Full Time Care

I haven’t said much about my partner’s alcohol problem over the last week or more. This isn’t because it’s magically gone away, but because I wanted to write about more pleasant things than the ongoing torment of seeing her slowly destroy herself.

On the contrary, her addiction is back in full force. For the past ten days or so, she’s been drinking every other day. There’s always a good reason, of course: anxiety over a possible voluntary job, anxiety over her analyst being annoyed at her inability to get out and do stuff, anxiety over her parents’ possible reaction to a single sentence in a letter she sent, anxiety over our cat’s cystitis problem… you get the idea.

Bizarrely, I’ve been less affected by this resurgence of inebriation than I would have imagined. I suppose it’s partly because a lot of my other stresses have diminished: we have a little money in the bank, our rent is paid for the month, the house is clean, we’re not being evicted, the benefits are all sorted out and my back has generally been a bit better. That said, I’m in a lot of pain as an aftermath of all the housework for today’s landlord visit, but that’ll pass.

She’s still very determined to reduce her wine intake, too. It’s not as if she just says “Sod it” and opens another bottle: she knows that she’s dependent, she knows it sucks and she’s desperate to break the two-day cycle. That’s our first goal over the coming days. If we can break the chain, like she did at the start of the year, we can slowly increase the number of days between bouts. One positive influence is that the housework and exercise she’s been doing has helped her lose some weight: this will probably be my main way of convincing her not to drink. The longer she can go without alcohol, the more chance her body has of throwing away all that fermented sugar and continuing the weight loss process.

Saturday will be the difficult day. If she can avoid drinking then, we’ll be on the way.