LOVING AN ADDICT AND THE GOD FACTOR...

These last few weeks have been a trying time for me. I miss my Love like there is no tomorrow. If you follow my blog you know that he is in rehab, and has been away from us for more than two years. When he does return home in five months or so we will have spent more time apart than we ever have together. I know that seems crazy to a lot of people. It sounds crazy to me too. Why would I put up with the life of loving an addict for twenty plus years? I don't have the answer other than that I have waited and been through all of the hard times to learn what real love is. My Love and I are at a point in our lives where we are on the same page. As I write this it is a strange thing to see that, to verbalize, to acknowledge and appreciate.
I am used to being the bold, independent, self sufficient single momma who never had to answer to a man. That has changed for me, in a good and positive way. My Love has always been in our lives through jail and prison and now rehab, my kids and I, but he has never been fully "present". Of course him being incarcerated had a lot to do with that, and that probably seems strange to a lot of people. He has been the passive parent standing to the side because his choices prevented him from being an active participant in his children's lives.

When I found out he would be gone for yet another 2 years I broke down and cried, but now looking back on it I am glad his probation officer didn't let him come home, instead putting him in a rehab facility a few counties away from us. This was so he would not try to leave and come home, something he did anyway once and then it hit him that he was preventing his own happiness. In the beginning he called me and said they are trying to shove religion down my throat..I don't want that I don't need a relationship with God like they want me to have. I told him in those early phone calls to just do whatever he had to do to come home.

I believed, I was a reborn Christian. I was raised Catholic but never practiced as an adult. Instead after going through our domestic violence incident and staying at the local mission for a brief time I was urged by a woman who was also staying at the mission to go to a church near the mission one Sunday. I went and I listened to the sermon, at the end of the sermon they asked if anyone wanted to turn their life over to God and to have a personal relationship with him. The way the Pastor spoke was as if he was speaking to me and raising my hand that day changed my heart from one that was hurting to one that would be filled with hope. I was later baptized and when my children came home two of them also became baptized and we faithfully went to church on Wednesday and Sundays for 5 years. At this time their father, my love was in his addiction deep and every time we went to church we prayed for his sobriety and his heart to be changed. He saw how going to church changed me, how happy I had become. He tried to be in our life but I held fast that he would not be in our lives as long as he was using and doing drugs for a long time and then I allowed him to come home after a stint in rehab where he said he changed. When he did live with us I stopped going to church and blamed having a new job and working overtime as the reasons I stopped going to church. My life spiraled and I lost places to live several times because I allowed my Love to make promises to me I knew he would not keep. He again went to jail and prison and I continued making bad choices. Moving a total of 5 times in the next 4 years.

I decided to shut him out, I deserved to be happy, I even went to church occasionally, but not as often as I wanted to. It was during this time that he showed up on my door to visit our kids, in the daytime.. he paid no attention to me. Which was odd because every other time he would say he was coming over to see the kids he would show up late after they went to bed, ashamed for them to see him sucked up and coming down from his meth high. His attention was on his daughters this time and he came and said "I know they( the police) will be looking for me Kris, I am so tired of this life...I don't want to live like this anymore. I love you and my daughters but I don't know how to stop. I want to stop but I don't know how to. I know I have lost you and them." I told him that he hadn't lost us but that we could not live like this, that he needed to get help and that it wasn't something he needed to do for us, but for himself. He needed to love himself so he could fully love us. The next morning after sleeping on my couch he was arrested. That was almost 3 years ago. 1 year of it was spent in jail and then in a rehab in Fresno, that I hated because it had not helped him before, and didn't this time either. He ended up leaving and getting a violation, more jail time, he had done well but was still kidding himself that he could make it out here. I am so glad he violated and that his probation officer put him in the program he is currently in. It is called Teen Challenge and it has saved him from himself and made him a different person entirely. He has been there for one year. Every day after he leaves will be a day of hard work and making the right choices, but now he has a renewed faith and that faith will help us both.

