Our marriage counselor told my husband to do one thing.
Our counselor was emphatic and direct with his message. He told my husband he needed to go home and do it immediately. My husband was never willing to do it.
This advice was the result of what landed us in marriage counseling.
My husband had begun uncharacteristically drinking.
He had scared our children and me.
“You need to go home and tell your children,” said our counselor. “That you will never again make them feel unsafe in their home.”
The marriage therapist told us my husband did not have a drinking problem. He was abusing alcohol and his anger was coming out when he was doing it.
To clarify this meant my husband wasn’t an alcoholic.
He was someone abusing alcohol during an unhappy time.
But it had to stop.
Our home needed to be a safe and predictable place again. Our children did not deserve anything less than that. I thought for sure my husband would listen to our counselor.
When he didn’t do as the therapist asked, I urged him to do so.
He refused.
This was in the infancy of our second attempt at marital counseling.
We didn’t yet have a diagnosis of his narcissistic personality disorder. We had arrived at this relationship milestone because of the drinking incident that scared the kids and me.
Later I would discover what prompted his uncharacteristic drinking.
I had told my husband I was unhappy and lonely being married to him. He spent two years attempting to win me back. I honestly didn’t think it was possible. But I ultimately came around and decided to stay.
But I had wronged a narcissist.
Once the narcissist won me back, he was angry and wanted revenge.
This incident was the beginning of a drinking pattern that reared its ugly head three to five times a year for the next several years.
One day our entire family is in the kitchen.
Our boys are upset with their father’s behavior and they voice it.
I watch my husband to see if he will follow our counselor’s advice…finally.
“Boys,” says my husband. “I know I’m behaving badly. But it’s your Mother she drives me to it.”
I can’t believe my ears.
I am outraged.
Our boys are smart enough and old enough to share my emotion. Kids are wiser than we think. They understand right and wrong. They understand the parent who is behaving badly and the parent who isn’t.
I am not happy with the way my husband treated me.
It’s one of the reasons I divorced him.
But it was far more shocking to see what he inflicted on our children with no remorse. It was startling that he not only failed to assure our children it would never happen again but he repeated the bad behavior.
He had no ability to put our children first.
The man I married was a disappointment.
But the bigger disappointment is who he ultimately was as a father.
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Photo credit: Szilvia Basso on Unsplash
