journey into my world

Don't Hate Me because I'm Blond & Look too young for my age.

2011-10-07T12:55:00.001-07:00

I had a lengthy deposition yesterday regarding my loft floors. I purchased a loft with wood beetles, was forced to use the Developers choice of floor installers to do the replacement and supposedly fumigate the floor to rid it of the beetle infestation.

Now that seems like a very cut and dry topic, with not a lot of room for arguing. That would be a logical "Real World" opinion, but not in the legal arena, where the victims are the ones who sit in the hot seat, not the people responsible for the problems.

The attorney started out pleasant enough before we were being recorded by the court reporter and then when we began, his line of questioning was totally out of line.

He started asking me questions about my former now deceased husband. I answered the first two then he started asking about
my husbands Legal background and I'm sure he was going to delve into our pending divorce at the time of his death.

None of his questions were nice, they were condescending, and I was quite frankly appalled that my attorney's assistant filling in
for him let this line of questioning go on. I was the one who simply said I was not going to answer anymore of his questions, they had nothing to do with my situation. I was in tears 15 minutes into the day.

He said he was just doing his background questions. Really??? Anyone who's lost anyone they love and witnessed their death is
going to get emotional at having to discuss it in detail to a total stranger who is just "doing his job"

The questions asked in depositions are supposed to be answered by a simply Yes or No, but that's how they GET YOU.

Some things cannot be answered that way. If you say Yes your done, if you say No, you can be held for lying.

We have a terrible legal system.
At the end of the day, we accomplished nothing and now it's been extended. There were three other attorney's present who knew nothing about the case and everyone agreed to finish another day.

After they left my attorney told me I could never win in court because I'm Blond, look too young for my age and I own a house in Malibu. That's how the system works. If the jurors don't like you Lose, period. He then told me that today the average juror would resent the fact that I own a loft for a million $ and they wouldn't care that the developers and agents knew of an insect
infestation and sold the lofts to people anyway.

This is the American Legal Justice system. No wonder the world is falling apart, it's still a popularity contest. If they jurors like you you win, think OJ. If you're a pretty woman and you've been cheated and lied to by your husband well too bad for you.
If the good old boys club is dishonest and can pay off a unethical lawyer they win.

That's how it really works, God help the innocent.

How to Help someone who doesn't understand What they are doing to Themselves by staying in a Toxic Relationship

2011-07-28T10:43:00.000-07:00

I spent two different weekends with an acquaintance of mine who has been living with an Alcoholic for over 10 years.
When she met him she had just lost custody of her son to her former husband who just happened to also be a well connected Lawyer. It was all so tragic, She claimed he was
sexually abusing the 4 year old and when she tried to get help through the Doctors and Agencies who supposedly help
families they in turn gave custody to the alleged "child molester" In this world there is no justice for women who complain to
well connected, men. The boy is now 21 and is still not permitted to see her. How can the legal system do that? The father had
a lifetime resrtaining order against her. For What???? Trying to protect her son from him.
It's like a sane person who gets committed to an insane asylum, the more you protest your not crazy, the more they think you
are. What a world.

She was an affluent resident in Malibu and went from that to losing he son, while trying to protect him, to a basically broke,
almost homeless woman. As I watched her life unravel I saw first hand what the inequities between the power of a Husband
and a wife can tragically become.

This is a common occurrence in families DISFUNCTION. Whether it is alcohol related or not. Obviously there was some other
kind of illness going on in their home for it all to fall apart like that. I wondered why someone who had experienced such trauma
would find herself in another situation which is almost as bad in other ways.

Do Normal people continue to go from one terrible relationship to another? I know so many people who do. What kind of help
is there for people. Therapy rarely helps, especially if you don't have the money to spend year after year sitting in some silent Doctor's office hoping that you will get relief and go broke in the process.

At least if you know there is alcohol addition or drug abuse there are 12 step programs available for no cost other than the willingness to show up. Which sounds a LOT easier than it is for many. Admitting you need help is often the last thing anyone
wants to admit.

Back to my friend, this is the second weekend she sought shelter in my house. After talking about her life these past ten years
I realized that No help I was giving her would ever help her. She told me that on and off for the past 10 years she has had to leave to find some serenity and peace because when this man drinks he's abusive and then she goes back again because "He's NICE when he's sober".

Oh WOW, did I relate to that. It's the Jekyll & Hyde personality. It's what kept me in my marriage for so many years. The Nice
side of my husband was awesome, his dark side was horrific. It's also why I refuse to get into another relationship, it seems everyone I'm attracted to has some sort of addiction history. They are either in Recovery or they need to be.

Is this attraction in a person's DNA where time and time again people are drawn to the same type over and over again? I think so. In the world of online interaction every now and then I play a little game with myself if I'm the least bit interested do they have an addiction? 9 out of 10 times YES its really scary to see who I'm drawn to.

How do you break the unconscious pattern in yourself? Do you shut yourself off from the world and never have another relationship? That is the path I've chosen since I've actually married two alcoholics in my life. I am terrified of living thru another bad relationship, the emotional damage is just not worth that sort of companionship. I'm sure there aren't many people willing to live like that, for me it simply works and keeps me happy.

Am I cured of my co-dependant personality? Hardly. Why else did I come so close to being sucked in to letting my friend stay with me for I thought a month, she told my friend a few months. I actually started to have a panic attack at the thought of having to listen to her problems day after day. I found myself in just a day and a half avoiding her company. I was grateful I had to have my car serviced and was gone for several hours. Something inside snapped and I went from really supportive to actually down right wanting her out of my house. I couldn't deal with it all. It simply brought up way too many old feelings, so the answer to the question is NO I'm not cured but I'm terrified that part of me is still there. I can only imagine how stunned my friend was at my sudden change.

They say time heals all things but I'm still waiting to feel completely healed from my life as a co-dependent. I'm not sure there ever will be that time quite frankly, but I do know that as long as I listen to my reactions, I will never allow myself to fall for another addict.

Another Year and Still I can't write my story

2011-01-30T00:21:00.000-08:00

Well here I am at the end of January 2011 and I still can't seem to motivate myself to start writing about my story.
Maybe it's a sign that I'm too busy living to revisit my past in chronological order who knows, all I know is that I have other things on my mind. So instead of blocking myself thinking I have to pick up where I left off, I will now approach this blog as it is and leave the time line to the editing process, or I may never put another word down again.

The end of 2010 was a combination of finally moving back into my loft after leasing out the Malibu house in September and being totally busy trying to get my life back in order.
So much to do in my own life and then having to watch my son go thru his emotional ups and downs and not being able to really do anything about it.

2010 finally brought a beginning of the end of Matt's relationship, I use the word beginning because quite frankly it's not over till it's over. I'm just praying at some point they both just realize that it's never going to work and avoid hurting each other by giving into what Katie wants more than anything. A marriage. In my opinion at this point she would marry anyone and I think she will not marry for love but for the dream of being married and not having to deal with taking care of herself.
Matt said she doesn't want to be a housewife and I couldn't agree more. She doesn't have a clue what being married is all about and being a housewife is what being a married woman is ultimately in the end. If I were to decode the term housewife in her mind, it means she has no intention of cleaning, cooking, taking care of anything that women do when they marry. She wants a cleaning lady she told me once. WOW I give her more credit than they both know. He always tells me she's smart and I have to agree, she's going thru the motions of getting a degree in Grad school so she doesn't have to find a job that can keep her above the poverty line. Now that's smart. She's hoping someone will feel sorry for her. She's already manipulated a $10,000 check out of him, because they were almost like "Common Law Husband & Wife" REALLY????

He moved her out over 2 years ago and she never quite got it thru her head to actually leave permanently. Just about one year ago this coming week we had our last major fight over her lack of manners. She is the most socially inept young woman I have ever run into. If I was the only one who thought that I would say it's me, but there isn't a person I know that has ever been able to figure out what the hell Matt see's in her. I don't think I know anyone who walks around and reeks of unhappiness they way she does. In fact she was still blaming her father for all her unhappiness as of just a few months ago until she got to see her mother in a whole new light when she started speaking to her father after almost 5 years.

I told Matt he was dating his sister and his father and by that I meant, like his sister she hates her father and like his father she is only happy when she's drunk. I didn't know until a few weeks ago that some of her anti-social behavior was because she was high on weed. I really could care less except for the fact that even on weed she's miserable. So what's the point of getting high if you can't even be happy then.

Two weeks ago she crept back into his life for two days. That's how she does it. She needs something. This time she needed to use his kitchen to bake some cupcake pops. No problem if she cleaned everything up when she was finished, but NO in classic Katie fashion she left a bit of a trail. Dirty batter bowl in the sink, foil, plastic wrap, and an empty paper towel holder all there on the counter. Now to some people my reaction to this could be perceived as an over reaction, but I lost it.

It was Wednesday morning and I went over as I have been doing for the past 6 months to make Matt a shake before his workout. I had left his loft Sunday at 1:30am after helping him clean up after his friends drunken puke fest. So when I saw the little mess, I snapped because quite frankly I am not her maid or his for that matter. I will not go back to that time in my life where I needed to do things to be loved. I help Matt because I want to. The minute I feel taken advantage of, it's over.

He was shocked by my attitude and asked me to leave and took his parking pass back. I had to laugh because that's what caused the initial rift between Katie and me. Although she didn't live there she needed the parking even thou Matt had moved me into his place to sleep on his sofa when I no longer could afford to run the water or pay the utilities in Malibu. The shocking thing to me is that he doesn't see her for what she is. I believe she would like nothing more than to see us not speak to each other like she does to her father. Unfortunately for her, I'm not going any where soon.

When he told me that he's still seeing her I told him flat out he's going to have a lot of trouble because she hates me. I will always be the Elephant in the room. We both agreed it's a problem. We can never go back to a time or place where we can pretend any longer that we can even tolerate one another. I tried the offering the olive branch for his sake at Thanksgiving and she refused to come over. I bought her a gift for Xmas and until today I have not gotten any sort of acknowledgment from her to whether she liked it or not.
So there will be no happy ending for this little family. I can't wait to see how the coming year goes for them.

Matt only wants her now because she is or was seeing someone else. It's his ego. Most men are that predictable I think.

So I face the coming year with the jury trial in April and Matt being in the musicale RENT. Drama and Drama:)

Interesting Changes

2010-09-03T14:59:00.000-07:00

I'm so excited about the new Mobile Media revoluction. Check out izigg. It will change the way you view promoting your business.

My Amazing Son Matt

2010-08-29T22:27:00.000-07:00

Last night was the final performance of the Musical Drama my son Matt was in. It had a 4 week run and the Cast delivered better every single night.

I was sitting in the audience at most of the performances just in awe of his talents, thinking about how very proud of him I am and how much he looks like his father.

I know that his dad is looking down on him from above thinking the same exact thoughts I have. What a gift he has always been.
We never really knew how talented he was until he was in High School. I am so proud of him for sticking to his dreams and watching them manifest into "his" world.

I can't imagine him being anything else but a talented Singer/Actor/Writer. It simply is
what he was put on the earth to do.

It's so funny because he thinks that I support him in all he does when the Truth is that his support of Me is what keeps me going. Without his love and devotion, not to mention
generous support of me. I would not be able to be half the woman I am today.

I am Grateful for every single moment I have had with him, and I can't imagine a life without him.

journey into my world: Entertaining the Kids from Japan

2009-11-10T14:17:00.000-08:00

journey into my world: Entertaining the Kids from Japan

Entertaining the Kids from Japan

2009-11-10T13:51:00.000-08:00

For me who never ever had a sitter for Matt, the time he was in Japan seemed like a lifetime. I was so happy to be back up in the rental house in Foster City, awaiting his return home.
Part of the exchange program through the Kiwanis club is that Matt went to live in Japan first with a family and then when his time was up we had his host "brother" stay with us.

That was great except that the other two kids from Japan had learned that our family owned the "Sunset Gower Studio" in Hollywood and they wanted to be with us and not their host families. They did not realize that they couldn't just go visit the studio one afternoon they would have to fly from the Bay Area to Los Angeles and stay with us in order to do that.

Luckily we did have enough room for the three of them to stay comfortably, all they needed to do was have their host families agree to pay the round trip airfare to get them here and back again.

Looking back at this now all these years later, it was amazing how simple it all seemed because when the three Japanese exchange students were here without the other host families, a little drama started to unfold. There were two boys and one girl.
Of course not being able to understand Japanese myself and the kids spoke little English, I had not idea that the boys were teasing this girl until one night around midnight she was crying so hard I had to have my son Matt come up to her room and find out what was going on.

It seems the two boys had ganged up on her about her looks, her style or something personal like that. She simply could not be consoled. So I found out thru Matt that she wanted to call home. What could I say, of course I said yes. It was a month later
when I got the phone bill that I realized she had spent nearly an hour on the phone or that would amount to a $2,000 phone bill. Wow, I had no idea she was on the phone that long or how much it would cost. We just had to shrug it off and pay the bill. What else was there to do?

I was just happy that for two of the three weeks it was just Matt and his host family kid. The other two were only here for 4 days and they were hard because the girl was so moody and in the end, even I who love kids felt helpless to make her enjoy herself.
She didn't enjoy any of her stay it seemed. I was thrilled when the day came to fly them all back to the Bay Area. That also included myself and Matt. It was time to start getting ready to go back to school.

The Airport was intense. Flights were being canceled left and right due to bad weather in San Francisco. And I HAD to get those three back in time to catch their plane home to Japan the next day. We were at the airport for hours and I was so grateful that Bob wasn't there, he never did have the patience to travel much and this was intense. There simply was no room for 5 of us.

No being one to give up I called another airline to see if I could fly them into San Jose on the last flight. As miracles go I got us on a flight but we had to run all the way across the airport to another terminal.
Imagine me trying to explain that to three kids who did not understand one word that I said to them.

Matt really saved the day, he got them all together and explained the best he could what was going on. Then we picked up our bags and ran like hell so that we did not miss the last flight out that night.

Lucky for us the parents in the Bay Area were so cool, they must have been worried also because they were responsible for getting those kids home to Japan on time just as I was.

The next morning was a relief, back to SFO to get them all off to Japan, I was exhausted and just happy to be with Matt in our little rental house in Foster City, anxiously awaiting what would turn out to be the beginning of an entirely new Matt.

Matt's Off to Japan

2009-03-06T22:44:00.000-08:00

Matt was leaving for Japan in just a few hours and already I was freaking out. It simply was a very scary day for me.
As I mentioned I had not spent more than a weekend in the same house with his father since last August, it was now June.

I kept my cool the entire time that we were together in the Airport. Looking back how lucky I was that this was before 9-11.
We actually got to spend the two hours with him at the Airport before his plane took off. The moment he was no longer in site to me, going through the final boarding gate, I fell apart.

I was inconsolable, I could not stop crying and literally did not want to talk to his father if I could help it. First of all, I was not totally prepared for Matt to be flying across the world at 15, he had been our constant companion his entire life. Second,
I did not know what to expect from being alone with his Dad. That was equally as terrifying to me.

We walked away from Matt's gate, and headed to another airline and boarded a plane back to Los Angeles. I wasn't even happy
to be going back to the Malibu house. What would my house be like without the most important aspect of it? Without Matt home, it simply wasn't a home.

It seemed like it took forever to get back to Malibu. Between the hour flight, the hour long limo drive and all of my mixed emotions, I was exhausted when we walked into the door. It was no later than 4pm and I went to bed. I could not speak and I knew if I were awake all hell would break loose. Bob really had no tolerance for not being spoken to unless I wasn't awake.

I must say, he was so kind and understanding, I certainly didn't expect it. I wasn't really thinking about how he was feeling, because he hadn't spent that much time with him the past school year. I on the other hand was with him every day. I felt like someone had ripped my guts out and locked me in a cage.

All I could think about was, "how could I have allowed him to go?" Then logic would set in and I would remember how proud of him I was. I just had to wait it out until he called. I would have to wait for almost 20 hours. It was an eternity I can assure you.
So I slept, or pretended to be asleep until that call came.

It was sometime in the middle of the night when the phone rang. Bob of course was not sleeping, and jumped for the phone.
There was no need to wake me, I was awake, just thanking the Lord above that he had made it.

The moment I heard Matt's voice I felt better. He was so sweet and he was apologizing for taking so long to call home,
What I realized at that moment as he was telling me how he had managed to change trains and translate for the two girls he was with in order to get from the Airport to the city they were going to, that he would be fine. Even at 15 he had the sensibility and the experience to navigate his way around an airport and a train station. At that moment I was so happy that we had traveled with him all those years. He was a very savvy traveler indeed.

He told me that he had been to a special dinner, honoring Him and the two girls at a temple someplace. He said that he had been sining Karaoke and been given sake to drink as a customary welcome. I was so happy. It was so wonderful to hear the joy and excitement in his voice, I was relieved. He hung up and for the first time in oh so many hours, I was ok and talked to
Bob about what Matt had told me. We were both relieved.

I know it's weird because we were only going to be apart for a little over a month but at the time it seemed like those weeks and days would never end. We didn't do anything special while Matt was gone, just hung around the house, went to AA meetings, dinners, movies and I of course made myself very busy fixing up the deck, painting etc. Busy work.

Bob was Bob. He started his day late, had breakfast took a book out to the pool and worked on his tan. Then he would go to the gym and come back shower and we would go out for dinner, movies or whatever.

