Image credit: Photo by Eternal ☼ Sunshine on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons It was raining the night I first kissed my husband. The wind was hissing and howling through the bare branches of the trees, rattling the last of the dead leaves still clinging to their posts. Before we kissed, we twined our hands [...]
Posts under ‘relationships’
A Game of Chess
Image credit: Photo by FJTU (a veces on-line) on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons My husband Mark recently taught our 5-year-old daughter, Janie, the basics of chess, and she has been fascinated by it. As I was playing with her this morning (and she was instructing me where to move so that she could capture [...]
Alley Cat
Image credit: Photo by mirsasha on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons When I was a child, I had the best cat ever. No animal past or present could compare. It wasn't that he had a sweet disposition. He was almost universally mean, awful and belligerent. When almost any creature approached him, he'd snarl, hiss, scratch, [...]
Opening Up
Image credit: Photo by casch52 on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons This week I plan to tell one of my best and oldest friends about my husband's addiction after nearly six years of silence around it. I've wanted to let her in to this part of my life, because keeping her out -- keeping anyone [...]
Feeding the Emptiness
Image credit: Photo by Djuliet on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons Many years ago, before we had children, my husband bought me a small fish tank for my birthday. At the time, I wanted a car. I didn't really think he could buy a car, but I was relying on a very iffy public transit [...]
Guest Post: Recovery Relationships, On Thin Ice but Safer Together
Today's guest post comes from my very good long-time recovery blogging friend The Discovering Alcoholic, who (like all of my guest posters) had me nodding along in recognition and agreement with his thoughts on the tricky act of balancing individual recovery with recovery within relationships... (Note on comments: I'm a control freak and moderate my [...]
Struggling for Positive Control
Image credit: Photo by .m for matthijs on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons My COSA meetings are structured around a speaker who reads from recovery literature and then briefly shares. This week's reading from Pia Mellody's Facing Codependence was a passage on negative control versus positive control. She defines negative (unhealthy, codependent) control as trying [...]
The Geographic Cure
"The only consistent feature in all of your dissatisfying relationships is you." despair.com Early in recovery, I struggled with the notion that the geographic cure -- trying to fix my life with a move to a new home, a new job or a new relationship -- is a fallacy. I know that I bring my [...]
My Daughter is Not Me
Image credit: Photo by igorms on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons When my kids were infants, the hard work of parenting was mostly physical: dealing with extreme sleep deprivation, lugging babies and their gear around, changing diapers, keeping dangerous objects out of reach. But the older the kids get, the more the work shifts to [...]
Getting Honest about Blogging
Margaux at Love in the Time of Addiction tagged me with this award/meme by virtue of my (say this in a Wizard of Oz voice, please) scrupulous and honest honesty. I'm supposed to share 10 honest things about myself and then tag 7 others. I usually do these kinds of things in haiku, but I [...]
