Alcoholic Wife. The breaking point.

Explain to the attorneys your concerns about public visibility; they've probably dealt with it before. They can probably set up a "neutral ground" meeting maybe an hour's drive away where neither one of you will be "public figures."

You could even set up a meeting in a meeting room of a public library. If you enter and leave from separate doors a half hour apart, nobody is likely to put things together, even the library staff.

The lawyer probably also has colleagues/acquaintances in a completely unrelated field of law, and can probably set up a meeting at their offices where nobody would think anything of your presence. At any rate family/divorce lawyers almost always are familiar with needs for discretion/ low public profile.

Of course, you're not doing anything illegal or unethical anyway; far from it, you're trying to act to safeguard your children. But public attention would add stress and pressure to a situation already overstuffed with it. Best of luck.

 

Gotcha. Good that you got custody of your son.

 

Thanks, yeah, I'm grateful every day. She had tried to keep him from me by filing false allegations in court (which were easily disproven, luckily) so I missed most of the first three months of his life and I didn't get to spend a night with him until he was six months old. I had to take parenting classes (which were actually quite valuable) to prove I was a fit parent, etc.

I knew she was drinking, but I couldn't prove it, even when I called the cops after she failed to answer her door for my supervised visitation. Her daughter was there and told the police her mommy was asleep. We could hear my son crying, but the police refused to enter her home (they requested permission from their Lt., who denied them entry).

When he was 10 months old, she passed out for 18 hours with him and her daughter there. Thankfully, her daughter called her dad and when he went over, he literally could not wake her up. After that, I was granted emergency custody of my son. Never gave him back. We later found from a tox screen that she had mixed Oxy and alcohol and that's why she couldn't wake up. During the rest of the process, she was granted court-supervised visitations. Of the six scheduled visitations, she missed two, showed up drunk to a third at which refused a breathalyzer and, finally, she failed a breathalyzer at the sixth and final scheduled visit. She hasn't seen him since and I'm glad she's out of our lives.

I'm thankful every day that nothing bad happened to him during that 18 hours and that his sister was able to call for help. He still struggles to fall asleep on his own, I think largely because that experience has stayed with him subconsciously.

 

Addicts love to pass the blame too, my old man was a raging boozer who blamed us for that - and his inability to stop throwing our money away at the track - when he was engaged in that behavior long before any of us came around.

 

Yes. Lots of denial and rationalization.

Some addicts are just assholes. Some are fine once they quit.

 

Ex, I'm sorry you're dealing with this.

I'll echo what others have said -- get some type of help or counseling for yourself AND your kids. They need it, too.

Al-Anon and Ala-Teen are great for support and resources. Your workplace may have an Employee Assistance Program entitling you to free counseling sessions. Your kids' school may have trained professionals they could visit with. Clergy may be an option.

But don't put this off. There are people who can help you down this road.

 

Also, broken marriages and alcoholism are amazingly (and depressingly) common issues. Don't suffer in silence and more importantly don't let your kids fail to get the help they need because of any concerns about stigma. You aren't applying to be a church deacon in 1950.

 

A good point, but public attention just adds to the pressures on everybody involved, including the kids.

Most attorneys and counselors in the divorce /family law field deal with that stuff daily. They'll know how to handle the situation with "discretion" -- not hiding or meeting in abandoned warehouses, etc etc, but "inconspicuously."

 

Thanks for all of the responses.

She made it the whole week without getting drunk. That is a first step. She did have one beer on Wednesday and we discussed the ramifications. My rule was no wine.

There has been no wine. The rule is if there is any wine consumption in the house, she's out. She can go find a weekly hotel and drink with those people.

Yesterday before the game, she came in bawling because she had read the texts earlier in the day on my phone from one week ago. The ones where her crazy best friend was texting me about making sure she was alive. Wife was passed out drunk and claims not to remember any of this.

She never remembers her drinking outbursts.

I told her that she's fortunate she was drunk when she said all that. If she was sober, I said, she would have earned a divorce just with those statements.

It's day by day. Only yesterday did she acknowledge the damage this has caused. A welcome admission but I'll need to see a lot more progress.

She's blamed me for her drinking and finally said yesterday it wasn't my fault.

Here's the big issue. All of her drinking led to so many other elements that have, essentially, killed ALL of my attraction to her. Perhaps we get through it. Perhaps we don't. Right now, I'm in this odd place in that I just want a resolution that equates to peace for the children and not having a drunk mother in their lives.

 

Ex, you should probably gird yourself for the reality to come: She ain't coming back to you. She'll be drunk again very soon. She loves wine more than she loves you.

I don't go looking but if someone were to give me a Tony Montana-sized plate of it right now, I'd dive in head-first and knee-deep and start soaring to the moon again.

I've been clean a good long while but you should also know that even though I don't go skulking in the shadows to look for it, I WANT to manufacture a reason to play in those shadows.

So you say she's had just one beer this week. She's gonna want another beer. But all she really wants to do is drink lots of wine. It's all she's thinking about right now.

You can't outrun the craving. You can never outrun the craving. She'll justify a reason -- she'll manufacture a reason -- and she will dive into another bottle of wine soon.

Take your kids and move on because she's gone and she's never coming back.

 

Well said, Songbird... yes, I know that she'll probably choose wine over me.

As the father with children, documentation is also my friend. The more incidents she has, the better off I (and the kids) will be when it eventually blows up.

I'll leave this as her choice -- either way, I'll be in a better place than we've been the last few weeks.

 

I'm not quite so cynical as Songbird. The addiction is the reason for the lying and the sneaking and all that.

If she can beat it, she may be a completely different person. People do.