When I speak to him now and spend time with him he is a completely different person. He has grown into the man I always knew was there. He has helped me to parent our children in ways that he never has before and it has been hard to listen to him give me direction because I have been doing it all alone for so long. I got mad the first time he gave me some parenting advice. I was actually upset with him for having the nerve to try to be a parent. Then I realized, wow this is what I had been praying for all this time! A partner who was willing to shoulder the responsibility. How do I know he has changed? It is a gut feeling, just as I knew when he was high on crank or drunk or smoking weed I know now that he has the God factor working in his life. People who find themselves in certain situations...Get God. Everyone in prison says they are saved, of course they are only saved to the extent that it allows them to get out and mess up again. That's not to say that some are truly changed. I had heard this before from my Love when he was in Prison. No this time its different, he had a conversation with me recently and he told me, "Pray Kris!" I answered back, " I do, I do all the time." he then asked, "Do you really pray Kris, or do you just ask for God to get you out of a situation? I am talking about taking time daily to meditate on the Bible and prayer." I was floored. Yes many of my prayers consisted of "Lord just get me out of this situation and I will go to church." Of course the Lord had nothing to do with many of my situations, because they were purely out of my inability to be responsible.
It was during this conversation that he told me to go back to church and I promised him we would. I thought how we might visit another church in the area, but for some reason I decided to go back to the church I had first stepped foot in over 10 years ago.

Last weekend was our first weekend there, there were seven of us, me and my daughters and a nephew and my grandson and my daughters boyfriend. It was nice and we left with a good feeling. This last Sunday we were anxious to go as we were having a special speaker for Fathers Day. All week I had told my Love when I heard from him. This speaker Darwin Benjamin, was like my Love, a former addict. I knew what he had to say would resonate with me so I eagerly anticipated the day wishing my Love could be with us to hear his story. He and his wife's testimony spoke directly to me and my family and rang true in many parallels to my own life with my Love. After church which had run longer than usual my love called and I told him how powerful the speaker was and what his name was and he said, "Wait a minute was he a black guy?" I laughed "Yeah, why?" and my husband told me that he had just heard him this last week at a Teen Challenge Picnic in Turlock. I was amazed that my prayers were answered and that my Love was able to hear Mr. Benjamin's message. I then started to see other coincidences if you will....The church I go to is heavily affiliated with Teen Challenge as it is an Assemblies of God church. I prayed every time I went faithfully to have my husband restored and saved. Darwin Benjamin is also associated with Teen Challenge and my church. The simple fact that my husband has developed a relationship with Christ at this facility is in itself a blessing. Everything is coming full circle from the very first day I walked into that church till now. Even after my absence for a long time God continued to work behind the scenes for me daily even when I thought he had abandoned me. That is the God factor at work. I fully believe that everything we do in life is linked to an event that needs to happen for us to find our higher power. Whether you believe or not is not the question because I believe for you. I know what God has done in my life and will continue to do. All that I or my Love had to do was surrender.

 

I messaged Darwin Benjamin's Truth Ministries on Facebook. I told him about the fact that he spoke at the event my husband was at and the parallels in our stories this is the reply Truth Ministries

• Omg - amazing i sure will pray for you guys and always keep the faith especially if we dont get what we want and how we want - we just need to say like Mary oh well let thy will be done Lord cause the Father knows best - i trust you Lord! Read Isiah 44:22 - 2 Cor 5:19-20 It's all there add 1John 1:9
  
  

  I am not here to tell you what you need to do with your spirituality. I am only here to tell you how my life has taken so many twists and turns and yet it has come full circle to where I first found comfort in believing as an adult. Too many coincidences to be just that. We are all works in progress and the truth is there is a lot of work to be done in both mine and my husbands lives but if me sharing this with you helps you through times of doubt and encourages hope in you then it has all been worth it.