It never dawned on me at that point just how boring our days really were. Before we left to go up North, I had started a little design company. I was always so busy hand beading beautiful silk velvet throws, but that pretty much ended when we moved.
I actually had to search for things to do. Too much time on my hand was never a good thing. I was great at avoiding conflict.
Bob did not have much sobriety under his belt and was always just on the verge of yet another dry drunk. I lived on egg shells.

He was pretty much on his best behavior, maybe he missed me while we were away, who knows? All I know was that I was grateful for the serenity and did not tempt rocking the boat.

Now that we had moved Matt to a school in Northern California, the only friends we seemed to have left around Malibu were Bob's AA friends. I liked them all alot, but because he had been slipping on and off, he didn't want to hang out with any of them. He always felt he was being judged by them. Who knows why. I never really knew how much drinking or pill use he really was into that first year. All I know is that he wasn't drinking at the moment and I was grateful it didn't come up again.

The end of July came around very fast and it was time to return to Northern California to pick Matt and his host student.
The way the exchange program went was Matt went to stay at a home and then return with the boy he had stayed with.
Of course I was more than ready to get back there.

We went a few days early and cleaned the house and filled the refrigerator with a ton of food for their return. The two girls Matt had traveled with were also coming back with the kids they stayed with. Everyone was once again at the Airport together
waiting. We made plans with the other families to get all the students together again before we took Matt and his friend back to LA. Little did I know that Matt had told everyone that they could all come to Malibu with us and see our Studio.

You have to understand just how excited those kids were to go to Hollywood and then to top it off, they were going to get a private tour of the Sunset Gower Studios by this kid's family. Of course I had no idea that was in the works until they all landed.
When Matt finally came off the plane and into customs it seemed like an hour had passed but there he was. He had lost about
15 pounds. It's not that he was heavy before, but I wasn't ready to see him so thin. He had a strange look on his face as he hugged us and said hello.

He later told me that it was weird hearing our voices and English again. The city he had been in he had little opportunity to either hear anyone speak English or even speak it himself. He was sort of displaced. Culture shock I guess not to mention their hours were all messed up. Matt and Takou were exhausted. When they got home they barely stayed awake for an hour and both crashed. Bob and I were once again left alone in a sense. Only now we were in Foster City, a place that he had never felt comfortable, a place where he was on shaky ground. I could sense the rumblings of discomfort going on in his head. The times were changing, I knew it.

The peaceful Summer so far was coming to a close. I didn't know how he was going to deal with 6 teens in the house at one time, let alone be their tour guide. It was going to be interesting for sure.

My photography

2008-06-20T01:53:00.001-07:00

PhotoShelter: Fresh Stock Photos Served Daily

Domestic Abuse in Affluent Homes

2008-05-15T21:48:00.000-07:00

Well today I am veering off the topic of my blog to write a post for Amnesty International. The topic I am choosing to right about is something that I have personal knowledge of. Domestic Abuse in Affluent families.

It does not matter what your financial background is in order to experience the fear of being abused by the person whom you love and trusted not to harm you, but it really happens everyday. Just think about Nicole Simpson and how the police who went to her home to protect her were simply enamored with OJ being a star. Where was the help for her? She lived in a mansion in Brentwood. OJ told the police it was her problem and they were happy to believe him. It's like a good ole boys club. I wonder what the numbers of police men who abuse their wives or children are? I know it happens all over the country.
The world does not understand why affluent women are afraid to leave or have their spouses arrested. These men hire hire priced attorney's to get them off the hook. They can afford to buy their way out. Poor people don't have that luxury.

The problem is it is almost impossible to get help from a family because as I know first hand the old expression was "We do not wash our dirty laundry in public." That's how my former husband was taught and that is what he insisted be the rules in our home.

The first time I was beat up I think I reacted like many women, I simply brushed it off to his being drunk. Actually when I met him he was 28 years old and drunk every night. It is what ended his marriage at such a young age. But I did not know that at the time. His former wife did not bother to confide that little fact to me. She probaby believed someplace in her head, that it was her fault. I whole heartedly believed he was just venting his anger about how much he was losing in the divorce and being separated from his daughter who was two at the time. I thought he would simply sober up on his own and heal from his divorce. I was also newly divorced but with no children so I really felt sorry for him when every Sunday he was literally in tears when he returned his daughter to her mom and his old house. I was smitten by his sensitivity and his love of his child. Little did I know that many people with alcohol problems cry about a lot of things. It's a great way to get sympathy and keep drinking. I sure fell for it. After all he was highly educated, an assistant deputy DA and as good looking as any famous actor in LA and his family owned a movie studio no less. He had it all going for him. I was in love.

It was a wonderful warm Palm Springs night the first time he ever laid a hand on me. As women who have been abused will often acknowledge it will not take much to set a violent tempered person who is drinking into a rage. I simply told him I was tired and I thought since it was 3 am maybe he should get some sleep and stop drinking so we could have a nice early day.
I had been looking forward to sitting out by the hotel pool to get a tan.

WELL, before I knew it, I had two black eyes and was simply in shock. this was the man who I fell head over heals in love with, 5 months before this. I had told all my friends how amazing he was and that I was going to marry him. Well needless to say that ended our Palm Springs birthday get away. We drove home the next morning in silence. Of course there was no remorse, he said it was my fault for upsetting him. I often hear that from the victim. Reverse psychology is quite common I have learned over the years.

I did not tell have the courage to tell any of my close friends what happened, but confided in a woman I had just recently me through him at a club.She told me to pack a bag and stay with her which I did. I was humiliated. How could this happen to ME. I did not come from an abusive household, neither parents drank except one drink on a holiday. I was not emotionally prepared for this. I was the adored only girl in the family. I had nothing to draw from, I was in foreign water to be sure. Back then no one spoke about Domestic Abuse or quite frankly Alcoholism for that matter.

But like so many women, he kept calling me asking me to come back, he was so sorry. It would never happen again.
I'm not going to chronicle the many more incidents themselves but focus on the lack of help for being abused that I got.

When he broke into my apartment in a drunken rage while I was gone, when I called the police they didn't even take it seriously, It was simply an area they didn't get involved with. Domestic Issues. This was back in the late 70's.
I don't think they believed me. Even though a neighbor had called the police, helicopters where hovering over my place and the front door was kicked in. The police didn't care. They said I couldn't prove it was him. The Hell I couldn't. There wasn't a thing missing or broken. He was looking for me because I had a friends, good friend staying in my extra bedroom and he didn't like that. We were not even living together because of his drinking and his temper. He was gunning for me or perhaps the couple who was supposed to stay with me. They were so afraid they left and checked into a hotel. It meant nothing to anyone that I was terrified. That's emotional abuse and it hurts just as much as a slap.

It was my problem to deal with. Not the police or my friends wanted to stick around. There is no sympathy. The victim is just thought to be an idiot for sticking around.
I have learned that there were two definite personalities to my abuser. The kind loving man who I just adored, and the man that could break your nose or you cheek bone like he did mine.

What is it that keeps women like myself in an abusive relationship? Is it that we really believe we deserved to be abused.. I think in the back of my mind I always felt somewhat responsible for setting him off because I always defended myself which just angered him more.
I was not a wishy washy coward but I talked back. That was the biggest problem for him, there should be no reasoning with him when he was angry.

In later years after we got married he wasn't drinking and the anger was still there. It usually ended up with the door taking the brunt of it. But it didn't matter because he had the money to repair whatever he wrecked. The family did not need to be involved.
Then I was expecting our first child. He was sober and angry and he actually kicked me in the stomach. Lucky for me the baby was ok. He took me to his father's house and his housekeeper took care of me while he calmed down.
It was never talked about. The only person who even listened was the housekeeper. She told me to keep calm, and have the baby and no matter what happened this child would always be mine. I have a feeling she knew what I'd been through herself, but even she stayed in an abusive marriage. She managed to live in my father in laws home five days a week to escape.

Here we were from two different worlds and yet we were in the same boat. Feeling like you had to stay in the marriage.
Too many people were involved in our lives and of course I did know what I had gotten myself into when I married him.
Once again, I took full responsibility for what had happened to me.

It was now 1984, I had no place else to go quite frankly. I could never afford to raise a child on my meager hair dressers income. I felt trapped. It was never an option in my mind to go live in the ghetto, where I could afford the rent on my own.
I was spoiled by my life style. I did not want to give it up, plus I married him through sobriety and he had not taken a drink.
I could not break my vows. I did not even say for better or for worse when I married him. I simply said through sobriety.

He didn't pick up a drink for 14 years but his anger did not go away. Our son seemed to calm him down for years. He was very happy to have another family. I felt that he had outgrown his violent side. I was dead wrong. The abuse had turned to verbal abuse. Little by little over the years he tried to break me down with insults. Lucky for me I was strong and never believed these insults to be true. I give my family credit for loving and adoring me so much that my self esteem was always very good. It's what saved me from total melt down. It's also what made him ever angrier most of the time. I would stick up for myself. When the insults were aimed at my family, I stuck up for them also. I actually got good at arguing with a lawyer.
I learned that he would not fight fair and he used everything I loved and picked it apart and threw it in my face. Then of course he would apologize and buy me something nice. I was not above taking the payoff for silence back then. Even though I loved to say to him that "He could not buy me," I was still there wasn't I? He did buy me, I just didn't admit it to myself.
I lived in a beautiful English Tutor in Malibu.

When he finally did pick up that drink, I now had to think about how much my son loved him. He was an amazing father. He never lifted a finger to our son. This only made me feel like it was more my fault. He started going back to the martial arts in sobriety which really helped him to release all that pent up need to hit something. When he got his Black Belt somehow the need to stay sober was not a priority any longer. He had been taking pain pills and back then I had no idea how much closer to drinking he was getting every day.

All the signs were there that the Volcano was going to erupt, but of course, I did not want to admit it. His family thought he was never going to pick up a drink again, and my family didn't know much about his past, because I didn't want them to know.
I hid it from them.
I went to Al-Anon for years and even they don't want to talk about it. They would tell me to focus on me, not the problem.
I simply did not know how to separate the two issues.

I think Abuse is the ultimate trap. If you seek help, your entire life as you knew it will be lost forever. Because there is no permanent cure for Anger. Not even "Anger Management". If you leave, you are guaranteed to live a sub-standard life style because there isn't a court in the world that can give you as much money as you had together as a family, and your children will reap the effects of that choice. If you stay, you believe you deserve whatever happens to you. You feel you sold your soul for a life style and quite frankly you have.

After my husband picked up that first drink, it took me six years to actually leave him. Before I could bat an eye lash, he was in another relationship with a woman who looked like we could be sisters. Ten days was al it took to be replaced. It was one of my biggest fears. I had thought that he loved me enough to get and stay sober again. I was wrong.
His drinking and trying to get sober was hell on him also. His anger got him into fights and one time it ended up resulting in 9 pins in his right arm and almost the use of it. The last time he was facing 3 years in prison for slashing his landlords tires an threatening some workers with a large hunting knife.

It was then that I really believed that I was not his problem, but it took almost 20 years for me to accept that. In the end, his addiction not his anger got the best of him. He was so terrified of going to prison he never picked up another drink, he died falling off a balcony with a belly full of Valium.

I was questioned for murder because I was with him when he died. He was grieving for his girlfriend who had hung herself ten days earlier. That was the ultimate act of Violence. She punished him for his being angry with her for not staying sober one more time and she was totally jealous of our continuing relationship with our son. We always put his feelings first. We were having a more than civil divorce when he died suddenly.

In the end, even though he died because of a fall, I was questioned for murder by the police and the coroner. I guess they knew his history. But knowing how he was, I would have been responsible for his death if another physical incident were involved. Thank god he didn't hit me. They would have never believed me.
Today I feel there really is no way out, you suffer no matter what you choose. If you stay you will suffer, if you leave you and your children and the family will be torn apart.
I believe that violence and addiction are closely related as many do. but I also know that it goes much deeper than that because the abuser doesn't need alcohol to fuel the rage. It's something just in them. And in my experience therapy did not help either of us.

I was simply addicted to him or maybe the abuse. No one has ever given me a clear picture of why I stayed for so long, or why I stayed silent for so long.

.

Matt's Accomplishments

2008-02-05T23:29:00.000-08:00

In spite of a terrible living situation for me Matt's first year at Menlo. He thrived.
In order to compensate for the fact that living in the Bay area was a far cry from what Matt thought it was going to be, he had visions of living in luxury like every other time we had gone to San Francisco in the past, his Grandfather had always arranged amazing luxurious accommodations. The family owned the Hyatt on Sunset along with the Sunset Gower Studios, and his grandfather always managed to get us suites to stay in. His grandfather used to call Matt, "The Little Prince," and in his own way that was how he was treated by everyone in our family. Once his Grandfather even got us the Presidential suite at the Hyatt on Union square. Now that is something to behold.

So when his dad and I rented a track house in a little middle class neighborhood in Foster City, with dirty orange carpets no less, he definetly was not a happy camper. To make up for the his dissappointment, I tried to make this place as much like home as I could, We even got him a piano so that he could continue to play it. (That' another Post for the future.)

It seemed to Matt that every dream he had of moving was not at all his new reality. To make up for our location,I took him to San Francisco every friday after school so that he did not feel like we totally ignored what he loved about San Francisco, Japan Town and the best Video store in town. He had started to amass quite a collection of Japanese animation at the time, which really helped his speaking the language with absolutely no accent to a Japanese person.
Till this day Matt is able to navigate the city of San Francisco better than most people who live on the Peninsula. I used to live and work there before I moved to LA and I knew that city like the back of my hand.

Of course by going to Japan Town every weekend the first stop was always the video store where we left with tons of Japanese Animation and classice Kourasawa films. This only enhanced his already vast knowledge of Japan and understanding the language.
He was so immersed into the entire culture even before going to high school and he actually had learned to understand it from watching animation in Japanese with English subtitles ever since grade school.

I could never get him to wake up in the morning for school and one day while flipping through the morning TV shows I stumbled upon a cartoon series that had "talking cats'.
Little did I know that "Sailor Moon" would be the catalyst to an entire new world for him. It was the beginning of his love of everythig Japanese.
Although he had studied the Martial Arts and gotten a black belt at ten years old, this sealed the deal, so to speak.
After winning the respect of his Japanese teacher, she put him up as a competitor in the much respected Japanese language contest. This in itself was unheard of.
It was not a competition that caucasians were entered in to. Not only did he compete he went on to take third place.

Now that in itself is a mystery. He was so much more proficient that the other two winners, but the award of first place was NEVER given to a non asian. The judges begrgingly had to give the award to him, asian or not. He was simply better than then all.

This lead to his being put up for a Rotary scholorship for a home study in Japan.
Not surprizing Matt won the Scholorship. He was fifteen years old and had barely ever had a sitter. Now he was off to Japan with two girls who did not speak the language. I was so proud of him and at the same time beyond nervous at him going away for a few months. This was the kid that barely survived his one trip to summer camp literally 25 miles down the road in Malibu.

But Matt was thriving at his new school. He was in his element and soaring to new heights. Who was I to stop him? It was the whole reason we moved up North in the fist place, so that Matt could be in a school that taught Japanese. I literally never dreamed that he would be so great at it.

My life on the other hand had become tragic. I would take Matt to school and come home and go back to sleep for a few hours.
I was really good at hiding it from Matt because I never wanted him to know what a wreck I really was. In the beginning his Dad would still come to visit us a couple of times a month, but we were pretty much on our own.
So I enrolled Matt into a Kendo class because he had always wanted to study the art of the Samurai. It was a good diversion for me also.
I really liked the instructors at the school and it was great physical training for Matt. He loved the uniform also, very cool, it looked like an ancient warrior outfit and the shinai were wood not real swords so he wasn't really going to hurt himself.

The first class would have had me running out the door and never come back. They did over 200 repetitions for the first warm up exercise of their swords over their heads. He couldn't move his arms the rest of the week. But he went back week after week.

To give you a little example of how scattered my head was, one night we just got home and the phone rang as I was taking his equipment out of the trunk. I ran into the house to get it and it was his Dad calling to see how the class had gone. I totally spaced out and left his big bag with all his equipment behind my car. The next morning late for school again, I backed out of the garage, right on top of his gear and crushed his crush proof helmet.

I was so mortified by my stupidity, but all I could do was laugh. Matt did not speak to me for several days he was so upset with me. One for ruining his equipment and two for laughing about it. I really think I must have been more affected by the anti-depressants my new doctor had given me then I ever remembered. What in the world would make me laugh at such a thing? It wasn't funny to see my son so upset. I stopped taking the anti-depressants. Talk about being in the clouds. I needed to be grounded. There was a lot going on in our world and the only thing positive about it was Matt's accomplishments and his new found activity.

The first year of school was coming to an end which meant Matt was off on his Japanese adventure and I was going back to Malibu to our home. I was nervous about both. I had not lived alone with his father while he was in and out of sobriety since before we got married. I did not know how I was going to handle it. I did not know if he would stay sober or be taking his pills or drinking. I was a nervous wreck. Matt had always given me the excuse to leave the room when I got nervous.

Now What?

STEPH'S FIRST YEAR AT MENLO

2008-01-13T14:14:00.000-08:00

While Matt was adjusting to his new life up North so was I. Funny how the little things that I used to take for granted were so difficult to find.
I couldn't seem to find my way in the sea of complicated "Rich Wife's" of the Silicon Valley. Now that should be a movie or a reality show because I have never seen such a bunch of uptight women in my life.
Fist of all the fact that a woman marries money does not in my opinion warrant any type of respect. I was used to hanging out in the PTA with my idol, Pat Benetar. Now that was someone I could really admire and respect.

