T Minus 2 years
Methamphetamine changes the brain. It uses all the “feel good” chemicals the brain can possible produce, all at once. And it leaves a person completely unable to reason, think straight or feel any sense of pleasure for a period of weeks to months following a single use.
I had agreed to give Kurt thirty days. Six months later, the drug was gaining a deeper hold on him than ever before. Sometimes he would go a month between episodes, and other times just a few days would go by, and he would disappear for a few days to return a crazed animal. I could see it in his eyes: a look of madness that terrified me. Like a rabid dog, he was unpredictable and intensely angry. The smallest thing would send him into a fit of rage about something I had done horribly or how I had no right to judge him, since he was financially supporting me. Mentally, he wasn’t home. Some demon had hijacked his brain and spoke through his mouth. The man I loved was MIA.
“It’s well over our agreed-upon thirty days. I’m drawing some boundaries. You go to treatment, full time, in-patient, or I leave. You can’t stay in the house any longer,” I would tell him.
“That is insane! I pay all the bills. You can’t kick me out of my own house.”
“You are right. My friend will move into the spare bedroom and we will split the rent. You just pay for the garage with your tools.”
He refused to go to in-patient treatment, but agreed to go to sober living, where he could still leave and go to work daily. He continued to bargain with me:
“Then I will come and go as I please to get tools out of the garage. I might come in and watch TV sometimes, you know, to de-stress.”
“No, if you are in the garage, fine, but you can’t come into the house.”
“You are crazy! It’s MY house! I’ve been supporting you for months, and now I can’t even come in just to chill out! Do you realize I’ll be sharing a room with a bunch of newly sober guys, and I’ll have no privacy!”
“If I get a roommate it won’t be your house. You can’t come in. I need space from you and it’s not fair to the roommate to share the house with you.”
“Why? Because I disappear for a few days at a time? It’s not like I’m a criminal. You are treating me like like I’m some kind of dangerous person.”
“No, Kurt. I love you, but you aren’t thinking correctly. You don’t get to go live at a treatment facility and come home to your comfy couch to zone out to the TV for hours every afternoon and then go back. It doesn’t work like that. You have to be all in.”
“You think you are so spiritually superior to me! You are so ungrateful for all that I’ve given you. You should have stayed back at your corporate job, where at least you were still pretty!”
On and on, we proceeded like this for months, me trying to get him to commit to treatment and him not acknowledging the severity of his addiction. He couldn’t. The drugs had destroyed the part of his brain that allowed for critical thinking. Out of all people, I should have been able to empathize, because I wasn’t thinking right either.
After several unsuccessful attempts at kicking him out, I knew I needed either to accept that he would continue to use crystal meth–and I would continue to watch him sit on the couch watching surf movies, not getting treatment, being the victim of his unpredictable anger–or I would have to get a place of my own. I was terrified, but not of him. Lack of money petrified me. I was working seven days per week, and only able to net a few hundred dollars per month after I paid all the teachers and rent on the building. There was no way I had enough income to rent a place of my own. I really didn’t even make enough to pay for food and a cell phone. We were at an impasse. Kurt’s ego refused to cede control, and I refused to do what it would take to escape a bad situation.
A lot of good friends supported me during this time, listening to my endless drama. One of the reasons I loved my friend Silvia was that she always said what needed to be said, without sugarcoating anything. On a power walk through Balboa Park, Silvia explained to me that I needed to act in my own best interests, regardless of money. The money would work itself out.
“I don’t have any other options, Silvia, You aren’t hearing me. I can’t move out. I simply don’t have the money.”
As we approached the footbridge over the 163 freeway, she stopped and looked into my eyes. She said something only Silvia could get away with:
“That’s so white trash Melanie. That’s battered woman thinking. You are way too educated to live like that ”
In just a few short weeks, her words would ring inescapably true.
But I had another fear, one even bigger than ending up broke, homeless and hungry: my parents. A little drug use was no reason to leave a marriage. My Dad had recently called to tell me about his best friend from church, who used drugs years ago but now loved Jesus. And who loved his wife, who stayed with him through the whole thing.
