Timeline: Part Two

May 5, 2009:
I wrote a journal entry titled "What I Learned During Derby 2009"

I'd been studying codependence diligently for more than 6 months. I'd had a couple of small victories, and some defeats. I knew what I needed to be doing, and sometimes I was able to do it, but nothing was changing. In fact, my husband and I seemed to be drifting even further apart. While it was still always in the forefront, his level of drinking was a definite improvement over where it had been in the past, so why weren't things getting better?

I'd had 6 months of enormous self discovery and reflection. I had always been a somewhat over anxious person, but my anxiety was beginning to escalate to the point it was disrupting my life. And for the first time ever, I began to suffer from occasional bouts of depression. I was writing a lot about my mother, and still grieving over her death, just one year earlier. I was incredibly sad, mad, and frustrated that despite my hard work and effort, things with my husband were not improving.

I chose this day as pivotal because some of the key points in that day's journal entry will come in to play again, further down the timeline. Of course I wrote about my frustration with my husband's over the top Derby antics. And I noted that I was aware of the fact that I was still way too concerned with his behavior. But I also noted that when he and I argue, the same unresolved issues keep surfacing over and over. I wrote that those issues really needed to be resolved once and for all. Finally, I wrote that my husband was not cured of alcoholism and I was not cured of codependency. We have some issues but we love each other, and we both want to be better. Better individuals, better parents, and a better couple.

At this point in time, I still firmly believed that this relationship should, could and would be restored to it's original 1995 luster. That somehow, one good, happy, sober day when we could both think clearly, my husband and I would finally be able to sit down and talk out those unresolved issues that keep surfacing over and over again. We would work them out once and for all, everything would be fine, and we could get on with the business of our lives.