Thank you all so much for letting me share the load via this thread.
Today I got in touch with 2 of my 3 nieces and then was able to see them individually. I made an amends (24 years in AA, that's what we do) to each of them for cutting them off while telling them it had to be done and was the best thing for all concerned. I asked for their patience & understanding going forward while telling them that I wanted to fix what I could now. They couldn't have been more gracious, loving & understanding. From what I gather from talking with the oldest, the middle niece is a hot mess these days, but I will see her tomorrow and try to do the same.
Bigheart,
I too wondered for a while why I was so angry at my brother but not at her. On my brother's end of things it was easy to figure out. His struggle with addiction had been going on since the 80's and led him to lose a lot. About 12-13 years ago he was on the wrong side of town at the wrong place, wrong time. A crack whore set him up to be robbed and he got beaten up so badly that he was in the hospital for 3 months. He couldn't walk for most of that time. He told me that he wanted to get help. I went to the hospital 3 times a week to lift him out of bed, into a wheel chair and take him to the 12 step meeting. I rented a storage garage and cleaned out his house and garage/business before the sherrif padlocked the doors. When he got out of the hospital he stayed with his ex and the kids for about a year. That was rough, and he played on my emotions at that point. I knew what a headache his ex was. When his SS diability came through I helped him make the security deposit to rent a house for himself, then on occasion helped with the bills. I thought he was doing better and was glad to help, figuring he'd have done the same for me if the roles were reversed. Unbeknownst to me, the affair had started toward the end of his stay with his ex.
Between the affair, him milking noit just me but her (behind my back) for money, all the help I'd freely given, his blowing smoke up my ass about how grateful he was for that help, how family was so important, how lucky he was to have me as a brother....the realization that all this b.s. had been laid on me while the affair was going on made me insanely angry.
With my wife, much different scenario in my view. She put up with my nonsense the first 10 years we were together. I didn't have any of the drama, arrests, eviction, etc. that my brother had but that may largely have been because my wife held things together. I just know that during those 10-11 years before I went to AA, she deserved much better from me. I wouldn't say I was an asshole to her, just that she deserved better. She also was the breadwinner during that time. In my eyes, she was an angel, and through sobriety I began to see how much I had taken her love and care for granted.
I was 2 years sober and doing well when her sister was murdered by her new husband. WW went into a horrible grief stricken depression for a long time, then a year later we became instant parents, getting custody of her sister's 8 year old son. After awhile we settled into a groove and things seemed to be going well. A couple of years later I lost my job and the new work in my profession would take me away from home 6 months out of the year. After 2 years of this I got a different job and was able to get home for 4-5 days about once a month.
I thought we were stronger than ever at this point, after 22 years together. What I didn't know is that she had a lot of old resentments she never dealt with, some about me. I knew she struggled with her relationship with her mother but wasn't aware of how deeply it continued to effect her after her mother's death. She was also miserable that physical complications made it impossible for us to have a baby. Also didn't know that she started smoking weed a lot and drinking more. She hid it all from me. She never blamed the cheating on that, but it's part of the story. Escapism. I'd been there, and understood how that goes. Soon enough she was getting high with my brother while I was out of town.
After she confessed to the affair over the phone in August 2014, she drove the 500 miles to be with me. Over the next few days I got my first real look at how fucked up and broken she was. It was scary as hell. About 5 days after she had confessed, a light bulb flashed in her head. She told me that she thought she was an alcoholic. I asked about her alcohol & drug use and it became clear that her addiction, never before apparent, had taken off over the last 7-8 years. I took her to a meeting that night. She's been clean & sober since. There are always ups & downs in recovery but she has worked the program as intended and it shows. She got very honest very early on about a lot of things (her drug & alcohol use, other bad habits, other mostly ons cheating) but TT endured for a long, long time about my brother. Just in the last month she began reading SI, the Linda Glass book and other resources and there seems to have been a distinct change. She (finally) comes to me to correct the record and talk abiout things she's figuring out thriough her reading and new attitude about openness & transparency.
I had been inactive in AA for too long myself, but all this pushed me back in a big way. The desire to drink and to do violence was stronger than I ever felt in my life, even so many years after my last drink & drug. I knew I needed AA to straighten all that out for myself. It works if you work it, and it has.
Very early on I spoke to a trusted confidant in the program about all this. He asked me, " Do you still love her?" I did. He said that no one would blame me for dumping her, but that if I stayed I needed to support her recovery fully. It was a fine line between SI mentality/advice and recovery mentality/advice. A hard road to hoe. I did the best I could, and it seems to have worked out well. I say "seems" a lot because once my eyes were opened to what she was capable of doing that could crush me, I'm not ready to 100% count on anything.
So in those first couple of years, talking to her so much or at least trying to amid TT and her fear, guilt & shame that tended to compound her confusion, it was easy to see how she was more a sick person than an evil one. She had done far too much good, shared far too much love with me and everyone else over many years for me to think of her as evil. She was just that broken. There were numerous times in the midst of those intense late night discussions that I was struck with how much she was the typical newbie in AA struggling with her consequences. I had done the same, though internally and without all the marital drama. I'd seen many others at a month, three months, a year sober who were trying hard but still half full of shit. That experience often took the edge of for me in regards to the TT. I would've been crazy to expect her to be totally honest at that point. She had gone too far off the reservation to get well so quickly. We're talking 20 years or more of grief, resentment, fear, heartbreak that formed this person who sought to escape with drugs, alcohol & sex. It would take a little time.
Being that I was well aware of how that process works, that I still loved her and saw the good in her, and that she was working at recovery the right way, I needed to support her fully. I still called her on her b.s. sometimes. She didn;t always get it right away, but she was trying the best we could. Over that first year I began to see the results in her. Meanwhile, she had been working very hard at getting the day to day stuff right by paying the bills on time (a big issue previously), becoming an exemplary employee at her new job, and all the little things of day to day life, many of which had been blown off in her addiction.
In AA they say progress, not perfection. I saw much prgress, even while the TT about my brother continued. I eventually figured that this wasn't a lack of love for me anymore. The TT was all about fear, shame & guilt. Thankfully she seems to finally be getting a handle on that.
Anyway, hope that explains that difference in my level of anger for the 2 of them. Sorry for rambling. Not much sleep and a lot of emotion the last week.
Thanks again, truly, to all of you who jumped in here with me.
DR