“Melanie, the divorce rate for second marriages is high enough. Third marriages almost never make it.”
Wow, thanks Dad, Yup, I’m way better off married to a drug addict who refuses treatment than to risk being single and unwanted. Good point.
My mom had her own unhelpful advice. She called me to give me the phone number of the wife of the Jesus-loving-former-drug-user from their church, in case I wanted to talk to her. She then recited some scripture that I already had memorized about how “The Lord works everything out for the good of those who love him.”
It wasn’t their fault. They just didn’t get it. My parents didn’t know any other people addicted to drugs, nor for that matter did they know any gay people, non-Christian people, or Democrats. Those kinds of people didn’t attend their church or homeschool their children, so my parents didn’t know them. My parents hated the idea of me leaving the man with whom I had formed a sacred union before God. Or maybe they hated the thought of what their church friends would think about the fact that I had been divorced, twice. Drug use was not a reason to leave. No matter how much I tried to explain the mental games Kurt played on me, my parents didn’t get it. I asked them to attend Al-Anon, so maybe be they could understand how addicts think and behave. They didn’t. It pained my Dad to know that Kurt was “hurting my feelings with his words,” so he called Kurt and told him to be nice to me. Because that would do the trick.
Al-Anon is a 12 step support group for friends and family of addicts or alcoholics. I mentioned to my Al-Anon group that I was thinking of leaving my “qualifier”. Qualifier was the euphemism we used to describe the addicts or alcoholics in our lives, who drove us to attend 12 step meetings of our own, to share our common experiences of strength and hope as it related to living with such people. The meetings didn’t allow “cross talk”, which meant we were not allowed to comment on another person’s sharing. We could word-vomit whatever we wanted, and there was no criticism or judgment or even advice-giving. The only response you might get from those in the metal folding chairs around you was “keep coming back.”
I had been coming back for almost six months, faithfully, two meeting per week. I had joined the service committee and even signed up to lead meetings. I found a sponsor, I met with her weekly for coffee. I did the homework she assigned. I read the Big Book. I prayed the prayers I found listed there. I worked the 12 steps, admitting I was powerless over another person’s addiction and that my life had become unmanageable, and so on, until I completed the entire program. And I kept coming back. They say, “It works if you work it, and you’re worth it, so work it.” Those words stuck. I wanted to believe I was worth it. On that particular night, the idea of “I’m worth it” was starting to become more than an idea. I was starting to believe it.
“Hi, I’m Melanie.” I begin my share.
“Hi Melanie,” the group responds in unison.
“Welcome to the newcomers.” I started with the typical introduction. “Tonight I’m exhausted, mentally, physically and spiritually.” I launch into my allotted three minutes of sharing time per meeting.
“You guys, I feel like I’m like living with a pissed off 10-year-old trapped in a very large man’s body. It’s such a mind game, because I’m looking at the face of the man I am in love with, but the words coming out of his mouth and his body language belong to a monster. Sometimes I believe his venomous words, because I don’t know if I’m talking to Mister Jekyll or Doctor Hyde. He knows me so well, he knows just what to say to hurt me the most. There are a lot of emotions going on, and I just get so confused. I don’t know. I love him. I know that. But I feel like the life is being sucked from me. I feel so small and weak and fragile. I’m scared…scared there will be nothing left of me if I don’t get out. I want to get off this roller coaster. I know I hold the emergency stop switch, and I’m wondering if it’s time to flip it. I guess that’s it, thanks for letting me share.”
I was leading the meeting that night, so after we had recited the Serenity Prayer I headed for the coffee station to set up for post-meeting chit chat. I looked up from arranging cookies and saw three women in their sixties making a beeline for me. Alice gave me a hug and thanked me for my honest share. Linda said she always learned something every time I shared, and also thanked me. Then, their eyes grew serious, as Janet warned me,
“Melanie, if you are going to leave him, and we won’t tell you if you should or shouldn’t, but if you feel scared, in my experience it will only get worse, so if you are going to leave him, do it when he is at work. Don’t tell him your plans, just pack your things and leave. The moment you leave is the moment you are in the most danger.”