I found that up in Northern California you seemed to be the sum and substance of you frickin zip code. Even the head master at the school looked at me funny when I told him we were living in Foster City. Ohhhhhh forgive me if it doesn't fit into the profile of the elite. I took great pleasure in NOT telling people anything about our house in Malibu. I wanted them to get to know me for me, it didn't seem important to throw that into the mix or tell them that our family owned the Sunset Gower Studios because I had a really funny experience with telling that fact to a piano salesman up there.

Our best friend Bill who was Bob's closest friend from the days they actually went to Menlo as boarding students and then off to Stanford together called Bob one day because something had come up about me in a staff meeting. Seems that one of the Spanish teacher's at the school was married to the man who came over to tune the new piano we bought for Matt.
She was sitting next to Bill at the meeting and when Matt came up, she leaned over and whispered in his ear that her husband had heard him play the piano brilliantly and it was too bad that his Mother was a Porn Producer.

Bill pulled her out of the meeting and wanted to know where she heard that one from. She told him her husband had told her.
Little did she know that we were best friends. Bill called Bob without telling me to have a meeting with the man who was spreading these rumors around.

Bob flew up and had the meeting with Bill and the guy. The objective was to have him apologize and take back the statements his wife was spreading. Being a Latin man with such a large ego, he simply refused. He felt that there was no damage caused because the story had not leaked into the school yet.
Bob was furious. He tried to reason with the man and asked him how he would feel if his wife's reputation was being ruined by a ridiculous fantasy that the piano salesman had made up.

It seems that because, not to boast, but I am quite stunning to look at for the area compared to many of the woman I've seen up there myself. The salesman had never heard of our Studio and simply assumed I had to be into the porn industry because I can be somewhat Sexy at times. But how sexy could I have been in my sweats offering the piano tuner a glass of water and asking him if he had any kids and did they play the piano?
Lecherous men would have ruined my son's reputation at school and this guy could have cared less. He refused to apologize and walked away from the meeting.
Bill went to the Head Master and told him what had been said about me. Just so it would not get around the school.
My reputation was left intake but my feelings for the place were now on high alert.
I was stunned quite frankly, I had never met this woman and she was more than willing to gossip about me and my son. How dare she.

This wasn't the first time I had dealings with a woman up at the school. When I first started I had gone to a meeting to get involved with the Fund raising committee. I had so many years of experience with that in Malibu I thought I could just walk in and get started helping. Boy was I wrong. The woman who's committee I was with only wanted the title and she delegated most of the work to me. Now I didn't have a problem helping, but I had only been in the area for four weeks and I simply could not do everything she asked me to do. I asked her why she wasn't doing any of the stuff herself. She was livid that I would question her. Seems she had more important things to do like run for some position on the city council. This title was just a feather in her cap and she didn't have time for the work involved.
She didn't know who I was or how little I was about to eat shit from her. I busted her to the Chairman of the committee and resigned. I told her she would have to do the work herself, I wasn't her personal slave.
That was the end of my formal involvement at the higher levels of school activities.

I realized that I was too blond, too hot and too popular with the kids to be accepted at this place. I was just happy to sit in the circle after school waiting to pick up my son with the top down on my car, holding court. Matt would come out of class and sometimes pick me up and twirl me around, His friends loved us. We were a breath of fresh air to that stuffy little world of the elite. Thank God we didn't fit in. No matter how much plaid I wore, I was never going to be a Prep Mom. I didn't have the pedigree or the right mailing address. So now we were both free to be ourselves. We were different and happy to be so.
We had to find a way to be happy there and NOT fit in. We didn't like what we saw up there.

I used to call the area one big makeover disaster. I never saw so many people who needed a makeover as bad as up there. I didn't even try to have any friends up there beside Bill, Nancy and Angie. It was a lot easier to hide the fact that we really were a dysfunctional family just trying to get our son a great education. I can only imagine what the talk would have been if the school community really knew the truth.

Matt's First Year at Menlo

2008-01-13T13:37:00.000-08:00

It was a difficult first year for Matt. He had really thought we would be living in the heart of San Francisco in some amazing high rise condo with City views. Instead we were in a middle class neighborhood in "Foster Shitty" as I used to call it.
Far cry from our home in Malibu. We planted ourselves in the middle of a tract house section of the Peninsula side of the City.

Matt of course had left all his friends behind and didn't really fit into the prep school attitude, which turned out to be one of the best things for him.
First thing he told me was that there was no way in hell that he was going to cut his hair, wear khaki pants and brown shoes to school. I didn't care, I just wanted him to be himself. So off he would go with his black leather jackets and his shades on everyday.
On the weekends I made an effort to go up to the city every weekend. We would find ourselves in Japan town having dinner, buying Japanese videos, going to the movies and sometimes going to JapanBowl and bowling. It's gone now, but it was really cool.
I just immersed him in his passion for all things Japanese he did love that part of it.
He was starting to be noticed in school by his peers for being really cool and different. He just has that very cool vibe to him.
He became friends with this amazing upperclassman student in his Japanese Class. Nicole would have a very lasting effect on him. She was the first person to actually recognize his humor and encouraged him to try out for Drama. It's a good thing he was so smitten with her because that was the beginning of him actually finding his passion.

One day Matt came home and asked me to cut his hair short, I was pretty surprised by his request. I asked him how short and he said "really short". I found out later that Nicole, who had this beautiful long red hair halfway down her back had cut it all off. He would follow suit. She inspired him it seems. They became friends, but in high school the age difference is too great for a freshman to date an upperclassman and that is all it would ever be.

His school was so different from Malibu, There was a lot going on socially there because it wasn't isolated like he was used to and little by little he started doing stuff with some of his friends. He also started to take Kendo, a martial art that he was always interested in. I will never forget the first class he attended. The instructor had them do over one hundred strokes with their "shenei swords" Made out of bamboo, it was long and not too heavy, but after all those strokes, he couldn't move his arm for a week. He loved it and stuck it out for a year.

He didn't forget his best friend from Malibu and invited her to go to the Prom with him even. I knew he missed our house but he did seem to be thriving more than he ever did in Malibu. He was no longer isolated at home in front of his computer screen.
The thing that impressed me most about this school was the fact that they actually took an interest in every child in the school and would have staff meetings to discuss how a kid was doing.
One of the first things that came to my attention about how Bad his education at Malibu High was the day I got a call from the Math department. Seems the advanced Math that was taught to him in Malibu simply did not prepare him for the math class he was placed in. I told the school that I would not allow Matt to be punished and put back into a lower math class for the inadequacies of his former school The math teacher there who had a Phd. From Stanford tutored him for six months and he was now up to speed in the class. I didn't have to pay for her services, that's how concerned they were about his progress.

Matt's Japanese teacher also really took to him. She was so blown away with the fact that he came into her class with no formal training and understood the language and could speak it. At first he didn't want to let her know just how much he understood without her help. He was a little bit shy about it, but she did encourage him and even entered him in the Japanese contest up North which he placed in the top three. The only Caucasian to do so. She submitted him for the rotary club's exchange program and he was chosen. He got to go to Japan for six weeks and live with a family there. It was a remarkable year for us all.
Bob and I were so proud of him and not even our drama could interfere with all Matt's accomplishments. At the end of his first year of school Matt was given several awards which were a very big deal at this school.
The Love of Learning Award
The Japanese Language Award etc.

With all these accolades there was another bit of drama that was going on in the background for me that year. I had never been involved in a private school before. Matt had only gone to public schools where the parents, especially in Malibu were really cool. After all, there are plenty of celebrities and wealthy people all around town, I wasn't impressed by the Silicon Valley money nor the uptight attitude of some of the parents. Boy was I ever in for a surprise.

The Passage of Time

2008-01-13T13:01:00.000-08:00

As I re-read my posts even I have to admit there is so much repetitive stuff in it I get confused as to when the events took place and how we managed to survive them.
To make things clear, I was again in the middle of a five year cycle of drinking, getting sober, rehabs and sporadic episodes of drug induced anger and temporary insanity on my part.

I was simply going crazy living in the eye of Bob's storm. I desperately wanted an escape from the madness of our daily lives since Bob's relapse. The only relief any of us had was the fact that Matt and I now lived apart from Bob and that was a really good thing because Matt could have never excelled in school if Bob was living with us full time. He just needed too much attention and the focus was always on him and his issues. But it was not possible for me to be there for him like that any longer. I made a choice when we came back from Paris that I could no longer enable him like before. He was going to have to grow up and I was not going to be his Mom, I was going to put my mothering skills to use where they needed to be, on our son.
Even when he did come to stay it always ended up the same, he just couldn't be there because his demons were just too great during those years. He needed to be alone and do whatever it was his alcoholism was driving him to do. It was better not to know first hand what he was up too, the only clues I had were on the Credit Card bills. It really was a terrible time in my life.

The funny thing is that even during those four years apart, I never really felt apart from him until the end. I always felt he would get through it and stay sober like the first time.
It certainly was wishful thinking on my part, but the bottom line was that there really wasn't much I could do, I had to stay focused on being a stable Mom for our son. He needed me to be there for him, not spend all my time worrying about what Bob was up to.

It wasn't easy for any of us but what choice did we have. At a certain point in ones life you have to make choices and I need to provide our son with a stable home life, it was what he needed and deserved.
It was amazing how well we did seem to get along without Bob there. There was no chaos or arguing about anything. In the past there was so much tension in the house whether it was because Matt was up too late or actually anything that Bob wanted to focus on besides wanting a pill or a drink.

I do have to say we tried going to AA meetings up North, but even I had to admit that Bob was just not ever going to fit in with that crowd. There is just way to much differences in our lifestyle in Southern California and Northern California.
Bob found himself in a world that was foreign to him. Guys in those meetings were working 9-5 jobs and Bob didn't work.
In Malibu it seemed none of the people in the meetings had normal working hours. LA is so different. Bob was a fish out of water I have to admit.
I have so many different opinions about AA myself, sometimes it is more important to just have someone you can relate to instead of an entire room where you feel uncomfortable. Besides quite frankly AA didn't work for him, his GF in the end or Henry, who you will hear about later.
The years were passing by for Matt's high school experience up North and he was for the first time coming into his own.
I was so proud of his achievements.
He became a star up there literally on stage and in the Japanese classroom.
I knew that we had made the right choice for his life. Bob probably would be doing the same thing wherever he was.
Matt was thriving, that was the most important thing to me.

Check out my Slide Show!

2008-01-13T12:55:00.001-08:00

Nothing was getting easy

2007-10-28T23:09:00.000-07:00

My last post was about my court hearing well a very shocking event took place instead of that court hearing, I have another blog on myspace www.myspace.com/stephaniepick if you are interested. I have found that I need to keep two separate blogs going because there is so much to write about my present that it starts to get confusing even to me to mix them up. So I'm heading back to my past again.

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Life was not really getting back to normal there was no trust left in the marriage and no matter how many band aids we tried to put on the problems they just were not going away.
Bob's temper was always short and I simply focused on keeping the peace if I could, I was simply too tired to fight.
I found myself keeping a filled overnight bag in my car for those moments when he would follow me around from room to room just trying to argue. We argued about everything it seemed now.
Here I was raising our son, taking care of him, the house, all the bills, etc. while he was going to one meeting a day. That was it. Now his sobriety was important, don't get me wrong, but our life wasn't the same.
I no longer believed that all this isolation was going to keep him sober and I was right, it didn't. But along with that knowledge I was also not willing to be the submissive wive. There no longer was a reason too. Now when he was out of control I simply walked out of the door into my car and drove off. I would not tolerate it ever again.
We were all in foreign waters believe me.
Then one day the focus became the Internet of all things. I guess Bob just needed something to be mad about so he started getting at Matt for being on his computer.
Little did Bob know that it was the one escape from our nightmare that his son could retreat from without getting into any trouble. Bob viewed it as a fantasy world and never really understood that there were real people behind those names. Only in the end did he sort of get it when he himself signed up on myspace. He never told me I logged into my blog and found his profile as one of my readers. He got it, but he was spying on me. I wasn't doing anything but he had wondered.

One day he was screaming so loud I had locked myself into the bathroom and would not come out. I could not deal with his temper. I guess several of the neighbors heard him and came over. They told him if he didn't stop they were going to call the Police. I think it must have scarred him because when I heard them, I unlocked the door and bolted to my car. He did not follow.
We were living in hell and didn't even know it. It was the beginning of the Valium Years as I like to refer to them. Dangerous drug in my opinion. You simply never know when they are taking it, and at the time I did not know how addicted to it he had become and would always be. It was his new drug of choice for a long time.

How Bob got around taking any kind of pills were his real history of back and knee problems. There is no law against taking these pills especially when you have legitimate physical issues. He started having multiple surgeries on his knees, then it was a terrible hemorrhoid operation that went wrong for him.
He had been completely honest with the Doctor about his past history with pills and I must say this was the first and only doctor in all the years of living with Bob, that he could not get pills out of. The doctor gave him a few pain pills and only two Valium. Bob wanted more Percocette and a bottle of Valium. The doctor would not give them to him.

I will never forget our next nightmare. It was Labor Day weekend and in Malibu there is an annual Chili Cook off that we always went to with our son. It had a carnival and always was a great way to end the Summer. There was literally nothing more I could do to help Bob. He had to take it easy and was just laying in Bed, so I told him I was going to take Matt to the carnival for a while.
This is normal in any family. It was not a life threatening surgery and anyone will tell you, it is painful and uncomfortable. But there was no reason to sit there and wait on him hand and foot all day. I took Matt out to have some fun.

When we got back home all hell broke loose. He was crazy, screaming at me about how I was neglecting him and whatever else he was spewing out. It was another nightmare day with Bob on pills.
It's funny as I write this stuff that I actually realize just how much damage all these events left on my brain. I was always trying to protect myself from his outrageous theory's about what was real and what was not. You would have thought I committed an act of violence against him by leaving the house for two hours. It was insanity. That is the only way to explain any of this. Pill induced insanity.
When I spoke with his brother even he said that Bob could not be given Percocette.
This stuff went right to his brain and made him crazy.
I really don't know if he was in any sort of drug withdrawal from Valium at the time, but I do know looking back at this event it seems like it now. He made me drive him down to the doctor's office to get more of them and when he only gave him two I thought he was going to go out of his skin. It's how it affected him when I knew he was in withdrawal.
Bob had become really good at getting Valium and he had several doctors all over town that were prescribing different things for him. He simply knew how to work the system. This doctor must have had a feeling that he didn't want to be another one of Bob's pill pushers. I wish I could say that about all his other doctors.
They just gave him whatever he wanted because he was so nice to them. Little did they know how not so nice he was when he needed more of them. In the beginning even I didn't know what it was.
I used to blame everything on "dry drunks". The behavior was so erratic I will never really know for sure.
These next several years seem to blend in together. Separate vacations arguments about everything from his father to his daughter and everything in between.
The worst part of all this insanity was that I had promised our son that I would not divorce his father. I kept my word, but at times it was the hardest promise I had ever had to keep.
Nothing was easy. If we needed help with a homework project it would turn into a lecture. One that neither Matt nor I had any interest in let alone the time.
He never understood time management when it came to homework, bath and bedtime. To him we were his captive audience at times.

One of the nastiest unwarranted fights we ever had was when I was writing out our monthly bills as I always did and he decided to come into Matt's room and supervise. I have no idea what he was really mad at, but it turned so ugly and so nasty that I almost left him forever right then and there.
He started criticizing my family for no reason and then he ended it by telling Matt all these horrible made up stories about me. Can you imagine my poor son sitting there having to listen to his dad spewing hatred toward his mother? None of which was true, but he either wanted a drink or a pill. That's how it always started.
Pick a terrible unforgivable fight so that he could justify drinking or using.
The three of us were living in hell, yet there seemed no escape.
I couldn't even pray, I felt that God had abandoned me and I was angry. For all the years and times I had saved this man's life, and given him such a good life, this is how he repaid me. It did not matter that when he calmed down he would send me flowers or buy me something nice. I started refusing all gifts. I did not want to be bought like so many women I know. I simply did not have it in me to turn the other cheek for a diamond ring.
Over the years living in Malibu you hear of these stories of women who stick it out all because of their security. They don't love their husbands at all, I see it all the time. That was one hell of a price I did not want to pay. If it had not been for my promise to our son to not get a divorce, who knows how our lives would have ended up.
Perhaps had I had the courage to leave earlier, maybe he would never have met the "girlfriend". We will never know.

Imagine your family turning their backs on you

2007-10-20T15:05:00.000-07:00

I am in the middle of another very difficult time for me. In three days I have to go to court to finalize my divorce. It is two and a half years since my former husband passed away and I have been in the probate courts ever since then. It will also be his birthday on October 27th four days after this divorce proceeding.
I am really getting a divorce from his daughter and now I guess the rest of the small family.

Now everyone knows that Death and Divorce are right up there on the stress charts as the highest stress producing events in a persons life, along with moving.
Well I have been grieving for the past two and a half years, have been dealing with probate and a divorce and I am moving. At times even I don't know how I have made it this far.

So I wrote to my former Mother in Law to see if she would like me to return a coffee table that was orignially hers, but ended up in my husbands house when his father died. Of course I am happy to return it to her and a few emails passed back and forth regarding the table.
Since she was the only one in the family left besides my son who I can discuss these things with, I sent her an email pouring my heart out about the upcoming divorce and Bob's birthday.
What I got in return was an email asking me to measure the table so that her handiman could pick it up. Nothing else. I have to say, that really upset me. Here I am pouring my guts out about my life, my feelings and all she wanted was the damn table.

