My Recovery ~ In the beginning

A lady that I recently met but have quickly grown to respect said to my little girl you wont ever know what your mommy has gone through for you. For some reason those words really struck me. I started to think about all the things I have done in order to do what most parents do which is to make sure their kids have the best life possible.  One thing that I have been tried hard to do is be very open and honest with them.  I do not believe that secrets help any situation.  But that has been hard.  So I started to rethink the purpose of this blog.  While I hope to reach out to people that suffer in one way or another from the effects of addiction I also hope that someday my kids will read this and understand how things happened.  Maybe they and other people can learn from our mistakes and from our successes. 

So my recovery began about the same time as Joe.  I dont remember now exactly what happened that put me over the edge on this particular day but I decided I had had enough.  After about 3 years of marriage things were spiraling out of control.  I went to visit a friend who recommended a christian counselor at Bangor Baptist, John Kasten.  So I made an appointment.  On my first visit I sat in his office listing all of the crazy things Joe had been doing.  Then John started asking me things about myself.  I remember thinking why is he asking about me doesnt he hear all of the things I am saying about my husband.  It was then that I started evaluating my life and how I had become the person that I was.  Not all bad or good just really thinking about who I was.  He recommended a book that really changed my life, Love Is A Choice by Dr. Robert Hemfelt. 

Over the next few years I went to see John, Joe went to see Jim LaPierre and we went together once a week.  We also started going to a group for young adults at the Rock Church and Joe was going to meeting regularly and working the steps.  It was the beginning of a very difficult process but things really started to get better.  Well things started to go good for the first time really.

But like John always told me that life is an incline plane and unless you are moving forward you start moving backward.  After years of therapy and meetings we started to think that we could take a break.  It was very hard on not just us doing all this every week but on the wonderful family who was watching David for us. 

Ever so slowly we started to let down our guard and things started creeping back into our lives.  That would be the first relapse our family experienced.