My husband is an alcoholic and drug addict and as a result we have been virtually separated for over 4 years, since our son was a few months old. He currently isn't drinking but he is abusing a variety of drugs, prescription and non-prescription. As a result I have had to impose strict boundaries around his visits to see our son, because he comes down reeking of a cannabis, switching from uppers to downers, he has massive, crazy mood swings and often passes out. I can't risk him having unsupervised access to our little boy, which is why I feel we can't separate officially as I'm terrified of him being awarded unsupervised access of any kind.
He is incredibly emotionally abusive, he tries to be financially abusive, he has been very, very physically abusive throughout our marriage. For a long, long time I didn't recognise the first two types of abuse and credited the physical abuse to one of the two people I told himself he was; drunk husband-the abuser and sober husband-the amazing guy who was somehow not guilty of the things he had done to me. 6 or 7 years ago, he seemed to get sober and after a year of 'sobriety' we decided to have a baby.
I was 7 weeks pregnant when I found out he was taking benzos and had been all along. Some that he was prescribed, others that he'd bought illegally online when his benzo addiction grew. I didn't realise how bad things were at that point and we went to our GP together to discuss my concerns and my husband agreed to quit. Throughout my pregnancy his benzo addiction grew and grew and he got prescriptions from doctors in various countries he worked in. I was concerned but he lied and gaslighted me to the point that I thought I was going crazy at times. I was also extremely sick during my pregnancy and just felt so dependent on him.
I was in labour when I found out he was drinking again. It was like a form of nightmare and I sometimes wonder if it all contributed to my 3.5 day labour and emergency c-section where my heart nearly stopped and I lost massive amounts of blood. On my first day home from hospital he went to work and returned absolutely stinking drunk. Luckily my parents were there to support me but I was honestly sleepwalking through it. My dad drove to collect him from work to try to stop him getting too drunk but on the second night of this he manufactured a massive argument and stormed out. I was barely able to walk and looking after a 5 day old baby so I stupidly begged my parents to try to find him. My mum found him in a pub and turned to come back home to me, he saw her and ran after her, shouting at her. He caught her and twisted her arm behind her back hurting her and leaving her arm covered in bruises. Luckily my dad found them at that moment and my husband ran off. I wish I'd left him that night, but I didn't. He came home the following night, told my parents all about his childhood abuser and somehow, I plodded on for another 3 months, determined to help him through his relapse.
In that time he attacked me on numerous occasions, including times when I was holding our son. And he once kept us trapped in the car while he drove around like a crazy maniac. I realised I needed to get out and I rented a house near my family and moved there while he took a work contract abroad. We weren't separating, I was just moving nearer to family while he was away but in hindsight that's where our relationship ended. He never made it to the new job because on the way to the ferry he drove drunk and crashed his car, destroying it, a wall and shattering his leg.
Since then he has been through many ups and downs, at his lowest he took a drug overdose intended to make me feel guilty and let him move back in with me instead of the rehab his family was insisting on. At his highest he manages a functional drug addiction. At the minute he is somewhere in between, on a downward slope. His behaviour is increasingly erratic and he can lose his temper in very, very scary ways for no real reason. He is deeply in debt including having run up a huge debt in a joint account I believed was closed. He hasn't given any kind of financial support in months. I strongly suspect he's claiming benefits for us as a family and keeping all the money for himself. He's incredibly delusional, telling friends all about cute stuff our son and he have done together, even though it hasn't happened. I'm growing increasingly scared of what he might do next.
And today I've discovered that he has been telling a big group of friends about how awful his life is, blaming his childhood abuse for his behaviour, and painting me as a vindictive, controlling harpy who won't let him alone with our son because he is taking the SSRI medication he has been prescribed. I'm so scared because he believes this, he isn't telling them that he is being prescribed SSRI's from doctors in two countries, neither of whom know about the other. That he smokes an ounce of cannabis a week, that he takes Xanax, MDMA and various other drugs that he gets from at least three drug dealers that I know of. That he is driving drugged, that he has constant small crashes. That he passes out when alone with our son. That his moods swing between hyper to stoned many times throughout a day depending on what pills he's taking on top of his two prescriptions. That I am not trying to control him because to be quite frank, I don't care what happens to him, but I am not going to let him hurt an innocent little boy.
That he has attacked me so viciously in the past that I have passed out from being choked and been terrified I was going to die before I lost consciousness. That he's come at me with a knife. That each time he convinced me that he was desperate to be sober but his childhood abuse stopped meant he didn't know how. And my heart broke for him, for the innocent little boy who had been so hurt that I stayed with him throughout all the abuse he inflicted on me and, through him attacking my mother. But I couldn't stay with him through him endangering our son. That even still in the last 4 years I have given him room to find his own way to sobriety and might have been willing to give him another chance if he ever really got sober. But that I doubt that will be happening and am just determined to protect our son and give him the happiest, healthiest childhood I can.
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28 replies
ringringringringringring · 29/05/2017 00:28
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