This correspondence is exactly the evidence that I needed to remind myself that it is not my imagination, because sometimes I think I am being over sensitive when I feel like they just let me go, turned their back on me. Well they have.

I did not respond to her email for fear that I would say something harsh because I'm angry about the lack of concern and the way my situation ended. After a twenty year marriage, I got all the bills, half my house and $25,000 to pay off the legal bills. Another words, the left my son holding the bag on my debt, because if I loose my house so does he. Everything I have is his and at his age he should not have to bear the burden of his father's debts, especially when there was enough money to pay off half the mortgage, that was all I asked for. Because we bought a home and for years he refinanced it to pay his taxes and pay for the education of the kids.
The executor, his daughter, managed to just have the court negate that fact.

So yes I am angry and shocked, my I am not the only one, there are many people who know my family in Hollywood, because it was a very prominent family here in LA. So I didn't answer her email I simply waited to see what she would have to say in regards to me pouring my heart out to her.

I got another email regarding the table.

Well this time I couldn't help but reply with my feelings laid out. So this is what I wrote to her. These are word for word, copied and pasted below.
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I'm so sorry but I don't have a measuring tape, but I personally brought it over here in the back of my Lexus SUV from the Rambla Vista house so I know it will fit in a small SUV. You mentioned your handyman and if he has a truck it will fit just fine.

Sorry I didn't get back to you. I pretty much have been dreading next week Tuesday so much that I sent Marisa an email asking her to tell her lawyer to be nice. I don't want a repeat of the last court date and this time it will be just Matt and me in court plus I signed everything over to her over a year and a half ago That is all except the watches which Matt has not me. I'm hoping that doesn't come up. It is very traumatic because this is a divorce from her really not Bernie, he's gone.

You may have already heard about that, but I also told her to visit her father's grave and beg his forgiveness for putting Matt in such a terrible position. If I go down, he goes down with me. It's all on his shoulders now.

This is a very small town and his new investment people are simply shocked by this entire outcome after a long term marriage. All I asked for was help with the mortgage now I will never live here again because she simply refused to do the right thing.
Although I know you don't want to hear any of this either, I apologize for laying it on you. But it doesn't matter about the trust from Saul it still won't help with the mortgage So the only way to save Matt from the burden of losing his house is to move out of it.

Marisa has simply tarnished the family name. All these high power people in Town just adored Saul and I wasn't there but Matt told her my situation and she wants to meet me for lunch, she seems to think maybe she can help me even though I told her I have no money to invest. It was simply refreshing to know that I am not the only one that thinks this was so legally unfair. It's simply not OK to punish Matt because I have a Trust from Saul. So does Marisa and Matt. Bob's debt was Bob's debt. Even you don't understand the severity of the burden on him.

And I must say it's interesting that you can simply ignore any of this which I mentioned before but be so concerned about your table.

What a fascinating family.

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This is what she wrote back

STEPH,
I AM SORRY THAT YOU FEEL THE WAY YOU DO!! I DO NOT KNOW THE LEGAL DETAILS RE; THIS AND DO NOT FEEL THAT IT IS MY BUSINESS!! I ALSO DO NOT HAVE THE $$ TO HELP!! NO ONE IS SADDER THAT THE FAMILY IS SPLIT! I ADORE SAUL AND ALWAYS WILL. I TRIED TO HELP FOR AWHILE TO NO AVAIL AND SO, HAVE WITHDRAWN TOTALLY. I STILL CRY DAILY FOR THE LOSS OF MY LOVE AND CANNOT DEAL WITH THE RE-HASH OF THIS DRAMA!!

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Well that just set me off. This is exactly what I have been talking about on my myspace blog. I have a cold family that only cares about themselves. My reply
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I totally understand, but that's exactly the attitude that allows people to get away with bad things. Just think of all the boy scouts, alter boys, etc., that could have been helped if someone had just taken the time to speak out.
Silence is as bad doing the deed itself.

I have had to deal with my loss, my divorce and helping Matt and myself through our grief without the family. So why the hell would I want to deal with the family two and a half years later. No one cared and still don't and that is the sad fact not fiction.

I do feel your pain, I miss Saul as much as anyone because none of what has happened to me and subsequently to Matt if he were still with us. He was the glue that bound us all together. Marisa would have never had the guts to do what she did, but everyone just kept quiet.

I may have told you a saw a psychic and there he was right there with Bob. I didn't even say anything to this person, I went in to find out if I was ever going to get out of all this debt. It was quite healing. Bob kept saying "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." I sat there stunned and crying. It was surreal. So even if the family has turned their back on me, my beloved Bob and Saul have not. It gets me through my life believe me.

So if you like you can just have someone pick up your table and I will not speak to you again, because it's my life and if you don't want to hear it I will respect that.

By the way, this is not a ReHash. I am living it. I go to court on Tuesday and people are calling me to discuss my life. People who are stunned that my beloved family turned their backs and a blind eye to my situation.
You have a way of trying to diminish things just because you don't want to hear them. Is Bob's birthday drama?

I really feel sorry for all of you.
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So there is the story of my family's attitude toward me. Lack of concern.

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2007-10-20T14:51:00.001-07:00

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2007-10-20T13:34:00.001-07:00

Indecission

2007-10-08T18:30:00.001-07:00

What is it that makes me want to avoid writing the rest of my story some days. I will write things on my myspace blog? I guess that this is a painful journey some days and this month is extremely difficult.

I will be going to court to finalize a bogus divorce proceeding. What I mean by that is this. The court needs me to once again, verify that I have indeed given up my debtor's claim against the estate of my former husband. And yes the answer is I did drop my claim against the estate.

I did it because I will not waste any more money fighting a battle that should have never been fought in the first place. If the executor has no conscience about leaving me with all the debt of putting her and my son through school so be it. The entire family knows that I didn't spend all the debt of frivolous things.But all I get from the family these days is Silence. We helped but her through Stanford, helped with her living expenses while in New York and at Johns Hopkins even when her father was not legally obligated to do so any longer. And believe me there were times when he had to think twice because she was so cruel to him. But even after she called me and her friends wishing him dead he simply could not cut her off financially.
The other really difficult event is that it is Bob's birthday at the end of that same week, so it is with a very heavy heart that I finalize that chapter of my life. My former husband would have never argued the fact that for years he kept refinancing our home to give the two kids a great college education and the rest went to pay taxes most of the time. He would tell me that it was his job to worry about money and my job to basically do everything else around the house. So I did.

It was important to both of us to make sure that our son got a great education as well as his daughter. It was important to the entire family or so I thought. But education does not come cheap, it has a very hight price tag attached to it. So do taxes. We paid out so much to the government that many times we had to use the house to pay them. And so it was.

And in the end after the marriage had ended, Bob started a new business and he refinanced our house again and when he found himself in trouble with the law, he refinanced it once again to purchase a home. What was once a home purchased for $725,000 in the end ballooned up to over $1,400.000. That is the simple fact of Bob's way of supporting his family, and no one wants to address who is responsible for that debt.
The Estate had no difficulty establishing that I was not entitled to any of Bob's inheritance, why am I entitled to carry the burden of the debt?
Once could argue that I have the option of selling the home. Of course I do, but I will not, because my son's father gave him half of the house and I will not loose it for him. As my father Saul would have said, "It is his Life Insurance Policy". I couldn't agree more. When my time on this earth are done, I will leave my son more than he could have imagined. It is my duty to the only male grandchild of my hero. He will carry on the name and the dignity of his Grandfather.

In my opinion there is no justice when a wife of almost twenty years now has a title of debtor attached to her claim. Just because a person passed away, did all my rights as his wife vanish before my very eyes. In my case Yes. It seems an executor can pretty much disclaim a debt at their discretion with the help of an attorney. His daughter had no interest in paying off his debt and I had no interest in paying an attorney for the privilege of lessening the remainder of what was left after the government gets their part because my X simply did not bother to put everything in Trust. The executor has spent more money than I did securaing this final divorce, isn't that incredible. And she really didn't want to honor the agreement I had with her dad, that he would cover the cost of the divorce, after all it was his and his girlfriends idea to file for it in the first place. It was the least he could do. So that's that.

I didn't marry him for money and I guess I don't see the need to squander money to do the right thing.

I will find a way to keep the house for our son and I still feel grateful for my life.

Money doesn't always make a person happy and it remains to be seen how much of what is being given to his daughter will grow into a future for her as she dreamed. Her lifestyle is too expensive. A Beverly Hills girl trying to live the life of her Mom. Expensive vacations she has been to Europe three times already since her father passed away and may even be there as I write this because it is her three year wedding anniversary. She loves expensive dinners, shoes,clothes etc. I used to get annoyed with her because everything she ever bought had to have a designer label attached to it. The only thing that may save her is her wonderful husband who happens to be from the Midwest. Time will tell, the poor guy is working his butt off to keep up with the Jones's over there.

Unfortunately for her, if she ever does have any children of her own, I will not be there to help her with any of the stuff that I would have. Let her other family do that, but that's also questionable, because even she would say that her father and I got her everything she really wanted, her Mom got her the necessities. PJ's, underwear and things.
Now that I have gotten that off my chest, perhaps I can get back to my story.

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Off To New York

2007-09-23T01:31:00.000-07:00

After Graduation Bob's daughter got a job as a paralegal at a very large law firm in New York.
Well, it may have been a big law firm but the salary was not big.
Once again it was time for Daddy to dig into his wallet and cover "Half".

Since it seemed like the worst part of the past year was coming to an end because of the car incident and graduation. We had high hopes that Bob and Maria's relationship would start to get better after all at least they were speaking.

What were they speaking about? First they were speaking about the cost of her moving to New York, she told her dad that her Mom would meet whatever he gave her, I can honestly say I never believed that and neither did he.
He was giving her $3,000 a month and she was earning a salary. Plus she was not living alone, she was sharing an apartment with her best friend from high school. I doubt that she was getting $6,000 a month plus a salary. She may have gotten the credit card back also, I really can't remember if she did or not.

She also needed furniture of course and I do think her Mom helped her with that.
That was always the conversations, What did Marisa need this time.
It really bothered him. She tried to make it sound like she was calling to say hi, but each phone call always ended with her wanting something from him as he would say.
"I'm just a human credit card to her."

After she hung up he would sit on the sofa in our room and smoke and think. You could actually watch him replay the conversations in his head. His lips would move and he would be deep into it. If you said anything to him it was like he couldn't even hear you that's how lost in his thoughts he was.
He was really wounded on all levels.

Our family, that is the three of us, were still struggling to regain the trust that had been lost with Bob's journey back to drinking. His moods were all over the place for over a year. I later found out that it took him over an entire year for the Valium to actually leave his body.
It has what's known as an after life and it lodges into your bone tissue. Bob was on edge, always hot, like in a drug withdrawal, which he was, and just plain tense most of the time.

As hard as it was we were trying to get back to our normal family routines.
We were pretty busy with our lives and it seemed easy to not dwell on Marisa being gone because the truth be told she hadn't wanted to participate in our lives for so many years that it wasn't an issue. She had become more like a guest, that's how seldom we saw her.

I can't remember what time of year it was but one night Marisa picked up Matt and he spent the night at her house. It was so odd. I guess Marisa wanted to hang out with him but she didn't want to stay here. I'm not sure if it was because Matt wasn't home or the fact that Bob was hurt that Marisa didn't want to stay here he was just up smoking all night.

He had developed a pretty severe insomnia problem and I just used to got to sleep and not really hear him watching TV or getting up walking around or whatever.
But this night all of a sudden the house alarm was shrieking in my ears.
Bob had set the bed on fire.
Imagine how terrified I was to wake up to smoke the alarm blaring and Bob was just too shocked to really function.
We had a fire extinguisher right by the fireplace in our room and he couldn't get it to work.

The flames were on the carpet and jumped to the frame of the bed. I hopped out of bed and threw a bottle of water on it. It woke him up from his inability to think of what to do. I just kept refilling a glass of water and so did he and we didn't have to get the fire department, thank God.

It should have been a real wake up call for him, but what it turned out to be was the beginning of Bob burning holes in every set of sheets, the sofa, leather chairs everything he sat on.
He would fall asleep and burn his fingers. It was so scary.

He was a man who was just broken really. Trying to put up a brave front for everyone including himself. I look back and the loss of his sobriety took away more from him than those years. It seemed to rob him of any sense of direction or self esteem.
His temper grew shorter and shorter. He was so conflicted and probably always wanting to pick up a drink. By this time he had logged in twelve months without a drink but the doctors were still giving him medication for his back and knees. The only thing I Think he wasn't taking was Valium.

I must say having physical problems and trying to be clean and sober didn't really seem to work. If he was in pain and didn't have anything to take it away, he was always on a dry drunk. If he had the medication and wasn't in so much pain he was closer to drinking because he wasn't drug free. It was a real roller coaster ride for all of us emotionally.

The year that Marisa went to New York she started seeing a therapist. How New York of her, it seemed that everyone in New York had one and we agreed it was a good idea too. After all that she had been through and put her dad through.
So on Matt's spring break we headed off to New York so that Bob could have a session together with Marisa and her doctor.

Talk about being apprehensive, Bob put on a good show for her but with Matt and I it was a totally different story.
From the moment we arrived at our Hotel everything started going wrong. We always got two rooms because Matt couldn't be around all the smoke with his asthma and of course we couldn't expect Bob to not chain smoke, it pretty much was his only vice these days and he really needed to smoke that weekend.

When we checked in they told us that they did not have the adjoining rooms that we requested. Bob made such a big scene in the lobby that they ended up giving up a one bedroom suite with the most amazing view of the Chrysler building
Of course Bob had to sleep in the living room on a bed they brought up for him so that he could smoke near the window.
The three of us had a nice first night together alone without Marisa and she joined us the next day. She brought over a birthday cake she made for Matt which was so sweet and we all seemed really happy to be together.
The next day several friends of Matt's and their families joined us at the best ice=cream parlour in the world "Serendipity". After that the three of us went to the Sony store and we just window shopped most of the day and of course did manage to get Matt some very cool Birthday gifts.
The day was getting closer for Bob and his daughter to see her doctor. I can't really remember what came first the session or the new Rolex watch he bought her. That was his way. He wanted to get her something special for her graduation, but she had wanted furniture instead, so he got her the watch in New York so she could pick it out. She had really become hard to surprise with presents because unless she liked it she would take it back or give it back.

The only thing that I will never forget is what happened when Bob got back to the hotel after their appointment.
He told me that even her doctor asked her when she was going to forgive him. After all, he did not divorce her, he divorced her Mother. Her answer was always the same, that's not fair.
She had no intention of ever forgiving him for anything. Even things he didn't do to her.
He explained to me that there are some cases where a person can't seem to bear to look at the two parents equally. One is always right and one is always wrong. It was tragic, but it was right on the money. Everything he did seemed to bother her. Whether she was aware of it or not. She treated him like she was the parent. Always criticizing him for something. The way he held his fork, the way he chewed his dinner, they way that he loved to spot famous people etc. It just went on and on.
He was so flawed in her mind. I wonder how she got that judgemental? Especially because everyone always praised her. We had nothing but kind things to say to her about her always. But she couldn't seem to return the sentiment.

One of the things I struggle with always is how I could have been stronger and maybe a better "parent" to her. I felt constrained to me role and I didn't cross that line. Imagine twenty years of just "Watching" a child change right before your eyes and not really be able to do anything about it.
Now it's way too late.

The first time I had had enough of just letting her get away with really bad behaviour was over the phone.
She called us up and wanted to know if we would cover the cost of a gym in New York she wanted to join. As usual the answer was of course Marisa, your dad will pay for it. First of all, he wanted her to go to the gym of her choice. She had always struggled with her weight and the fact that she was working out was great.

Well I got the shock of my life when I spoke to her next. She called me back and said and I quote. "I talked to my Mom, and she said it's ridiculous". I told her that she had called us and asked for the money and she said. "Well, it was a test and he failed"

I went crazy inside and for the first time in twenty years I yelled and swore at her.
I told her "If you don't love him, then leave him the fuck alone." I think I hung up on her. It was very traumatic for me I don't really know how she took it because she had become so cold and calculating towards him. But she couldn't fool me. I knew she hated him from the moment she wanted to leave him in Paris. I could only pretend to let it go for so long. She was out of line and there wasn't anyone who was doing anything about it.

I had had it. I was sick and tired of having his spoiled ungrateful daughter ruining our lives. Everytime she pulled something like this on him it came back to haunt me and Matt. It would put him into such a frame of mind that all he would want to do now was drink.

I would never look at her the same way ever again. I didn't fight with her, but I knew who she was and that is not a good place to be in when you are trying to keep peace in a family already in trouble.

I told her father. I would no longer cover up for her and be a part of her duplicity. I would no longer be a part of the problem. There were bigger issues that I was dealing with. I had chosen my alligeince and it was to him not her. She just wanted his money, I wanted him to get well and live.

Graduation from Stanford

2007-09-07T20:35:00.000-07:00

Well, his daughter's graduation from Stanford was monumental for so many reasons.
First of all she gave us all hell when she got in and now she was thrilled to be graduating from such an amazing University.

The weekend started out great. The entire family went to San Francisco to celebrate her achievement.
There was so much tension in the air that weekend and I'm sure no one will ever forget how uncomfortable it got.

