…

“You know,” joked my husband Mark, “I think you ought to be paying me royalties. You wouldn’t have anything to write about without me.”

“I know. It’s true. That’s the sad life of a codependent. My problem is being all wrapped up in your problems. But you haven’t given me much to write about lately anyway.”

“Well, do you want me to go out and do something addicty for you so you can write about it?”

“No, that’s okay. Please don’t. I have a lot of other things to write about.”

“Yes, but no matter what you write about, I’m your inspiration. I’m your…

One day, early in his recovery work around sex addiction, Mark and I were standing in line at the grocery store, when I commented on a headline on one of the news magazines. “I can’t look,” Mark said.

“What?”

“It’s not good for me. Those magazine and tabloid covers are awful. I hate the grocery store checkout. There’s no place I can safely look.”

I hadn’t thought about it before, at least not in terms of recovery. Most of the magazines were insipid and pandered to the worst in people, but when I wasn’t tuning them out, I was mocking them. I never…

“I can’t hear this song without thinking of you,” I said to Mark as The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” came on my music mix a few days ago. It reminded me of falling in love with him in college: how he made me scream, and laugh, and promise to run away with him, how dreamlike and obsessive it was, and how I lost him for a time.

There are thousands of songs in my iTunes library at this point, collected over decades, and nearly every one has an association with some person or event. Play “Footloose” and I’m with giggling with…

A few days ago, my daughter Janie walked into the kitchen, which my frantic holiday baking had turned into an indoor winter wonderland, covered in soft mounds of flour and dustings of sparkling sugar. “What are you making, Mama?” she asked.

“A pie for a potluck dinner with some friends,” I answered.

“Mm,” Janie said, “Is it a cherry pie?”

“No, it’s apple.”

“Is apple your favorite kind of pie, Mama?”

“No, actually my favorite is blueberry. Although I really like cherry too. I like both of those better than apple.”

“Why didn’t you make blueberry then? Or cherry?”

“Actually, come to think of it, I’ve never…

Last night my husband Mark and I stayed up past midnight finalizing the details of our Christmas budget and to do list. We divided up the errands and agreed on which of us would buy for whom and how much money we would each use to do it. I (in an uncharacteristically organized fashion) made a detailed list of everything I’d volunteered to take care of as well as a few other things that occurred to me. I set it next to my computer along with a calendar showing my deadline for each item, so that I’d be ready to…

Someone I grew up with drank (still drinks) a lot. And over the years, I’ve struggled with her alcohol use. Year after year, the incidents around her drinking have piled up. There was the time she was laid off and spent the next several years living rent free in a home her parents owned, spending her days drinking and watching TV, rarely bothering to get dressed. There was the night of her brother’s wedding, where she was found vomiting in the bushes outside the reception site after overindulging in the free alcohol. And there were the trash cans full of…

You know why I hate the word codependent? (And although I have taken on that label, I still truly do.) It has the word “dependent” right there in the word. Weak, wussy little “dependent.” It practically whines at you: “I’m so helpless. I can’t do anything for myself. Waaaa! Someone do it all for me, I’m just not capable!” And that’s so not the way I’ve seen myself. In fact, the only word with “dependent” in it that I’ve ever associated with myself is “independent,” which adds that nice little “not” before its dependent. I don’t need help, no sir,…

My 12 Step group had some difficulty recently around a reading that listed some of the behaviors partners of sex addicts might have in common. Many of the women in the group found it triggering, because they felt the list of characteristics implied there was something wrong with them, that they were “sick” for reacting to an insane situation in a way they felt was normal and understandable, or that they were being told they must have reacted in some way that they hadn’t simply because they were part of Club Partner-of-a-Sex-Addict. I knew that feeling. I had had it…

This post includes some spoilers.

It’s been a long time since I nerdily reviewed a movie, but my husband and I went to see New Moon this weekend, and I just couldn’t resist writing a post about it. The movie is a vampire love story. No, actually it’s a vampire, werewolf, human love triangle. Bella (a human teenage girl) is the object of affection of both Edward (the 109-year-old teenage-looking vampire) and Jacob (the teenage werewolf). It’s also a stunning portrait of codependent craziness.

Picture Mark and me, cuddled up in a dark theater, surrounded by shrieking teenage girls. On screen, shimmers the…

Always a sucker for both science fiction and anything vaguely related to time travel, this season I’ve started watching ABC’s new series, Flash Forward. The premise of the show is that everyone on Earth simultaneously loses consciousness for approximately two minutes and sees visions of a few minutes of their lives six months in the future. The show follows Mark Benford, the FBI agent leading the investigation into the cause of the “blackout,” as well as the lives of several intersecting characters, and then examines how their visions of the future affect their actions in the present.