I HAD AMBITIONS AND DREAMS THEN I WENT TO JAIL FOR DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

October was domestic violence awareness month. My month for domestic violence awareness was September. It has been 9 years since I was arrested for attempted murder. It has been nine years that I have lived with the choice of that fateful day, September 2, 2001. How do you go from a good girl who has never ever been in trouble other than a traffic ticket, to walking into a jail with your loves blood on your shirt? The tumultuous road that led up to that day was paved with good intentions and I had a bright future ahead despite the fact that I stayed in an abusive and codependent relationship too long. I fell in love with someone who did not love themself, that is where all of our problems started. He was a bad boy and mysterious and beautiful and I was naiive even though when we met he was 18 and I was 25. I was the proverbial good girl, I still lived with my parents. Worked full time and had ambitions and dreams and he was just someone I was finally going to have sex with, because despite all of the whispers and gossip in highschool I remained a virgin. It was not supposed to be me falling in love with him or he with me, it was supposed to be a fling.  The kind of great romance you tell your grandchildren about. Instead I found myself in a situation that I did not like, there was something about him that needed rescuing and something in me that needed to be needed. We were destined to a fate that neither one of us saw coming.
I found myself pregnant and him in another state. I did not know that he was absconding Youth Authority Parole and I did not realize the depth of his issues until it was too late and I was in another state away from my family and away from everything I knew. I never witnessed any potential for violence from him. He became angry when I told him I wanted to leave and return home. I decided to stay because that is what I learned from my parents that despite any problems you have you tough it out. Not to mention that my father would not have let me come home. Although we eventually did return home and that is when our nightmare began. It was during this time that my love became addicted to methamphetamine and a cycle of drug use and physical and emotional abuse started. The cycle stayed in tact for 8 years and 3 children later and jobs lost, and jail and prison time and welfare and instability. I left him several times but always went back even though he had infidelities and lies about his drug use. In this time I too learned to be abusive and became addicted to the cycle of domestic violence, you fight, you argue, you provoke, you get physical, you actually inflict some physical or mental and emotional warfare on your love, and then when they break you are in control, finally you feel remorse. After that remorse comes the honeymoon phase when there is a period of calm and you are happy and content. Then the calm before the storm, and waiting for the bottom to fall out because inevitably it will and the chaos that is domestic violence starts again. He is not the monster here, I want to make that clear I will not villify him. I too was just as responsible for the life I lived and the danger I put my children in. My violent tendencies only flourished under his maltreatment and my uncontrollable anger. His drug addiction became bigger than our domestic violence lifestyle and it came to an abrupt and all too predictable finale on that September day.
 I remember all that led up to it and I remember being ready to confront him on what I assumed was another infidelity. I remember needing diapers and waiting for him to bring my car home so I could go and get some shopping done. I remember needing new clothes for a second interview with Sams Club, and getting papers filled out to become a Girl Scout Troop leader. I remember making plans to finish up my AA in child development so that I could go on to become a kindergarten teacher. He saunters in smelling of beer and ciggarettes and I knew that I needed to get him out for good. The volcano woman that I would soon become was dormnant  no longer. We began to argue and he yelled at me and I remember my middle lovelie telling him to leave me alone, she was all of 5, soon to be 6 at this time. I see in slow motion as he picks her  up and scolds her for getting into an "adult" conversation and I saw her little feet leave the ground. I ran and picked up the biggest kitchen knife I had. I remember motioning towards him and his eyes being as big as saucers filled with fear, as I told him to leave. Somehow we ended up in our room and all I know was that the very tip of this very big knife hit his neck and it was like a poke. When blood came out it was not gushing or pouring out, it came out in bright scarlett drops. I knew that I was not going to be a teacher anymore and all of my dreams left me and I sunk slowly down the wall onto my bed and crumbled under the weight of what I had just done. That is when I saw my middle lovelie in the doorway of my room and my love rushing in a blur before me. I snapped out of my shock and saw that he needed medical attention and drove him to the hospital about a mile away. Leaving my three daughters with the neighbor who had heard it all.