We met his daughter in Palo Alto for brunch because she was having dinner with her other family members. Bob always felt slighted but after a year of her not speaking with him, he was having a bit of trouble keeping his anger under control.
This time he lashed out at my mother in law at brunch.
She just happened to be the only one who ordered anything alcoholic to drink and that set Bob off more than she could have ever imagined.
He simply could not tolerate people drinking in front of him early in the day for some reason. He used it against her.
We were discussing how difficult it was to get into Stanford and she mentioned that her nephew did not get accepted, even with my Father in Law's generous donations. She went on to say that Saul should never contribute to Stanford again, because she thought it was so unfair.

Well, Bob just unloaded on her. He started telling her to stay out of it because we still had Matt to think about, at that time we all thought that he wanted to go there like the rest of the family.
I don't know how she didn't burst into tears right at the table. I was so shocked because even though I was used to him going off at me about anything, he had never raised his voice to her ever.
Once again, his father took control of the situation and calmed him down, at least on the outside. He was still fuming on the inside. It was the day before his daughters' graduation and I'm sure he just wanted to unload on everyone in the family who condoned his daughter not speaking to him for that year.
He had to come face to face with her Mom, and her other family members.

Actually, looking back I don't know how he kept it as together as he did. He was a great actor. He had a lot of anger and resentment just locked inside of him and it was being squeezed out a little at a time. Oozing out of his pours. So that trip my mother in law got to experience first hand what I had sort of become amune to.
I guess I just became tough. It rolled off my shoulders most of the time unless the insults just got too ugly.

She was lucky that he didn't go on about her drinking in the morning to her face like he just kept going on to me about.
Actually it was such a big deal in his head that when we returned home, I had to explain to his brother why he felt that way about her drinking.
He resented the fact that she was his father's designated driver, who drinks in the morning and on and on.
Well I must say, he certainly was an expert of drinking. After 30 rehabs he sure had enough of an education to spot a normal drinking pattern from one that was excessive and he didn't really buy the old wine is good for the heart thing.
He resented that his father was now opening a bottle of wine for dinner every night because he never did that when his Mom was alive.

I could not argue with him on that point. I never met his Mom, but from all the stories I have listened to over the years I don't think there ever could have been anyone to fill those shoes in his eyes. Especially his dad's second wife.
In her defense, she tried to be kind to all of us, but we were always aware that he made her uncomfortable when he was around and we were never really invited to just drop in for dinner. It had to be an occasion for that to happen.
He also resented his old room being used as a guest room for her family and friends.
He couldn't seem to let it go.

All I know is that there was no reasoning with him about any of this. They were his feelings and I couldn't change them. At best I could try and shorten the monologues that I was forced to listen to and try my best not to make him more angry with my opinions.

Life could be so happy and carefree, until he started thinking about his family. Then Matt and I would pay the price.

He was starting to just sit on the sofa in our room smoking and running all these old tapes in his head letting his resentments grow.
Finally he just stopped talking about it as much.
He would just sit, smoke and talk to himself quietly. Sometimes I would walk into the room and watch him have a conversation with himself. He wasn't speaking out loud, but his lips were moving. It was very odd.

Looking back, this was a man in trouble and I sure didn't know how to help him. What can you do for a man who has been to all the best hospitals, had years of meetings, rejected all the physiologists and did not really respect anyone in the program. All I could do at times was tolerate him and other times just leave the house for a while when his temper got too out of control.

I really did feel sorry for him at times and at other times I was just angry with him. He was brilliant, why couldn't he just let go of wanting to drink? Even though he wasn't drinking, he was still consumed with thinking of alcohol.
Judging everyone who did drink. I was so grateful that I was never a drinker or I can only imagine what hell my days would have been like.

We started making plans to move up to Northern California to send Matt to a private school up there. It was almost the breath of fresh air everyone needed.

We started spending time in the Bay Area with Bob's best friend Bill. They were like brothers. They had been high school and college roommates and buddies. They had been through a lot together.

I really loved Bill and his family. I always felt safe around them because Bob was on his best behaviour around them.
The only thing was that Bob had not told Bill that he had had a major slip a couple of years before that.
He was really ashamed of it and he did not want the fact that he didn't have that continuous long term sobriety to affect our sons chances of getting in to his old school. At the time, I really didn't think there was any reason to tell his friend.
After all, it was not really my place to do so. If he wanted Bill to know he would have to be the one to confide in him.

We wanted Matt to like the Bay Area so much. We took him to San Francisco quite a bit and he started loving "Japan Town" and the city. He loved the tall buildings and the hip urban environment. Not to mention that he started collecting Japanese animation and videos and every time we went to the city he came home with a stash of new movies.

Finally one day we got the good news letter. Matt did indeed get accepted into Menlo. I was so thrilled for all of us. I was counting on this being a solid new beginning in our lives and with the support of his best friend and his family I thought the move would be flawless.

My nephew came to visit and we took him with us to San Francisco to look for a house to lease for the four years we had to be up there. All in all it was an amazing weekend for all.
Because I had lived there for so many years I knew the city like the back of my hand.
We never got lost and I drove all over the place.
It really was a new world.
We just happened to be in town for Gay Pride Week and Matt and Paul got a new kind of education. Paul came from Wisconsin and we were from Malibu, so it was quite a different celebration for the both of them.
I just remember having so many laughs that entire weekend. My hopes for the future were at an all time high. I had never embraced a new beginning quite as enthusiastically as I did that move.

I was really tired of being caged in up here in Malibu. Malibu had lost it's charm for me the day Bob picked up his first drink. I was constantly complaining about it. I felt I was living in a retirement community and didn't bother to hide my opinion about it. I used to say that Malibu was a place people came to to die. It seemed that people here stopped living in a way. The friends I had never went into LA to see the theatre, Opera or any of the things I wanted to do. It had also happened to Bob. All he wanted to do was go to the movies and then he would just fall asleep in them. I was bored to tears. The only thing I loved about the place was our house. The town's charm had long ago lost it magic for me.

Therapy

2007-08-25T20:16:00.001-07:00

One day shortly after returning from that trip, I got Marisa, Matt and myself into family therapy. I think many professionals would agree that was a very wise choice.
I called a local woman who specialized in addiction in the family, or so she said.

It was a MISTAKE. I'm not sure if it's because she was in Malibu, and believe me I have spoken to more than one professional in the field who have told me that many doctors would not consider setting up a practice here because of the calibre of help given by the local doctors, etc.

Well, I hadn't realized that at the time, I just wanted to heal the family the only way I knew how. I went alone and several times I took the two kids.
The advice that I was given was the beginning of the end of my happy marriage.

This woman who was my first therapist, was telling me what to do. Something I later learned is not done. I was so desperate to "fix" the situation at home that I listened to everything she told me to do. Including leaving Bob at home and going on our planned vacation to Hawaii without him.

At the time, she told me it was the only way to assert myself and it would be a lesson for him that he could no longer rage against me verbally, which was happening a lot since his relapse. Bottom line is all roads were leading to the end of the marriage.

Looking back it seemed ridiculous because neither one of us were planning on ending the marriage at that time. We loved each other, but couldn't tolerate the behaviour.
Quite a conundrum to put it mildly. It was almost like my therapist wanted to break up the marriage. She did nothing that I can recall to help me save it.

After a few short visits Matt refused to go back to see her and so did Marisa. We never did get any help as a family, or help as individuals for that matter. It just made things harder at home.

I just terminated the sessions and was left to try and pick up the pieces myself.

What does a family do when there are addiction problems? Everyone agrees that it is not easy to be married or in a relationship with a practicing addict, but here we were once more, Bob wasn't drinking, he was just so angry all the time.

It was the year that Bob and I started fighting more and more about his daughter, which had become a really hot topic of conversation from this point up until the end.

He would go on and on about her and how he felt used. He could say whatever and all I could do was just listen, because if I said one thing he didn't like, he would turn the fight on me. I wasn't used to fighting about his daughter, we always got along great. For all the years she didn't want to come to our house I could always manage something to say to put the fire out in his head. I could no longer do that.
The truth was starring him in the face.

She would not speak to him, the family condoned it, and he was still giving her money through his father. The resentments were mounting, and I can't say I didn't agree.

I must say, if my child did to me what she did to him I would have stopped paying her tuition and let her mother deal with it. But once again Bob was always filled with guilt. He didn't know how to stick up for what was right because of it.
She simply got her cake and she got to eat it too.

That year was the ultimate slap in his face, he was never comfortable with confronting Marisa or her mother, who actually was quite happy to encourage the bad behavior of Marisa, that was until just about one year into the silence that Marisa had a car fire after installing a new radio in her car.

Now she finally needed something from her father bad enough to finally give him a call. Bob was so happy to talk to her he welcomed the fact that she was only calling because she needed something from him.

Her car was totaled and he was the registered owner. The insurance money was going to be sent to him. I guess she didn't hate him enough not to need the money for a new car. Her mom would put in half for the new car and if he agreed to give her back the insurance money that would buy her a new Jeep. As usual he told her of course. What he told me was a totally different story.

Once again I got the brunt of his true feelings. He was pretty disgusted with her and her mom hitting him up for the money. After all, didn't Marisa tell us all that her Mom was going to take care of everything for her and she didn't need him any longer? And on and on and on. He was always treated that way. Once she even told us that we got her all the cool stuff and her Mom would buy her the basics, pajama's underwear stuff like that.
I have a feeling that year was hard for her without that credit card of his soon after that she got the use of it back. Some things never change.
She was speaking to him again and using his money again. Funny how that worked out.
A pattern that never ended.

Birthday Lunch

2007-08-19T22:55:00.000-07:00

To say that coming home was a very difficult time would be an understatement.
I was simply devestated by all that had gone on between Bob and Marisa and Bob and I.

I felt so sad that Marisa and Bob were totally estranged from one another. I decided that I did not want to celbrate my birthday that year. It didn't feel like anything that I wanted to do. It was a very sad time for us all. I guess I never really understood the resentment that Marisa had for her father. I really thought she loved him so much. I remembered her as a loving little girl who just adored her Daddy.

Of course time had gone by and things do change, but never did his love, adoration or support for her ever faulter, so I didn't see this coming.

Getting together with our family was always the best of times. This year would be more than difficult so I just told the family I wasn't going to celebrate and I didn't.

I did go to lunch with Marisa alone to celebrate my birthday. I really wanted to remain close to her inspite of everything that was going on. At this point I had no harsh feeling toward her I sympathized with her. Loosing the love of your parent is a very big deal in one's life and to actually bring this upon yourself is an entirely different matter. He still loved her and would have gotten over everything in a heartbeat, she would be the one who would be difficult to sway. I was hoping beyond hope that I could be the Peacemaker between them. I would learn that wasn't going to happen at least not at this lunch.

At that lunch we talked about everything that had happened in Paris of course, but the one thing that stands out in my mind just as clear as the day she uttered it were the following words.

In the middle of discussing everything Marisa uttered "I'm cold like Bonnie".
I managed to keep my mouth shut but inside I was shocked. I never forgot that because I went back home and told Bob.
I was literally crying because that was the most tragic statement I had ever heard come out of a brilliant young girl.

Here was a girl I admired more than anyone. I actually looked up to her. I admired how she worked hard at School got into Stanford, even if it wasn't her first choice, I was impressed. I had always been so proud of her and was willing to overlook the entire episode of wanting to leave her dad in Paris because emotions were running high and I thought we would all heal sooner than later.

But the sad reality was that she had no intention of ever speaking to him, at least not for a long time. I thought it would blow over, but I knew it wasn't going too.

Something always happened to me when anyone was upset with Bob, I always defended him because I believed in him so much.
I had no influence over his daughter. It was never more clear that from the point of her return home all her decisions were going to be talked over with her Mom and probably her other family members. There wasn't going to be forgivness going on.
Her Mom wasn't going to pay for everything as Marisa had imagined, but she did contact Bob's father for his half and now Marisa had no reason to talk to him at all.
Bob's dad would give her mom a check every month and Bob would reimburse him.
I guess it was always about the money.
Even though Marisa was over 18 and he legally didn't have to support her at all, especially if she didn't want to deal with him. He couldn't not support her as he had always done.
His father was trying to make things better by pretending that the money was coming from him, but it only made the distance between Bob and his daughter broader.

I went home and really felt very sorry for Bob, I started to cry as I told him about my conversation with Marisa at lunch. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that we all better get into therapy and fast. This was not good. Marisa was being incouraged to ingore her dad, but take the money.

I called the pyscologist.

Shattered Delusions

2007-08-14T22:16:00.000-07:00

For years I had clung to the delusion that as long as Bob didn't pick up a drink we would be fine. No matter what, I would be able to forgive and forget. Acutally that worked for many many years. It worked so well that little by little I started to loose the respect of Bob and I think Matt. I never wanted to "Rock the Sobriety Boat"
But like the "butterfly effect" one day a harsh word from his father changed our reality forever. I didn't have anything to do with the changes that were about to happen. I was caught in the eye of his storm and I didn't have a life raft I had a veil of delusion. I guess it's really called denial.

Mind you, my delusions of our peaceful harmonious life where thinly veiled. I wanted to have the perfect little family and for many years everyone who knew us thought that was exactly what we were. Even a few years before Bob had gone crazy when a Pain Management Doctor had taken him off of Valium "Cold Turkey" no less, he wasn't drinking, even though he was totally crazy coming off of it.
He was tipping over the kitchen table acting insane and many hours into a fight, he started taunting me with unacceptable insults. I had hauled off and whacked him in the face.

I had no idea I was so strong. I had been taking self defense classes privately from one of the women at our karate studio and I guess I had learned well. I scarred myself. I vowed I would never raise hand to anyone again. After all, I had be slapped around enough by Bob in the early years. I was ashamed of myself and totally baffled how strong emotions can make a person loose all sense of control. I knew where he had come from back them.
But Bob was not drinking. All was forgiven.

Covered by a now thread bear cover of hope more than reality one day after we returned home from Europe I woke up and our lives were altered forever.

I'm always speaking of having a mirror put up in front of a person and that morning my mirror was 10 feet tall. I could not change the facts of what had happened nor the reality that I wasn't ever going to get over it.

First of all I was totally jet lagged we arrived back from London and it was around noon our time. I went directly to Bed when I got home, I didn't go to our room because Bob was in there smoking and pacing.
I needed some rest and escapism more than anything. Matt also went to sleep so Bob was on his own.

I got up the next morning went down to the kitchen as usual and made myself a cup of cappuccino with really hot steamed milk. Bob was up early which was a sign that he had probably not slept much or at all. His insomnia was raging.
I had become very comfortable with having at least an hour or so to myself every morning without the drama of Bob which recently had become an art to deal with.
I did keep in mind that he was also devestated by drinking after all those years and I tried to keep his feelings in perspective. I wanted to believe he could get over this slip and get back to another fourteen years without a drink. I really wanted to believe that he could do it. After Europe I really wasn't sure about anything. I had seen the Bob I had run from many years ago "reborn". It scarred me beyond belief. In my life the only thing that really terrified me was Bob actively drinking or on a dry drunk just about to take that drink.

That's were I found myself that morning. In the Twilight Zone. My past was shattered and my future hanging by a thread.

The first words out of Bob's mouth were derogatory and accusing. He started to blame everything that happened in Paris on me. He started talking about Meagan and how beautiful she was. How she could have been another Sharon Stone. I literally saw red.
Much like the night I hit him, I do not remember what he was still yelling at me, all I remember is not wanting to go back to place of violence and before I knew what I was doing I launched my steaming hot coffee in his face.
He was stunned quiet. He didn't have a shirt on so it also hit his chest. I was in big trouble, or so I thought.
What happened was the opposite. He calmed down, went up to our room and literally took a cold shower.
When he was finished he called his Dad. One of the worst moments in my life was getting on the phone and telling his Dad what I just did to him. I have the feeling that Marisa had called him also so he was really compassionate with me as usual.
He told me to apologize and everything would be OK not to worry. I put Bob back on the phone. His father knew as well as anyone that Bob could be difficult, he also wanted more than anything to have me help Bob not pick up another drink. His dad knew that for some reason if anyone could or would help Bob to try and stay sober it could be me. I would not let his Dad, Matt, Bob or myself down. I loved him and I wasn't ready to throw in the towel on our marriage.
As hurt as I was I was willing to try or so I thought until I threw hot coffee on him. Now I didn't even know who I had become.

I had been so careful to walk on egg shells with Bob and Marisa to get them back home safe and in relatively not too damaged shape and now it was all turned on me again. But this time I was different. I was never going to be the same. I would never be that wishy washy wife as Matt used to call me so many times. That person disappeared that morning.

I had tried to get over Meagan, had taken the family on our first European vacation together with the hopes of healing and forgiveness and the truth was it was not going to ever be the same.
I had to face the fact that I was not a woman who was going to ever really trust him again. And with no trust we really had nothing. What was left was a family that was going to put up with each other for the sake of our son.
He begged me on many occasions not to get a divorce and I stayed because I didn't want to hurt him.
I would simply have to find a way to control my anger and hide my broken heart.

I had a broken heart. I loved Bob more than words could ever say, I was his defender always, maybe even his guardian angel and he threw it all away and rubbed Megan in my face when he was angry.

He could be so cruel at times. He was a Scorpio and his words were often cruel and targeted at doing damage. He looked for a weak spot and went for it.
I was now going to fight back and for the first time, I engaged him verbally like never before. I didn't care.

