Admitting what you cannot fix

The title above is what I saw on a bloggers site that I read, and I think it is a very profound piece of statement..

How often does one carry on trying so hard to fix or change things that will never be any different and yet because you have already invested so much time and effort into doing just that and hoping it will be different, you are loth to stop. It takes real courage to say you are going to leave it all and walk away.

I married very young, just 21 and pregnant with our first child. I knew I wanted his children from the moment I met him, but really had not thought it through at all. At 21 we were so young to be taking on the role of parents and we had absolutely no money at all.. He was starting University and because I was pregnant, I couldn't work in a permanant job as I was already pregnant and all the laws were different then, so we carried on and got by with my doing temp work until the baby was born.  Then 6 weeks after that I had found a babysitter and was back working and in a permanent job.

He however was a student and being with other students, he was the only married man and a father at that, so he stayed out as long as he could, and drank with the others and seemed to find it hard to manage both different ways of life. He felt trapped and I know he loved us, but he was just too young to be able to organise it all. I had to work, come home and look after baby until he returned sometimes not until after midnight and totally out of his head with booze. I thought this stage would pass and tried to make the best of things. He graduated, and then was a qualified accountant and working in reasonably well paid jobs that allowed us to own our own home and then there were the other children coming along to join our first and we ended up with 5. All the time I tried to encourage and support him in his career and  ideas of the future, but he was finding it harder and harder to be able to manage and keep a lid on it, and booze was being his crutch more and more.  He was intelligent and rose up the ranks in fact to become managing director  in London. He enjoyed his work but his stress levels rose higher and higher and so did his need for a drink. I could not see any way out of this trap we had fallen into. We loved each other but the bottle was prime positioned in his mind in order to cope. When the last two children were checking the fridge to see what kind of an evening we were going to have I thought it was time to leave. I had tried and tried to fix it for him, but I was never going to be able to..

It had to come from him a decision to re organise his life and  I could not do it for him, so we left.

It was so hard and I knew I had to be strong for the last two, the older children had left home and so I was like a single mother with two boys to raise as best I could. . Luckily we managed to work out an agreement and he was able to see the youngest ones regularly, but it broke our hearts knowing how much we had lost because of the drinking.  It was a hard day when I finally realised that there was absolutely nothing I could do to fix his demons, and I had to walk away before I too was destroyed.. 

There are a lot of bloggers out there who are going through this trauma now, and its so difficult to realise that there will be a place of peace and comfort after all the travails that you are going through, that one day the sun will shine again . That maybe you might meet another person to share times with and that you will smile and laugh again, but whilst you are in the middle of trying to cope and not seeing a way out the future sure looks bleak..

 I just hope that those bloggers will find it helpful to vent online and let them feel better about walking away because they couldn't fix it.