As I drove I remember saying "see what you made me do!" and I remember him saying "I love you" and telling me to say he fell on the knife. I told him how stupid that was and to shut up! I drove into the emergency room and ran and got a nurse, a girl who I had gone to school with, telling her my husband was stabbed. She calmed me down and he was whisked away into a back room. "Who did this?" she asked and I said, "I did." It was not long after that a police car arrived and this idiot of a cop came and basically said that I was not scared of my love that I was the aggressor wasn't I and I started it. And I told him I have nothing else to say to you, and he said you will go to jail, and I said matter of fact, "well then take me". I was mad, that I was not the victim in his eyes, my love had given his alias and none of his domestic violence arrests were showing up. A younger officer felt compassion and gave me respect and sincerity when he spoke to me. My love did tell them he fell on the knife and I could hear him calling my name. I just wanted to disappear into complete nothingness, because surely not existing was going to be better than anything that awaited me.
I cried and tried to sleep for the first two days of incarceration and I remember the shackles that I was wearing and how they clanged on me. I had a public defender and a clean record going for me. My lawyer John Garvin was very real about my situation. My kids were placed in foster care with my sister, my husband barely survived surgery. I severed his carotid artery with the tip of that knife. He had open heart surgery to repair a lung and food duct that was damaged when they replaced the artery. He was in a precarious situation and so was I. I was originally charged with attempted murder and before I went to my final hearing my lawyer presented a plea deal to me or the option to risk going to court. I say risk because I was looking at doing 7 years in the State Prison for Women in Chowchilla a town away. The other thing I had to factor in was waiting until December to have a court date and the possiblitlity that having a jury trial could go either way because jurors do not want to be deliberating someones fate when they should be Christmas shopping. My other option was the plea of no contest and five years probation, and being released after serving less than 30 days. I had already missed my middle lovelies 6th birthday. I went ahead and took the plea felony domestic violence. My love and I were both released on the same day and he actually called the jail and told an officer there to tell me to pick him up. How crazy was that? I wanted nothing more than to get away from him I was afraid of him. Everyone that heard what had happened said he got what was coming to him that he deserved it. I thought that it was going to be me not him and I came to realize that neither one of us deserved any violence we comitted against one another. Family violence is an epidemic in this country. Not just intimate partners but sons and fathers, mothers and daughters, siblings. What creates violence? I believe violence is a learned pattern of behavior. So I had to take a good look at myself.

I went through so much that year that followed my family viewed me as a failure, I had no one to turn to at times. I perservered through homelessness and found two jobs.Went to counseling and anger management classes. I did end up seeing him we were both trying to reunify with our daughters but my relationship with him was not the priority and it shouldn't have been. Getting my daughters home was. He ended up using again to numb the pain from his surgery first oxycontin and then back to meth. He had not learned that meth is what destroyed our lives. I did whatever CPS and the courts asked and my girls came home. I saw him on and off during this time and he told me that he never blamed me for anything. I still loved him after all. I still cared about what happened to him. 9 years later he was still using and at times he stayed with me but it was always short lived because his addiction was his love. I still put my daughters through a lot of unnecessary drama by dealing with him when he was in his addiction. Last year I stopped communicating with him and moved and changed my number with strict instructions at my job that no one tell him anything about me. I know that it sounds so twisted to you, to hear me say I still love him, but I do, because for all of the terrible times, there were good times between us too. There was love between us that no mere mortal except our very close friends could fathom. My love made one last request to see his kids and so I let him and this time I noticed that he was not chasing me down that he hung on their every word and there was a sadness in his eyes as he saw what he no longer had, his family. The next day he was arrested, he asked for help. He went into a facility for drug rehab and has been clean since May of this year. He has made great strides in his progress. Will it be enough? We know it is one step at a time, one day at a time. We have both grown up in so many ways.

I am not saying domestic violence is something that you grow out of on the contrary the more you live it, the more you know it, the more insidious it becomes. To me change is possible and souls are resilient. Today we know what our triggers are and we know that it is work on both of our parts. I and my daughters have had ongoing counseling.  I hate when media says "he" is an abuser and therefore a "bad" person. I was violent too. You don't think women can be violent?  Go to the womans prison and listen to their stories. It can be learned for us too. I say there are two sides to every story.

Not every family can heal from domestic violence most people must leave a situation, but where there is hope and love and a willingness to change, then all is not lost. I would never tell a woman to stay in a relationship that was violent where she feared for her life or her childrens well being. There are a lot of agencies and help available to women and men who want to make a change in their lives.

Almost every day I see women being released from prison and I say there go I, but for the grace of God. I wonder what their stories are? I wonder if they know that change is possible. I wonder if they still have hope? I know I did the right thing taking that plea no matter how much it limits my choices career wise. Besides the only real thing limiting me, is me. This was something I had to go through to get to where I am now. Where am I? I know myself better now than I ever have, and I love myself more now than I ever have. I know I have to be realistic and not fantasize about what my family is or will be, but they are my family and for all of our dysfunctions we are stronger than most! I cannot predict the future but I will say that I am a realistic optomist when it comes to my love. His addiction fueled his violence and his violence fueled mine and my violence taught my daughters that violence is acceptable. By seeing our lives change hopefully our daughters will also learn that violence is not acceptable. Are you willing to break the cycle? If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence in their lives check out these links  http://www.ncadv.org/  and  http://endabuse.org/ http://www.thehotline.org/ or call the  national hotline number 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or TTY 1-800-789-787-3224.