I had moved to Malibu with the hope that he would be far away from temptation, which he was at the time, I had walked on egg shells and people pleased him to death, but all that bought me was an illusion. Fact was he still picked up the drink and I had to let go of the idea that I had anything to do with his sobriety. He simply stayed sober because he wanted too and one day he didn't want to be sober any longer and he drank. End of story. That chapter of my life was over. I had better find a way and fast to learn to cope with our present situation.

I got up early the next morning and went to an Al anon meeting. I have never like this 12 step program and in fact always identified more with AA, at least there seemed to be a sense of hope and compassion there. I had experienced people reaching out to Bob and trying to help him stay sober. I prayed that I could find the same kind of support. I really needed help. I wasn't going to find it there. I poured my heart out when I shared and much to my shock, I was cut off and told not to talk about what had just happened in Paris. It was the last meeting I went too.

I called a friend and got the number of a psychologist in Malibu, I prayed that she could help us. Boy was I wrong.

The Flight Home

2007-08-14T00:20:00.000-07:00

Even when you are having the time of your life on vacation the flight home from London can seem to take an eternity. The biggest problem usually is the fact that you are flying into the morning. No nighttime to get some sleep.

As you can imagine, Bob did not wake up smelling the roses that day. He was tired and in the middle of the mother of all dry drunks. I had to get Matt and Marisa and us checked out of our hotel and through security at Heathrow. In the best circumstances it's not pleasant, but Marisa had an excess of baggage and weight in her suitcases that we had prepared for but we never anticipated the mood that everyone would be in.

Imagine trying to act like a happily little family at that point. What a stretch.
Bob was already going into nicotine withdrawal and dealing with the baggage was the last thing that he had the patience for that morning. As I recall there was only one little glitch at checking everything in and we were on our way to our gate.
Everyone was on their best behavior, thank god.

We boarded our plane and Matt and Bob sat together and Marisa and I were together.
As fate would have it Bob was seated next to two little kids that were having a pillow fight for what seemed like an eternity. He finally snapped. He started pacing up and down the Aile of the plane taunting Marisa. I really can't remember what he was saying to her, but his remorse had turned to anger. That was not a good sign.
People were drinking all around him and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what was going on in his head.
Marisa had informed him that her mother would be picking her up at the airport and taking her home there would be no need for us to bother.
He was not going to escape seeing her mom after this trauma, and don't forget Marisa was telling him that she no longer needed him for ANYTHING.

I had saved two of his Valium and brought them with me on this trip just in case something like this should happen. I gave one to Marisa and I took the other. We had to stay somewhat calm on the outside, we could not afford to get into a fight on an airplane. Bob was pacing like a caged animal now. It was too bad that he couldn't take any Valium he was the one that needed it most, but he had just almost died from Valium withdrawal two months before this. If he had any idea I had save a couple he would have taken them and been back in trouble.
I was awake through a real nightmare. I prayed for the strength to just be calm and be understanding and supportive of the two of them. I can't believe I gave Marisa a Valium but it was the only way I knew how to stop the insanity. I think she went to sleep and Bob no longer could antagonize her.
Things seemed fairly calm during the remainder of the flight.

We arrived at LAX and the first thing that Marisa did was call her Mom to let her know we were in customs. It was then that her Mom told her that she was going out that night, but that she would get her some food to eat when she got hungry.
Bob didn't say much to her, but to me on the way home he wouldn't stop.

He just called it. He said if Marisa thought that her Mom was going to let him off the hood financially she was just kidding herself. She couldn't even break her dinner plans when Marisa was in a total crisis. He couldn't get over it. Whatever he was he always put his kids first. It was shocking to him. So Marisa had to basically go home to an empty house after one of the most traumatic experiences of her life. Not to mention that she had been gone for the past four months while studying and traveling abroad.

Her Mom always put her needs first. It was the thing that Marisa seemed to turn a blind eye to. Always. No matter what her father did it was wrong or bad. Her Mom on the other hand could do no wrong. He was furious.

Bob certainly was flawed, at times unbearable, but there was never a time when he didn't put his kids needs before his own. Right up until the end.

A Family in Crisis

2007-08-13T23:27:00.000-07:00

If there ever was a moment in my life where I had no control over the events that were about to unfold it was sitting in a cab with Bob trying desperately to get him to an AA Meeting without him just telling the driver to pull over to the nearest Pub.

I had to accept that the dream of getting over the slip was Shattered. I never took into consideration how much anger and rage Marisa had towards her father. I should not have been surprised but I was shocked at the level of her rage.

Coming from a family of Mob guys I was used to people being more than angry at family members but never did I experience it first hand. His daughter really wanted nothing to do with her father, she would have preferred to have left him in Paris and the three of us just get one with our little vacation.

I never loved Bob more than I did at this moment in his life and I really felt his heartbreak. It also broke my heart that the truth could no longer be brushed under the rug and forgotten with tons and tons of retail therapy. The jig was up so to speak and as crazy as it sounds for the first time in years I was also proud of Marisa for telling him that she wanted nothing from him ever again.

Now this is what she wanted and she would soon find out that even though she thought her Mom would cover all the expenses associated with her Stanford tuition and the free spending she had on her dad's credit card she would soon come to realize that her Mother would have nothing to do with that scenario. But at least for the time being she felt that her relationship with him was not worth the stuff.

She was convinced that her Mom would just take care of everything. It was not meant to be.

Of course our amazing Matt would stay neutral as usual. He comforted his dad and stayed with his sister to in his own way comfort her.

I may not have been born into a well educated or wealthy family, but the one thing we were oozing with was the importance of family and I was being torn in half. Matt was neutral he loved us all. I had to find a way to comfort both Bob and Marisa, They were both hurting on so many levels that I was not prepared to handle. My god we needed a full time shrink on board for the next few months and I was in no shape to upset the apple cart with either of them.
I had to literally handle both of them with kid gloves. Bob's life depended on having my support because he was looking for any excuse to throw in the towel and just drink himself into oblivion.
He never really knew how much his daughter was affected by his alcoholism but the truth revealed in this manner was not something either of us had been prepared for.

I was angry with myself for even agreeing to go on this trip in the first place. Had I just said NO none of this would have happened but there was no turning back.
I was now in my maternal protective mode. I had to protect then both. From themselves and each other. Not an easy task for anyone, but given the tight quarters we were facing flying home together was freaking me out. I had no idea how Bob could make that flight without a cigarette or a drink.
All these thoughts were going through my head while I was in that car and as we pulled up to the meeting place, I felt a weight lift off of my shoulders. Bob had made it past hurdle number one.
He wanted to get into that meeting as much as I wanted him to be there.

There really is such a thing as a miricle and that evening Bob experienced another miricle of sorts.
We were the first people to arrive at the meeting and the man who was leading asked Bob if he would do the honor of leading the group. Bob accepted and by doing so he would have no excuse to leave early.

The man's name was Ray. I will never forget that he saved Bob's life that night. They had an instant bond. In England it is a bit different that over in the States.
The person leading the meeting has to tell his story. I felt that we were really being protected that night.

Bob poured his heart out that night and instead of many different stories everyone there rallied around Bob and his honesty. He actually begged for their help and told them how he didn't think he could make it without a drink that night.

Ray told his story and as bad as Bob was feeling at the moment his heart went out to Ray. Ray told the group how his beloved daughter had passed away a year ago and how his marriage had fallen apart behind it. It was probably the only story that could top the pain that Bob was feeling. He may have lost his daughter's affection on this trip, but she was still alive and he would have an opportunity pehaps in the future to make it up to her.

Ray on the other hand would never have another chance to tell his daughter how much he loved and adored her. She was truly lost forever. It was a glimmer of light at the end of a long painful two days.
Ray was so taken by Bob and he related to how much that Bob wanted to drink, that he actually drove us back to our hotel and spent two hours with Bob in the coffee shop talking and comforting him. While they were talking I went to check on Matt and Marisa to make sure that they were ok and to let them know that we were back at the hotel. Marisa took really good care of feeding and entertaining Matt so they were just fine. I was emotionally on pins and needles. I just prayed that I could keep it together for all our sakes.
What an amazing gift Ray was that night. By the time he left it was well over 2am and we had to be at the airport at 7am. No time for drinking fighting or anything but sleeping.
Bob's last words when he got back to the room were, "I don't know if I can make it without a drink (there was a mini bar in the room), but I will try. That was enough for me. I kissed him good night and thanked him for trying.

At that point it was all about reverse phycology. I could not lecture him or tell him what would happen if he did drink. He already knew and as far as he was concerned there wasn't much left to live for that night. The words that had spilled from Marisa's mouth would haunt him forever. No matter how much in the years to come we would all try to pretend that they were never uttered they were always lurking in the back of our minds.

In all the years I knew him and all the fights we had experience neither of us had ever stooped to the level that she did. No one ever wanted anything but for him to be sober, she went beyond compassion with tough love into hatred. It forever altered my opinion of her and I really felt sorry for her. She obviously had some major major issues.

I had been kicked out of my house years before and it never occured to me to hate my parents, I simply was stunned. But I loved her and I needed to get her back home to her mom in one emotional piece also. I alwasy used to say no one gets to be like they are by themselves. We are shaped by our childhood and our parents and given the fact that she spent most of her time with her Mom and her family the damage was irreversable.
Whatever love she used to have for her father had been altered and it was heartbreaking to watch them both suffering like they were. I rose to the occassion and did my best to mother the two of them. Matt was just a dream, so loving to them both. He was always there for his Dad. And his Dad adored him for that love.

Becoming Stephanie

2007-08-12T15:32:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning with the lingering distaste of something that was told to me, hence I wrote the previous blog last night.

I must have had a very restless night and I woke up remembering another strange dream.
I have had several in the past week.
While in Las Vegas last week, I had one of the most vivid dreams of my life. It was so real I can still remember it. When Matt and his girlfriend got back to the room, I told him the following story:

I was watching TV in the room and all of a sudden walking towards me from in front of the Television was a little girl. She came and sat on the bed with me and I touched her and told her I was so surprised because I was sure that she must have been a dream and now I was touching a real girl. It was very comforting to not be alone in the hotel room and I was happy to have her with me.
I was touching her hair and talking to her.
The next thing I know is the door opened quite loudly and I was alone and awake.

I started to tell Matt about this and even he said it seemed strange that I was having a dream and talking about dreaming in it.
Whatever it was, either my imagination or someone in the spirit world visiting me I of course will never know, but I still feel the lingering presence of a very sweet little girl.

Maybe that little girl was the sweet girl I used to adore in Marisa. I treated her with so much love and kindness always. Even when I knew how much she was changing I tried to be kind to her. That didn't mean I agreed with her, but I simply allowed her to reveal her true self and saw less and less of her.
Perhaps I was missing those long lost wonderful days, filled with love and hope for the future. Maybe I was missing the sweet and kind child that has turned into a rather cold woman in so many ways so much like her father with a propensity for the same addictive relief.
They both love the Trancs to calm them down. She likes the Xanax and he loved the Valium. The only exception is that she isn't aware of the path she is on, no matter how I tried to tell her years ago to be careful of that. The apple does not fall far from the tree as they say.

Last night I dreamt of romance. That is certainly out of the question for me who seems to be at the top of her jaded ways. But there it was, in living color another bad boy, much like Bob.

Imagine dreaming of a handsome man with an edge, Sober no less in AA. I have vowed to myself I will never ever get involved with another alcoholic. There is just too much of a gamble to ever go there again.
How could I be dreaming of being attracted to someone with the same addiction issues. Am I just missing Bob? Who knows? It wasn't his face up there on a movie screen of my dreams.

That is enough to have me running to a shrink. What is it about me that would be so attracted to another problem relationship. That is the exact reason I refuse to date.
The fear of another terrible outcome just for the momentary pleasure of being in love or lust, who knows. I only know one thing for sure, If I like a man, he is going to be trouble. That is my type. Trouble with a capital T.

I look around and I have yet to see happiness in couples who are together. The initial joy is never sustained. Young or old, it always ends up the same.
I am convinced most people stay in a relationship because they need the company or they do not want the stigma of being alone.

I never feel alone and I certainly don't fear it. I think I am blessed by always having been a loner. My entire life I would rather sit in my room alone as a young girl even, listening to my music or simply being alone with my thoughts.
Sometimes I think it is because I did not grow up with my natural parents and though I was loved and adored, it was different. I child feels the difference to the core of their soul. I just didn't have a strong bond like I have with my son. I was always treated like the honored guest I think.

The pain of the last few years of my marriage were enough of a cure for me. Being Alone seemed like the prize not the punishment to me.
So today I would rather focus on the past good times in the end, when Bob had his girlfriend to take it out on and not me.

Which brings me to this point in the subject matter.

Why do people always hurt the ones they love? Is it because they think they won't loose them? Do they think it is part of the "relationship" I have no idea.
I do know that I never got along better with Bob than when I was not living with him and we were in the process of getting the divorce.
Our friendship was stronger than ever, we actually enjoyed our brief time together when we did manage to have dinner or see a movie. All of his demons were no longer my problem and I only saw the good side of him. I now had the luxury of removing myself from his presence if things got ugly. He would simply have to go home to his condo alone or he could go to the house he shared with Linda.
I felt sorry for them both. They had each found themselves in the other, it was a hell of a price to pay for romance.

Being Enlightened

2007-08-12T01:03:00.000-07:00

So what has happened to me emotionally and intellectually during my lifetime? I have become more than enlightened in the ways of the world. Unfortunately life has forever altered me and some would say not in a good way.
I have had to go into survival mode on so many levels. I feel like a man who has the pleasure and the burden of protecting their loved ones.
I have gone into warrior mentality, not by choice but by necessity. All my senses are heightened and I am aware of perhaps more than I want to be aware of.
I no longer trust anyone to be what they appear on the outside to be.
My mind always reserves the right to disprove what they are saying. I know that most people have their own agenda, we no longer live in a kind world. It has become a survival of the fittest world.
The weak have always been run over by the strong. I choose not to ever be weak again.

In the past two years I have lost everything that was important to me except my son.
I have lost the ability to believe in people and kindness. I used to be so naive and Bob would get very upset with me and tell me how ridiculous I was to trust everyone. Unfortunately, he was so right.

He had the ability to see right through people. He could judge them in a second and know who they really were. It was a gift that held him in good standing while practicing law in his younger years.
He could see the lies in their eyes. If you recall earlier I told a story about how he knew his cousin would be killed by his former best friend. The court mediator thought he was crazy. Less than a week later, his cousin would indeed be murdered by his friend.

I did have the luxury of finally listening to Bob, the last couple of years of his life. He was relatively clean and sober and when you had a sober Bob you were in the presence of brilliance.

I have never known a more insightful or brilliant mind. It was one of the most attractive things about him, besides he good looks.

He called it every time. He humbled me in so many ways and in the end I took advantage of his tutoring me in the ways of life and the world.
He had overcome so many obstacles in his life with his battling his addiction.
He too had suffered the loss of so many things. None of them material. I think it started when he lost his mother. He was consumed by all the things he did to disappoint her. He was torchered by the loss of his daughter's love of him, and baffled how he offered her so much and got really nothing in return except her wanting more of his money and not his time.
He rarely spoke of his brother's lack of approval it was just too deep and painful to talk about. He loved him but they were never close in the 25 years that I had know them. Not close like I am with my brother, who I can call up and just talk and he will listen to what is going on in my life. I think it was probably the reason Bob and Richard were so close, Bob could talk to him and Richard would listen. He regarded Richard as a brother and in his way he rewarded that kindness by helping Richard get a house. Richard never judged him like so many did, he simply saw the good side and couldn't even conceive a the things that were going on when Bob was drinking.
Bob's father was one of the most generous people I have ever known,he too rewarded people who were loyal to him with great kindness. Don't get me wrong, they both could be very tough and I would hate to be on the bad side of either of them. But they both had a balance between tough and kind that balanced them out.

I loved being influenced by that kind of generosity. I really wanted to follow in their loving footsteps, BUT it is a different world now. People are different, there is a world full of opportunists even loved ones can become opportunists. I told Matt I think I went to sleep one night and work up as DAD.

I now tend to see the world totally different than many people who I used to be surrounded by. I no longer have the luxury of pretending and keeping my mouth shut and hope that all the uncomfortable things that life throws my way, will just vanish.
I no longer have a shoulder to lean on or the strength of a man. Actually the strengh I thought I was leaning on crumbled into a pile of dust anyway. The illusion of security, just vanished in a moment of truth one night a little over two years ago.

The woman I had been died that fateful night also, but I didn't realize it at the moment that my life would be altered in so many ways. That night I lost my other half, the half that kept the lid on outrageous thoughts for the most part.
The metamorphose has been complete. Sometimes welcomed and sometimes not.

I'm a woman, living in a man's world. Much like Jane Austin I don't want to play the part that society deems fit for a female. Where the hell is society when, I'm facing financial ruin at the hands of a man, who is in charge of a simple act like delivering a check on time.
In two years I watched my credit rating plummet at the hands of a man, and had to spend ten thousand dollars on an attorney just to get my checks delivered by the first of the month. I was not supposed to fight for anything, and believe me, the opinion that man has of me is probably not good. How dare I question a man? A professional old man at that. A man who can't really remember things as it was glaring out at me during the final phase of me finishing up my part of probate, my divorce. This man "thought" he had already paid me back my legal fees. Does anyone think that I would forget that? Whatever.

Tonight I was reminded of one very important thing. I would rather be respected than liked because no matter what I do someone always seems to be bothered.