I was fighting tears. I wanted to continue the conversation but it was all too overwhelming.
As I got in my car after the meeting. I felt the roller coaster start up. Had I really used the word “scared”? I wasn’t scared scared, maybe just a little unsure. Kurt had never hurt me. He would never hurt me. No, I wasn’t scared. I didn’t need to slip away under the cover of darkness. Kurt and I would have an adult conversation, communicate about what was and wasn’t working, and simply take some time apart to sort things out. No big deal.
He tore open my suitcase and pulled out fistfuls of neatly folded clothing, flinging them around the living room. In contrast to his screams, the clothes hit the wall in silence. They simply lost speed and slid to the floor in crumpled little piles. I, too, dropped to my knees in slow motion, covering my head, heaving silent sobs. When he had finished tearing through my third and final suitcase, the room looked like a hurricane had stuck. Pictures were knocked off the wall, and all of my worldly belongings were strewn everywhere. I was in a ball, on the floor, my back to a corner in the wall. My head was between my knees, my hands over the back of my head. Sobs wracked my body.
“Why are you crying?” he screamed down at me. “You want to go? Fucking go, go now, get the fuck out!”
“This is the shit you want?” He barreled around the house, scooping up armloads of the clothes he had just flung everywhere.
“Take it!” Arms full, he kicked open the back door and hurled my clothing into the dark alleyway, where nosy neighbors had already started to peek out of back doors and windows.
His tirade continued. He screamed that I had better tell him where I was going and, if I was staying with a man, I had better be prepared for the worst. How I would end up homeless, since he had been covering the rent for both of us. How I was such a selfish person for not appreciating his generosity. How, if I had so much money to be on my own, why hadn’t I been helping out with the rent? And how I probably have been lying to him for months and stashing away money, and on and on.
The more he yelled, the more I shrunk into myself. I wanted to disappear, to shrink into such a small ball that I could just disappear. Maybe this was a bad plan. Maybe I should just stick it out with him a bit longer. Maybe he just needed more time. After all, we are husband and wife.
I’m not sure exactly what happened next, but something inside me snapped. Perhaps it was an animal instinct for survival. Somewhere, deep in my belly, I knew I had to go through with my plan to leave. Curling up into a ball was not going to work. I got an idea.
I would force him to give me an excuse to leave, one that even my parents would accept. I got to my feet and shut off my tears. I emptied myself of emotion. I stood in the doorway, blocking him from returning from the alley, where he was now loading things into my car, trying to be helpful. I made myself big. He moved like a pissed off bull and he outweighed me by eighty pounds, but I felt no fear. I moved toward him until our faces were inches apart.
I said, “If you are such a big, strong guy, why don’t you hit me? Do it, just smack my face. You know you want to. DO IT!”
He didn’t hit me. He was shocked. He backed down. He said I was crazy and that he didn’t want to hit me. He was right. I was out of my mind.
The neighbors, filled with drama-lust, helped me gather something from the garage. And that was it. One neighbor asked if I was okay and said she had just called the police for a domestic disturbance, and would I like her to call them back and say we didn’t need them. I felt like…well, I felt like White Trash. What was a good, wholesome, midwest farm girl with a master’s degree in math, a small business owner and an elected official on the town council doing in an alley at 11:00 pm with the cops about to show up? White Trash, indeed.
I drove away, backseat piled with all of my worldly possessions, heart profoundly empty, possessed with a special type of loneliness that only follows from heartbreak or death. I wanted my Mom. Sometimes, feeling so alone, so badly needing support, no one will do but Mom. But I knew I couldn’t call her. In my mind, she would offer no support. I had failed. If only he had hit me, then my parents would have understood. I knew in my heart I had done the right thing by leaving, but the part of me that longed for approval from Mom felt like a miserable failure.
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*some names have been changed to protect privacy
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