Dear B
a letter to my husband, sept. 2022
Dear B,
Why do you keep doing this to me? Why do I keep letting you do this to me?
Do I just not care anymore? Have you finally upset me and let me down enough times that I’m immune to it?
This is the third time I have caught and confronted you. You have sworn up and down on my life – our lives – that it wasn’t you and tried to make me think that I was the one going crazy.
You have a problem. You are an addict. You hid it from me for so long, so well. First it was gambling. Then it was alcohol. Now it’s uppers. My uppers. You have been stealing my prescription medication. Drugs for ADD which I was diagnosed with after my epilepsy. More than 100 pills.
The first time, I was very confused. I went to take a pill from a prescription written for 60. But there were only 13 in the bottle. Had the pharmacy made a mistake? Was there an insurance issue?
You had taken 47 pills from me. 47!
The second time you were so bold to take the entire bottle. You even pretended to help me look for it and made suggestions of places in the house to check. When you finally, painfully confessed, the story was that you had the bottle at work, took a pill, felt “cracked out,” got scared and threw it in the pond.
I never believed you for a second. That bottle sat in your office, your car, a hiding space somewhere. You swallowed every fucking pill in that bottle.
Today, I went to take a pill. Again, a new prescription written for 60. There were 16 in the bottle. You had taken another 44 pills before I had even taken one. I had deliberately hidden the bottle after you stole last time, which is a major problem in and of itself. The more disturbing part of this incident, though, was that to have found the bottle this time means you went rifling through my belongings. You literally must have stood in my closet and opened my purses, shoe boxes, drawers, rummaged around like a fiend.
I never should have given you the benefit of the doubt. I thought we had reached a real understanding last time. But every other time I’ve given you the benefit of the doubt I’ve been disappointed, too.
Right now you’re going on three hours of napping. You nap a lot. It must be nice to sleep so soundly during the day, through the night, unbothered by guilt – or any emotion – resulting from your actions. How does one do that? How do you look at yourself in the mirror, get dressed for work and walk out of our house knowing you’re off to take a pill you stole from your wife? Knowing that when I find out, because I always do, it will crush me? How do you do that?!?!
I think about leaving you. I have very seriously considered it in the past. Sometimes I try to visualize that life. And I can. I can picture myself and Peanut. I can picture you having to come to the door to pick her up and take her back to wherever your new place would be.
A lot of the time I don’t even feel like I can trust you with her. Is that surprising, though, when I don’t feel I can trust you with anything else? When I tell you that you become indignant. You think I’m the audacious one.
Thinking about that life is reminiscent of when my parents got divorced, the days where my dad would come to pick us up at my mom’s, his presence announced with a horn honk in the driveway. It was horrible. Agonizing for my mother. Sad for me and my brother to be temporarily removed from the comfortable home we were growing up in, near our friends, only to be relocated to one in another neighborhood that never felt like home.
I don’t want to leave you. I kind of want to scare you. I want to scare you into thinking I am going to leave. It sounds evil … but the questioning, begging, pleading days are over. I gave you multiple chances, more than you deserved, and you blew every single one.
You tell me you love me all the time but I don’t even know if I believe that anymore. It sounds automatic, trained. It doesn’t sound special. You don’t make me feel special enough. I’ve tried to explain that to you and you say you understand and so you’ll randomly bring me flowers a few times and then it all goes away again.
Possibly the best year we ever had in our 10 years together was 2020. The irony – a pandemic ravages our country just as I finally become pregnant. Life ground to a halt. It was terrifying for a time. But we were so good. You were so loving and kind and thoughtful. You brought me Whole Foods mac and cheese four times a week. You tracked our baby’s growth with me on the What to Expect fruit chart. You even painted my toenails before my c-section! We were closer than ever, the love was visceral, it hung in the air between us.
Was it real? Or was it just because I was finally able to give you what you wanted most in the world? Is this my fault? Should I have done something sooner, besides beg you to get help? I didn’t know what else to do. Addiction has only ever been a newspaper article or sad story to me. I never knew any addicts. I certainly don’t understand addiction on a human level - I get the science of it but that doesn’t help figure out what to do when it’s staring me in the face every day.
So what do I do?