The interesting thing about…

A few days ago, The Junky’s Wife sent me an e-mail with the subject line “Lois Movie!” (Yes, I am shamelessly piggybacking on JW’s superior recovery research skills and pop culture knowledge.) Now for most people, that might imply that a new Superman film is coming out. After all, in spite of the fact that Google seems to think it’s Family Guy’s Lois Griffin, isn’t Lois Lane the world’s most famous Lois? But if you have spent time working a 12 Step Anon programs for friends and family members of addicts, you have Lois Wilson, founder of Al-Anon and wife of…

“The level of sexual imagery in modern life is astounding. I knew intuitively this was true, but when you tune into it, you just can’t believe it. I click on the Yahoo! finance page, and there’s this blond model in a low-cut dress looking at a computer screen and nibbling alluringly on the temple of her glasses, apparently very aroused by the latest S&P 500 report.”
~ A.J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically

Warning: the links in this post lead to material that may be triggering to sex addicts and their partners.

Years ago, when my husband Mark and I were first…

Creative Commons, photo by Jeff Christiansen

I rashly went out Halloween costume shopping a few days ago. I’m not sure what I was thinking. Well, I know I needed to pick up a costume for my daughter — Yes, a few days shy of Halloween. I’m totally on top of it as a mom. — but for some reason I thought maybe I could find something cute for myself. You know, something suitable for a 40-year-old mother of two married to a recovering sex addict. There must be tons of costumes to fit the bill, right? At the very least there had…

Creative Commons license, photo by snogglethorpe

“So at my meeting last night, I wanted to say that sex addicts are hot, but there were a few newcomers, and newcomers don’t think that’s so funny,” I told my husband Mark as we were getting ready for bed. Mark laughed. He knows my running joke; if I’m ever looking for a relationship again, I’m going to go to a 12 Step meeting for sex addicts: given my history of being attracted to addicts, at least that way I’ll end up with someone in recovery from the start.

“Why don’t they think it’s funny?” Mark…

When I first found out that my husband Mark was a sex addict, I threw myself into the thing that had always saved me in the past: research. I had graduated at the top of my high school class, gone to an excellent college and had a successful career thanks to my ability to analyze problems and find the answers. When I became a mother, I researched. When my son had speech delays and was eventually diagnosed with autism, I researched. So, when I found that Mark was a sex addict, I researched.

I read about sex addiction and looked for…

Creative Commons License, photo by "geishaboy500"

Silk is a sexy fabric. It’s smooth and soft and falls in glistening ripples like waves. Years ago, shortly before I moved to another state to be with Mark, I sent him a pair of silk boxers as a gift, and he wrote me an erotic letter about them in return. When I arrived in my new home, he had lined our bed in silk. At my bridal shower, a friend gave me a silk nightie for my wedding night and I was married in a dress of silk. I told my husband Mark I…

One morning, eight years ago, I turned on the desktop computer my husband Mark and I shared and called up the keystroke logging software I had installed. Mark didn’t know that the computer was secretly taking notes on every character he typed, and I didn’t want him to know. He had been staying up late at night on the computer often enough that I was concerned about it. I’d asked him what was going on, but he said he was working, and just playing around on the Internet, blowing off steam. It was no big deal.

When I opened the file,…

Eight years ago, in spite of the fact that we were both exhausted by caring for our infant son, I found that my husband Mark was staying up later and later at night. He had to be up at 5 a.m. to get ready for work, yet I would wake some nights at 2 or 3 or 4 a.m. to my son, wailing for a feeding or a diaper change, and find Mark’s side of the bed empty, cold, untouched. Then I’d glance to the bedroom door and see the eerie blue glow of the computer screen in the next…

I went to a great 12 Step meeting this week. A lovely group of women, some of whom I’d never met, sat together and shared the kind of things we usually share as partners of sex addicts. We share about things like incest, physically and verbally abusive relationships, using sexual relationships to escape from or buffer ourselves against painful realities, using food and alcohol to help dull emotional pain, and contracting sexually transmitted diseases from our partners. We share about how it feels to have your life fall apart and to realize you never had that life in the first…

I’m a party pooper. I’m a downer. I’m no fun. I ruin other people’s good times. (Because I totally have control over other people’s good times, you know.)

You see, yesterday Mark and I had plans to take the kids to a pumpkin patch. We were going to let them run around and jump off hay bales and find pumpkins and navigate a kiddie corn maze. But I woke up a few hours into my night’s sleep when one wet child tried to climb in bed with me and an hour later when another child sniffling from the tail end of…

I started keeping a journal semi-regularly when I was in middle school.  My very earliest journal entries are a thrilling roller coaster ride through the life of a suburban tween: from the heartbreaking lows of the cancellation of my favorite TV show to the giddy highs of eating raviolis from a can for lunch.  But by high school, my journal had become my closest confidant, not because I had any terrible secrets, but because the secrets I did have became so tiresome to the friends who had to hear them again and again.

I’ve never smoked, never done drugs and never…

“Worry brain, your mama’s so ugly, she makes onions cry!” I found myself saying after I got off the phone with my husband. I had to hang up the phone because I’d burst into tears, and now I was trying to beat back the anxiety that was consuming me. I’d read a book on helping children cope with anxiety that suggested we learn to mock the part of our brain that produces those irrational, anxious thoughts. As a feminist, sometimes I worry that I shouldn’t use ugly mama jokes on it, but then I remind myself that’s probably just my…