Oh, I used to be liked, adored or possibly even loved. Who knows. Today as I sit here I would rather be a force to reckon with than the weak, meek or simple minded who seem to dominate the world today. Nothing gets past my eagle eyes or my perception. I have finally become more like a man in my thinking than a woman. I cringe at remembering my old subservient ways. It makes me ashamed that I allowed so many things to happen to me. Marisa said it best when she reminded me that I should have never even trusted her father by not reading certain documents pertaining to my divorce. TRUST NO ONE once again screams out loud.
It's like being trained as a warrior. Every sense is heightened. That's survival mode. You can't help it. It just is. Nothing gets past me of importance, it doesn't make people comfortable.

Has there ever been a President of any country that was loved and adored by Everyone?
Hell no. Do they seem to care? Just think of Clinton or Bush. It's part of the job description. Half the country or more will end up despising you, regardless if they voted for them or not. The price of power is walking a lonely road. There are no friends just faces who either need you or want something from you.
At least the Politicians can blame their unpopularity on Partisan Politics. I can only blame myself for the separatist I have become.

I feel like I mostly identify with Jane Austin of all people. God forbid a woman should point out the inequities of the sexes. Or not want to depend on a man. Because trust me, I know that the price I paid for that false security came at way too high a price. One that destroys the meek. I was heading down that road until I had a miraculous recovery in my mind. I just will not give in to popular opinion of me or anything. Whatever I think or do not think I still end up in the same position Alone with my thoughts.

I can only tell you that I would not change anything about my outspoken personality for anyone. What are the choices? I could go back to crying and whining about my fate, or I can take the higher ground and make things happen for myself. A very unpopular thing for woman to do. Society puts woman into little boxes.
One day I was speaking to an insurance agent about getting a life insurance policy for myself and he said he was surprised because it is not something that woman do.
It's 2007 for gods sake. It is still a man's world.
I fell like since I've had to deal with men on their playing field, lawyers accountants insurance brokers etc. they view woman like children, "We should be seen and not heard".
I played the game for years and where did it get me? It got me an accurate view of life and a family that really doesn't know what it means to be a family.

There is no point on being a people pleas er. It is a waste of my time. People end up having something to say anyway. In life, it seems people are damned if they do and damned if they don't. So if those are the odds what the hell, there is nothing to loose but truth itself. Tell it like it is.It's why I choose to remain a lone ranger. I wouldn't have it any other way.

Tonight I had an interesting situation where something got back to me. It's funny how the human mind is quick to point the finger away from the truth. Hell I'm happy I threaten people enough to have them still talking about me, as I said earlier this evening,I must be getting back on top of my game.
A smart woman is a dangerous thing to handle. Especially when there is no reason left to sensor truth any longer. If you run with me, be prepared to hear it that way I see it. Mostly very, very truthful. I do have a tendency to hold the mirror up and make people look into it.

I had to learn the hard way that in the end the only thing that really matters is how a person views themselves. "To thine own self be true" someone once uttered.
It is my motto, can't live it any other way any more. I spent too many years trying to please the people that in the end turned their backs on me for greed or for the fear that I knew too much and would and could dare to speak the truth.

Well here it is, the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth as I have written several times in the past. The pen is so much mightier than the sword. Words cut deeper than a knife.

Is it a curse to see through the haze of polite society, perhaps. It certainly does separate the men from the boys. Truth has never been for the weak, it brings grown men to their knees others to criminal acts.
So imagine me, a petite little blond with the insight to see right past all the bull shit and niceties of polite society. It is not a welcomed trait to poses.

Most people would much rather talk about you behind your back and pretend to share your same feelings. Not me. I have lost the sensible ability to sensor myself.
Mostly when I have this overwhelming need to speak the unspeakable. Whether or not it is well received. I do make some people uncomfortable but there is only one person in my entire world that matters to me, Matt. The rest are just players in the play of life. In a couple of years I won't even remember most of their names.

At least when I check out of this life in my final golden years I will have done it without fear of what others think of me. I already know and have always known.
They either fear or hate me. You know that old saying, "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful"? That has been my life with the exception of my former husband and my son.
I have walk a solitary road for so many years. I never tried to be popular even back in high school, I found the jealousy of being my self something that alienated my friend from me. People like to hang out with clones of themselves. That way they don't see the need to change.

It's a double whammy to look like I do and see through the bullshit and tell it like it is. I just don't care anymore what people think of me.
I wouldn't want to be a member of a club that wanted me anyway, as W C Fields said.
I want to listen to the beat of my own drums not someone else's.

PARIS

2007-08-10T23:30:00.000-07:00

What can I say about Paris, Bob and I were thrilled to be going. I had booked first class seats on the Chunned from London to Paris. The three of us were excited, Marisa was being her moody self.

Once we got our seats in the first class coach we were excited about our trip under the English Channel to get to Paris. That was a remarkable experience especially for Matt. He was loving this trip, Marisa was just plain bored. She didn't enjoy the lunch that was served to begin with. Hell what was not to enjoy? We were served lunch with fine china, silver and table linens. She "Wasn't Hungry" again.

I will never understand how stupid I was to believe that Marisa would even begin to actually forgive her Dad for his relapse back into drinking.
I guess Matt and I were already sort of over the shock of it, and more than willing to try and regain our once extremely happy home life.
I failed to take into consideration that Marisa did not have much to get back to. She rarely came over and she was getting just what she wanted. Us to get her and her overweight suitcases back to the States.

I started to get that little knot in the pit of my stomach. Bob and his daughter, Oil and Water. The tension was mounting between them.

The Chunnel trip was over and now we had to get a taxi to our hotel. I booked two connecting rooms at the "Inter Continental Hotel". The location was perfect. Near the Louve to begin with and all the places we wanted to see.
Bob had not been back to France since he was studing there in collage. He was excited to go exploring.

But first we needed to get our Rooms. If you have ever been to France you know that the experience can be very bad. Our connecting rooms were not, connecting, and Bob really started to loose it. He did not want the kids down the hall from us and we had to argue with the check in clerk to get our pre-booked rooms.
Tempers were starting to fray and just when I thought Bob was going to really loose it, a miricle happened. Sitting in the lobby of the Hotel was a very good friend of his from AA and her mother.

I don't think I was ever happier to see anyone from the program as I was to see her that day. We went over and talked to her for a while and she told us where there was a meeting near the Hotel. Of course Bob had no intention of attending a meeting while on this trip. He didn't tell her that but I'm sure she knew by his lack of enthusiasm.
Before we went up to our rooms, she made sure that she let us know what room she was in, just in case Bob needed her for "anything to do with his program>"
She had heard him share about how devastated I was and his family was by his slip.
He had lost his fourteen years of not drinking and we were all still numb with fear and disbelief.

After unpacking Bob and I decided to let the two kids explore on their own. He needed to chill out from the bad vibes he was getting, and Marisa just wanted to avoid him at all costs.

I am grateful for those few hours. It was romantic and I was really happy. All seemed to be forgotten, almost like we were heading into a second honeymoon so to speak.
We walked all over town, went and had the most amazing pastries and coffee and window shopped. Just looking and not shopping was totally fun.
We went back to our Hotel to get ready for our first dinner in Paris.

Matt and Marisa had explored Paris their way. I think they went to "Tuillery" gardens. There was a carnival and they had fun together. They rarely spend any time alone ever, so this was really a good thing for them to bond.
Matt of course was as excited about the programs on French TV as he was with any of the historical monuments.
TV over in France is nothing like he had ever seen. We just let him watch whatever.
It was four in the afternoon, how bad could it be? Marisa was appalled that we would let him watch it.
She seemed to be uptight about it. Hell, our philosophy was, when in Rome. Matt was having a "Real" French experience. I saw no harm in that. After all, it is the culture.

We found a very nice restaurant that we could walk to for dinner, so we all dressed nicely and walked over and we were not disappointed.
I can still see the quaint two story restaurant in my mind. We all of course visited the second story restrooms not only because we needed to, but because it was a perfect chance to explore the place.

I don't remember dinner being tense, but looking back at the walk home, I should have sensed trouble was brewing.

When we got back to the Hotel, Matt and Marisa went into their room and we went to ours. Even though they were connected we didn't all hang out. Matt came in for a while to see what we were doing and then went back to his room to watch TV with his sister.
Bob and I were just really getting over our jet lag and I was so happy to just call it a day. I got under the covers and closed my eyes, Bob read his book.
There was nothing in the air that night that could have prepared me for what lay ahead.

I was abruptly awakened at nine am the next moring, by a very angry Bob. He was yelling at me to get up because he didn't bring us all the way to Europe to sleep the day away.

That was the first sign that we were really in deep emotional trouble. I was stunned, first of all in all the years that I knew him, he was the one who never liked to get up early and nine am isn't exactly wasting the day. I asked him what the hell was wrong.

It was then that he went to the mini bar, picked up two mini bottles of Vodka and started waving them at me, threatening to drink them. I guess we were loud enough that Marisa came in to the room and asked us what the hell was going on.
By this time, I was more than angry.
I told her that her father was threatening to take a drink.

In our world that was the equivalent of suiside. It was not an idle threat. It sent terror into every pour of my body. It must have affected Marisa the same way.

She wasn't preparred for his totally uncalled for reaction. He started to yell at her. I can't really remember what was going on. I wasn't even fully awake when it all started.

All I know is that before things could get worked out, Marisa started screaming at him at the top of her lungs.

She was telling him how much she hated him and that he was just a "sick alcoholic"
She then threatened to jump off the balconey and kill herself.

By this time Matt was in the room. We had never had a "Family" meltdown ever.
First of all I think we were all stunned by the words comming out of both of them.
It was pretty apparent to me, just how much resentment each of them had for each other.

I had to step in and do something to calm them both down. I begged Bob to calm down and call his friend at the hotel and to make a call to his sponsor back in LA.

He actually did both. By the time I got to see how Marisa was doing she informed me that she was in the process of booking a flight out of Paris for the Three of us.

The three of Us? I asked her what she was doing? Did she know that if we left Bob in Paris, we would never see him alive again? It was a death sentence for him.
The one thing I did know about him to the core of my soul was that when he calmed down he would be more than remorsefull.

We decided that I would just go to the Louve with Matt and her father so that she could calm down and perhaps we could just get over it.
That's what I always tried to do. Get over it.
Marisa was a different story. She wasn't used to walking around on egg-shells to calm him down, she didn't want anything to do with the situation.
Matt and I took Bob to the Museum. Of course I look back at this with a bit of humor.
Bob was so far gone at this point, there was no calming him down. He was pacing around the court yard of the Louve smoking and Matt was just taking pictures of him lost in the angry thoughts of his head.
Years later Matt and I would remember with humor how we had an amazing real French Experience and laugh.
Bob always told us about this French man in AA who would go to meetings and tell everyone how "He hated his life and how he hated AA and all of "You" as he referred to people in meetings.

Well, here we were in Paris, his father and sister were behaving just like the "Comedy Improv" skits that Bob would perform for Matt. It was more than surreal.

I'm sure that Bob never remembered one thing about the "Louve" he was busy talking to himself and chain smoking.
I was busy wondering how I was going to get out of Paris without Bob picking up a drink. He was on a terrible "Dry Drunk". The fight with his daughter almost sealed the deal.

That's the first thing he always did before picking up that first drink. Start a big fight. The only thing I was grateful for was that he was more angry at his daughter than me and I was able to try and calm him down.

When we got back to the Hotel Marisa told me to pack because the three of us had a flight back to England.

I was stunned. I couldn't imagine how cruel that would have been. I told her she better rethink her plans, because if she went ahead with her plan, she would never see him again.
I asked her to reconsider and calm down. We were supposed to leave for Spain the next morning. I told her we either all go to Spain or we all go back home but we were not leaving her dad behind.

She looked at me and said the trip was over, she wanted to go home.

I don't even remember if she booked the flights and a hotel room at the airport in England or if I did.
My only concern was to not let her father out of my sight for one minute. He never needed a friend more than he did at that moment. His sobriety was hanging by a thread.
That may sound so dramatic, but it wasn't. All he wanted to do was pick up a drink and die.

If you believe in a higher power than the rest of this story should not surprize you.

We arrived at Heathrow got a room and I immediatley went down to the front desk and asked if there was an AA meeting anyplace near by.
They could not have been kinder to me. Not only did they tell us where there was a meeting, they booked us a car to get there.

I was so grateful that Bob was even willing at this point. Matt and Marisa were in a room by themselves all the better at this point.
I went to their room and explained to Matt and Marisa that I had to take their dad to a meeting and that they should just get anything they wanted from room service or whatever. I had no idea how long we would be gone.

They were both happy that there would be no more drama that day.

We left the hotel and went to seek help because I don't think in many years Bob had ever needed help more than he did at that moment.
He told me he just didn't know how he had managed to make it that far and he told me he did not think he could make it home without a drink.
I was very kind to him and I told him to just do it a minute at a time like they say in those meetings. He said he couldn't even promise me that but he was willing to get in the car and be driven to a meeting out in the middle of nowhere.
We were both desperate for a miricle.

Tonight I write with only healing on my mind

2007-07-24T23:53:00.000-07:00

As my beloved brother Mark once said and I quote, "Family, who needs it"? At the time he murmured those now etched words into my mind, he had probably had enough of the drama that he was being pulled into by our beloved Bob in his active addiction phase.
Although I seemed to be the only one foolish enough to actually believe that Bob would achieve long term sobriety again, I never did loose hope, Mark on the other hand was much more realistic and quite frankly was done participating in uncomfortable family holiday dinners with so much tension in the air. Who can blame him? If given a chance, neither Bob or myself would have wanted the drama either.

As I look back and take that painful walk down memory lane I am reminded by the lyrics of one of my favorite "Counting Crows" songs, that the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow that it brings.

So I started my last ten days. I have the once in a lifetime opportunity to wipe the slate clean of a past life filled with so many moments of ups and downs that have transpired these past several years in my world.

I am facing one of the cross roads of a life that one must make and pray that the gamble will pay off. I can no longer stay in my home of 21 years because of the circumstances of Bob's sudden death and as my Mother in Law made sure to remind me, that Bob did not provide for me as my "Father" did for her. I am going to lease our home out hopefully for several years, with the hope that I will be able to save it for my son. I thank god for the fact that Saul did include me in a Trust, everyday.
Had it not been for that, I would have been forced out of my home two years ago.
The past two years have given me the time to start to heal. There is a post traumatic trigger ever present replaying the final moments of Bob's life here every time I drive down the PCH past Rambla Vista. I hope that time will ease that memory. "Pick me up Steph, please pick me up", Bob's final words are branded in my brain, unfortunatley along with his once beautiful face.
There really is no telling when the grief will end,if ever.

Last week my son and I had to go through every article of clothing, books, personal items and other things that he had at home for his entire life left "Home" for all these years. We also started to watch marked and unmarked video tapes so that we can copy them to DVD's to preserve them.
It was an un-explainable experience. So gut wrenching that I could not bear to ask him to go thru the remaining things we have stored here of his father's. For the second time, I had to do it. I couldn't stop myself from putting a shirt to my face, hoping to catch just a slight scent of Bob. A few times I actually convinced myself that I could smell him here with me again. Wishful thinking or delusion. There really is not much difference at this point.

I unexplainably broke out into a sweat while watching the tapes, got sick to my stomach and had to go and throw up. At first I thought I ate something bad at dinner, but as I leaned over the toilet bowl, nothing came up. I was simply involuntarily taken over by years of emotion. Bottled up, repressed or simply forgotten memories in a flash forward synopsises of the past 20 years of my life.

Unfortunately the first home video we watched just happened to be the beginning of the end of the good times. I looked at the stress on my face, saw the pain in my eyes and actually did a sense memory of how miserable our lives had become. Each day was hanging with the dark cloud of another relapse looming in the near future.

I was trying my best to keep my family together, to preserve what was once a family that was the envy of an entire community. "The Picks" the happy three-some, out and about town, going to the market, the movies, dinner, karate or whatever.
I had to leave the room during that video and run to the bathroom.

The next tape was just by a random selection two weeks before the birth of my son.
My life at that time was like a fairy tale. Two people talking to their unborn son, telling him it was OK to be born any moment now.
We were so funny.

Then the next part was Matt being held by his sister and his grandfather. It was like being all together again. We were all so new to the home video filming that we were all so self conscious of the camera. Funny stuff, looking at our teeth, our chins, especially me because I had gained so much weight. Looking at the sweet child that Marisa once was and looking at myself kissing her head. Realizing that I have lost so much more than I can bear to think about. Everything that mattered to me back then, has been ripped from my world. It has nothing to do with money, but with family.

But the unexpected knife through my gut was Bob doing his comedy improv stuff to the camera,He had just started acting at the Lee Strasbourg's School and any chance he had to be in front of a camera was a golden moment for him. Matt and I had not laughed so hard for over two years now. We laughed so hard until it hit us.
Those days are gone forever, never to be given back, ripped from our lives leaving the hole as big as a crater from space. We both started to cry.

Maybe that is what we needed to shake us out of this just pretending that things will get back to normal someday, hopefully sooner than later. "Where have I been for two Years? Matt whispered. I couldn't explain survival or grief or the road it takes you down.
There will never be another moment listening to Saul, tell a story that happened to him a few days ago, or Bob at one of the happiest moments in his life, filled with unadulterated joy of having his two children with him or Mark so relaxed and happy to see the Baby.
The only uncomfortable moment was watching Bob ever so mindful to make sure that Marisa was not the least bit jealous of our new addition. You could see how hard he tried. It was the motto around our house, never make her feel less important that Matt. We did our best, right up to the end.

