I am writing today to tell you how alcohol destroyed my relationship with my husband. When we first got married, my life was controlled by alcohol. It was all that mattered. Alcohol was more important then my husband and my marriage. It 
just made things worse. It came to the point that we almost got a divorce. Know I am in treatment, and looking towards a clean and sober life. Now I am the wife that I was supposed to be. A clean and sober wife, who doesn’t have to take any drugs or alcohol to live.
Furthermore, when I had my daughter I couldn’t handle it. I had post-partum depression and turned to alcohol as a way of escaping. But that wasn’t the solution. It just made things worse. I am writing to tell you not to drink because it doesn’t solve anything and it isn’t the answer to your problems. I know now that being clean and sober that I can get through anything. It’s hard to be a good mother when you are drunk. There is so much time taken away when you could be bonding with your child.
A mother doing the Narconon program
I remember the day I woke up to see that she was gone. She was my life, my everything but now she was simply gone. There was a note: “Steve, I can not do this any more. You love your alcohol more than me.”
I called my brother and told him Stacy was gone. He came over and we talked for a while. He told me I needed to accept what he and other family members had been trying to tell me for years: the alcohol was more important to me and had taken over my entire life. Sure, I could function through the week at my job but on weekends it was all about getting drunk. I backed out of more family events and special occasions every year just to stay home and get drunk.
The last couple of weeks Stacy and some of our friends has been telling me how overboard I had really gotten lately. When they told me I should get help I cussed them out and told them to mind their own business. I remembered dimly some of the arguments but apparently not as well as they did.
I think Stacy’s final straw was when the check for the water bounced that Wednesday and it was shut off. I jumped on her and she in turn did a little research and saw where I had used the debit card to buy some vodka and beer the previous Friday evening totalling nearly a hundred dollars. If I had not bought the alcohol, the water check would not have bounced.
My brother called his neighbor who is a counselor at a drug rehabilitation center and spoke to him for a little while then handed me the phone. Sometimes an intervention is needed but I think Stacy’s leaving was my intervention, definitely my wake up call. I agreed to go into the residential program immediately and my brother drove me over.
After a little while, we were able to have family members come and take part. I was so happy and excited to see Stacy. My brother had called her and when he told her that this time I really did take the steps to get help, she was thrilled.
Stacy and I are back together. I have been sober for two years now. There are days when life is not that easy; I get through them without the use of alcohol but using the tools I learned at the rehab center. Almost losing Stacy made me realize that there is more to life than alcohol. I have her note from back then to this day to remind me that I never want to get that close to losing her again.
I remember my first year of college. I was away from home for the first time and giddy with the excitement of being a woman for the first time. I was an adult. After years of being the baby of the family and protected by my older siblings and parents, I had resisted them when they advised me to go the community college, instead taking off for halfway across the country.
I wanted to belong to a sorority. I had heard rumors of parties and nights getting out of hand but I was an adult now and wanted to show the world I could handle it. I found out the hard way that I couldn’t.
Drinking made me feel grown up at first but soon I became so dependent on it that I found myself slipping it into my big carry around cup that had previously been used for my favorite soft drink. My roommate was the first to notice and express her concerns, but already in deeper than I had realized, I snapped at her. In the end, though, she is the one who cared enough to save my life.
I had gone to a party and it got seriously out of hand. There were several guys from a certain wild fraternity there that night and the way some of them looked at me made me uncomfortable but I could not figure out just why. When three of them approached me and asked me if I wanted to go to a private party with them I dimly remember having enough sense to say yes but that I needed to use the restroom first. I went in and called my roommate. She told me to stay in the bathroom and in just a few minutes she arrived with her boyfriend and several others. She came in and they whisked me quietly and quickly away. Then one of her boyfriend’s friends called and informed campus security. That night another girl was raped by those same three boys.
My roommate called her brother and he came to visit and told me he was an ex-alcoholic. He took me to a meeting and I began to realize I was in trouble. I took a good, hard look at where I was heading and changed things around that week.
Today I help at one of the best rehab centers around. My old roommate and I are still close friends. In fact, I eventually married that same brother of hers. Because she was the family member of a person who had gone down that road, she knew the signs and symptoms of alcohol addiction to look for when I began having problems and she saved my life. Every time someone tells me I make a difference in their lives, I quietly tell myself that my roommate just saved another person through me. She paid it forward when she came and picked me up that night long ago.