Those memories you get walking down memory lane come at a price. Both Matt and I have Saul's funny story etched in our brain, Bob's totally hysterical, rather risque comedy bit, that really rivals anything that John Belushi could have come up with. Just off the top of that brilliant mind of his. It still lingers as I write this.
Oh how I loved that man. That kind, loving handsome, brilliant man who came back for a period of almost twelve years, was talking to us and making Matt laugh like only he could do. The laugh that would make Matt run for his inhaler was present again and he did get the inhaler. The Bob that no one outside of the three of us really got to experience. A relaxed Bob not feeling guilty or remorseful about anything. Just happy to be sober and alive.

Those were the best days of our lives.

As Matt and I stayed up well into the morning talking again about life and death and his feelings and perhaps his fear of what will happen someday when I am no longer here, I reminded myself and him that life goes in cycles and he, much like I am doing now, will have to dig down, really deep and keep it together for the sake of his children, because their emotional stability will depend on how well he will be able to cope with a loss, get through the pain, but just keep going for their sake. It is the cycle of life. When you think you can't take any more, that's when your children will need you the most to help them try to cope with their loss also.

I need to remind myself of that on a regular basis when I feel abandoned by my once beloved family because they chose not deal with me talking to them about what was happening to me in the process finalizing my divorce in the Probate system under the direction of my step daughter. Gone without a word, just vanished into thin air, like I don't exist and perhaps listening to me, reminded them too much of their own thoughts and demons. I will never know because silence is golden to some people.

I wish them all well and I hope that I never treat anyone so heartless in their time of grieving and despair. Because much like I had to do with Bob, I have to forgive two of the three because I know it was not intended to wound me, but to protect themselves from the mirror I seem to hold up to all. It is a tragic flaw of mine. Not everyone thinks like I do. So militant and times and so boldly honest almost without thinking of the effect it has on others. I just say what's on my mind, and let the chips fall where they may.
Mine fell on the same table Bob's did, a family that would rather run than fight. Too civilized to speak what was on their minds, just ignore the problem and in time it will just go away I guess. It drove him crazy talking for hours about stuff, so frustrated by the lack of communication.

So be careful what you ask for is a great mantra. I leave a void in the family voluntarily and hold my head up high. Because in spite of everything no one can ever say that I did not defend Bob right up until the bitter end of our divorce two years after his death, because anything he did to hurt anyone he at least was sorry for his behavior and accepted the consequences. I hope we all learn that lesson from him.
Maybe that is his final legacy. Taking a hard look at ourselves in a mirror when only we are looking back at ourselves. You can't fool yourself for too long, it comes back to haunt you. I never abandoned him and had he been the Bob I married and not the other Bob, things would have turned out much different.

I went to an interesting event several months ago, featuring a world famous radio clairivoent and two different people described Saul, Bob and my real birth mother to me in detail. I was simply stunned into tears. I never knew my mother and at first I thought the man was talking about the woman who I called my mother, not my birth mother, that was until he told me that I look just like her. I knew this man was the real deal.
Among the most healing thing that happened that day was that two times from two different people, the first thing that was said to me was that someone keeps saying that they are sorry, so sorry. I know it was Bob and you can stop asking me for my forgiveness Bernie, I was never mad at you.
The second thing I was asked was if I was writing something, I said I was writing the story of my life with Bob, I was told to keep writing. I will.

Dissapointments in the Air

2007-05-21T01:11:00.000-07:00

As we planned our trip to Europe the tension between us seemed to subside for a while. This was going to be our first trip abroad together and I was really happy that Matt would have a chance to see England, France and Spain and a pretty early age.
At least early in my opinion. He was ten or eleven, I don't remember but I didn't get to see those countries until I was in my twenties.
I started doing a little research into inexpensive Hotels with American amenities. We needed things like a TV, air conditioning, and if possible connecting rooms.
I also was thrilled to be able to get first class seating on the Chunnel.

I was excited about taking a train underwater from England to Paris. It all seemed so thrilling. As the time came closer to going I had the chance to speak with his daughter several times. She seemed comfortable that we were coming, even though she hadn't wanted to ever travel with her father again.
She reminded us that we should pack light. One of the main reasons she wanted us to come and get her home was because it would have cost her so much to get all her stuff back home. I guess her luggage was way over the weight limit.
Looking back at it now, I can't believe her Mom would be so concerned about the cost of extra luggage.
We had to pay to have something else sent home before hand. It was always those little weird things that confused me. Her mom dressed to kill all the time, once she even spent ten thousand dollars on a dress, but when it came to spending $300 to ship a backpack home, that was too expensive, ask your Dad or Steph to do it.
Given the state of mind her dad was in, nothing was denied.

He was going to eat crow for a long time in order to redeem himself to me and the family.

Well the day arrived and the three of us were off to England. We flew Virgin Air and Matt was in heaven. I think he played the on board Nintendo came the entire trip without ever napping. Bob did remarkably well without a cigarette. I couldn't believe how well behaved he was. The plane ride went off without a glitch.

We arrived in London on a damp drizzly day. Never happier to be anywhere. We had a sense of adventure like never before. Even though I had been to England once before, I had never been to the Museums, the Tower of London or even Harrods for that matter.
His daughter had arranged for us to see Three plays while we were there and we had made dinner reservations at a couple of really expensive restaurants based on recommendations from my brother in law.

Every thing was planned to perfection except for one thing. No one was prepared for Jet Lag.
We arrived in the morning London time, got our hotel room, wandered around the city a little and then Matt and I just collapsed in one room. Bob waited anxiously for his daughter to join us. She didn't get to the hotel until around midnight I think.
By the time she did arrive not one of us had enough energy left to do anything but say hi, Bob's daughter had bought us all some really cool soccer jackets,I also got a great sweatshirt that said Oxford on it, really great gifts.. They were perfect because none of us had anything to really wear in the rain. We must have seemed ungrateful but we were all so tired. I went to my room and went right back to sleep her Dad finally crashed also. Full of high expectations for the following day, we all got a good nights sleep, finally.

We were clueless to how exhausted we would be. His daughter had been there for an entire semester so she was used to the time change and wanted to cram everything she was unable to do into a few short days. We had three plays to see. One every night.
We did the usual sight seeing during the day, but something was wrong. It wasn't blatantly obvious at first, but that same old tension between father and daughter started to raise it's ugly little head.
We went to the Museum of London like three little excited tourists. She was annoyed and left us there. Said that she had been there before and wanted to go shopping someplace. She would meet us later for the play and dinner. The first day that was just fine. The three of us were happy to be tourists. It was really hard to sit through the theater that night. I was dozing off during the play, which is pretty hard to do in a musical. Then we had a very late dinner and we had to wait because it was a really trendy place. The three of us really couldn't do all that. But we were all on our best behaviour because Bob didn't rock the boat with his temper. He did get upset because Matt was exhausted and starving and the wait seemed endless.
By the time the dinner arrived, it really wasn't anything all that special. Maybe for England, but certainly not by our LA standards. So day two ended up with stored up tension between the two of them.
The next day, we wanted to see the Tower of London, she didn't want to go, so we went without her. More shopping I guess. Another play and dinner again. Can't even remember what it was that's how Jet Lagged I was.
The next day we all went to Harrods for high tea. Now the tempers were starting to show a little. Matt wanted to know where the food was, because to tell you the truth, little cucumber sandwiches are not exactly ten year old boy food for lunch. He also hated tea. Instead of having a sense of humor about this, Bob's daughter took it personally, and after tea, she left us again, and we went downstairs to Harrods most amazing food court. I am so happy Matt was hungry or none of the three of us would have experienced it. It really is like being a kid in a candy store. Matt had the most delicious chicken for lunch and of course after that we just had to do some shopping at Harrods. We bought him the most beautiful Bear, all dressed up like a castle guard or maybe it was Paddington, but he walked out of Harrods with some really cool toys.
Now Matt was happy. We took a double decker bus back to our hotel and I will never forget the look on Matt's face when this beautiful blond girl got off the bus. We all just starred at her. She had the most beautiful skin. Matt said he could live in London if all the girls looked like that. We three were really having a wonderful time. What was his daughter doing, shopping.

We went to see "Tommy" on the fourth of July. It was in a very cool, small theater and it was in the afternoon, so I was awake. I had always loved the "Who" and I never dreamed I would be seeing "Tommy" in London. We walked around Carnaby street, bought some cool little things and got ready to leave the next day for Paris.

Looking back, I really do wish, that his daughter had just told us not to go on that trip. It was so obvious that we were not on a family vacation, we were simply getting her and her stuff back home and making sure that she got to eat at the expensive restaurants and see the plays that she hadn't been able to see or get to as a student. Bob was starting to feel used by her again. It wasn't subtle, she spent as little time as possible with us in London as she thought she could get away with. Her father was not stupid. All the little excuses that a young girl uses and thinks her parents will believe simply didn't fly with him. He was just tolerating her because he promised me that he would behave. It never occurred to me, that the one I should have been worried about was his daughter. He was trying really hard, and she really was just avoiding him as much as possible, but using his credit card to get whatever she needed. The only time she really perked up is when she took us to Neils Garden, I think it's called. She loved shopping there so she was happy that afternoon.

She was happy and he was smoking more. I as usual tried to be my cheerful self and not acknowledge the fact that I sensed trouble brewing. After all, the three of us were just now starting to get over our Jet Lag, I thought maybe we were all just tired. I could justify most anything back in those days. The little peace maker.

Well the little peace maker was about to get a serious wake up call.

Dejavu

2007-05-17T00:50:00.000-07:00

I thought that once I got Bob on the medication he would simply calm down, but as usual. Bob's body never reacted to things the way I thought they would.

I don't know if it was the patch they put on his arm to calm him down or the trazadone, but something either set off his desire to just rip and run or he was coming out of his skin. Valium withdrawal was unpredictable.

I took him to another AA meeting the next night, but this time instead of being grateful to be there he came out angry. I was not in any way ready to deal with this. I must have said something to really make him mad and he opened the car door and jumped out. I know he just wanted to get drunk.

That's what he always did before getting drunk when I was around. Pick a fight about nothing and use it as an excuse to blame me for picking up a drink.
He was screaming at me calling me terrible names and I was just sobbing. I had no idea what to do but I did know what not to do. I did not just drive off and leave him alone like he wanted me to.

Now if you recall, I'm the first one to say that I am one hell of an enabler. I was not about to leave him wandering around alone on the Pacific Coast Highway. Maybe a saner person would have just let him do what he was going to do, but I never could do that. I followed him slowly and begged him to get back in the car. He finally got in and we drove home. Well we dodged a bullit that night, but it would not be the last time he would jump out of the car.
I called one of his friends from the program and begged him to come over and talk to Bob. Don't forget, I didn't want to ever deal with this insanity again, I couldn't do it. Plus I had just about gotten comfortable with the fact that the marriage was OVER. This was a terrible place for the two of us to be in.

Bob knew how miserable I was. Even though I was trying to help him, it was almost like he resented me for it or maybe he realized he should have never called me to let him come home. Because at that moment all he wanted to do was drink and now he couldn't. I was there watching him. I don't even remember if he had his car back home. The night he left for good he drove it into town and probably left it at the studio. He was taken to rehab in a limo. If I remember right, I think that's why I had to drive him. He must have felt like I was watching his every move and I was.

It seemed like an eternity but Dustyfinally got to the house and told me to leave and go spend some time with his wife at their house. I was so happy to get out of Bob's presence. This night I remember Matt stayed at their house. The reason I remember is poor Matt was so allergic to dogs, and they had a huge Great Dane who of course jumped on Matt's bed when he was sleeping. Dogs just love following Matt around, they love him Poor kid just what he didn't need a one hundred pound dog licking his face in the middle of the night.

It's amazing how those little things just stick out in a person's mind. I remember so clearly being at their house and his wife being so kind to Me and Matt. They had dinner for us and really tried to make us feel better. Matt of course didn't even want to take a drink from one of their glasses. He just didn't like being there.

It was so bitter sweet because we had been a model family in the community.
I had always been a bit judgemental of this woman because her husband was in and out of sobriety while Bob had been sober and I couldn't understand why she just didn't leave him, but here I was tyring to find a way to stay in a marriage myself, in spite of all the insanity that was going on.
Dusty spent several hours with Bob and calmed him down. He called me and said it was OK to come back home. I really didn't want to leave, but I had to.
Little did he know that Bob was going to hold that against me for a very long time. He was raised to, as he would put it "We don't wash our dirty laundry in public". In his mind I had committed a cardinal sin. I had shared our deepest darkest secret with someone else.
It was one of the reasons' I believe he had so much trouble with the twelve step programs. He wanted to hide all those demons and secrets, not really share them with the locals. Especially in Malibu, where people in this community just seemed to thrive on other people's misery.
Bob had now fallen from his pedestal. After years of being the man who flew Angel Flight missions, and built the local Karate Studio, he was now just another Alcoholic
who had no sobriety. A Newcomer. God how he hated that term. He was normally a very humble guy but that hit him where he lived. It took away all his self esteem and I guess his dignity. Something he had worked so hard to try and regain in those fourteen years of abstinence.

So the cat was out of the bag and now most of the people that we knew had now heard about Bob and my situation. Small towns are not the place to live when something this terrible happens. Word spread like wild fire.

After all those years of not going to any meetings here we both were back at AA and Al anon. God I hated Al anon so much that I would go to more open AA meetings than any non alcoholic I ever met. At least I felt hope there. I never understood why someone would go to Alanon meetings and complain about their lives, when I felt that all they had to do was leave a horrible relationship. I know, I was as addicted to Bob as he was to drinking, but I had given this marriage a time limit. I did not marry him "until death do we part", I only married him through Sobriety. Now I was totally conflicted.
I never dreamed that our son would beg us to not get a divorce. I never wanted to be one of those people who stay in a horrible marriage for the sake of the children, but that was exactly the path I was going on.

I simply did not have the courage to walk out at that time. I think I was scared of what would happen to all three of us. I kept trying to convince myself that it was the right thing to do by giving Bob another chance, after all, it was only one slip, and one little affair. How much did my son's emotional well being mean to me?
It meant everything. I would stay with Bob for the sake of our Son. He was more important to me than my own feelings about the betrayal. After all, I was a pretty good actress around the family, I knew if I had to I could just get through it somehow.

During Bob's stay in the Hospital I had started to make plans for Matt and I to go to England with his sister. We thought it would be really great for the three of us to go around England, France and Spain together. Well when Bob found out that he was supposed to pay for this trip and he wasn't invited along he went crazy.
Looking back I really couldn't blame him. We had never been to Europe together in all the years we were together, and now his daughter wanted me to leave her father home. I couldn't do it. I totally understood how he felt. I never used him for money, we were always a team before this. Now things were changing so rapidly neither one of us knew the rules of the relationship any longer.
I called his daughter and told her that if she didn't want her father to come along that Matt and I would not be going either. I gave her permission to tell me she didn't want to deal with him because she had stopped traveling with us several years before this and they just didn't get along as I have mentioned many times.
Well, I'm not really sure why she made the decision to let us all go. I do know that she needed us to help her get her extra luggage back home without having to pay the extra cost, but that couldn't have been the only reason, at least I hope not.
Any way the decision was made. The three us of would meet her in London.

As crazy as it seemed, at the time it was just that little ray of sunshine we needed. It gave us something to look forward to. Something positive. I started going to Therapy to get help for dealing with Bob cheating on me and his slip. Bob had started to get a little saner and was going to a lot of AA meetings and he even got an AA sponsor. I felt that I had made the right decision, I would try to put this behind us. We had a lot at stake and many many reasons to try and work it out.

The only question was, COULD I EVER REALLY FORGIVE HIM? Only time would tell. Now I was the one living One Day at a Time. How Ironic.

I get two phone calls

2007-05-11T19:56:00.000-07:00

I will never forget the day the counselor called me for the last time.
He told me he had thrown Bob out of the Hospital and if he called or came over here that I should not let him in.

I was stunned. The first thought I had was for Bob's sobriety. I knew how he had always reacted when pushed up against a wall like that. The problem was twofold.

One, I didn't want Bob to go back out and get drunk, he almost didn't live through this hospitalization and he wasn't fully detoxed from the Valium yet.
Second, I knew that he had no money or credit cards on him. They were at home.

That could only mean one thing. Once again Bob was going to be my problem to deal with.
Sure enough, not more than ten minutes later Bob called and begged me not to hang up on him. something I did quite often rather than listen to him scream at me.
What he didn't know was that I had already been told what had happened and also told not to let him back in the house.
No matter how upset I was at what had happened during his slip, I could never turn him out, if I did, he would not come back alive is how I always looked at it.
In the past whenever Bob had left treatment before he was really sane and sober, it would be only a matter of hours or days sometimes before he would be right back where he started.

I had no idea what would happen. My only point of reference was the past. He had not picked up a drink in fourteen years and as far as I was concerned anything was possible.
I told Bob that I would not hang up the phone and I just listened to what had happened.

He was doing his laundry and his councilor started talking to him about something, can't really remember what, but I do recall Bob telling me that he told him to in his words, "Get the Fuck Away From Me."
At that point I guess the guy just said to himself Bob was hopeless and he didn't want to deal with him. So he excerpted what little power he had and threw him out. What compassion for a fellow addict who was still suffering. I guess a little power went to this guys head. He couldn't bear to listen to Bob telling him the truth about his bad attitude. You don't just disregard someone who didn't pick up a drink for fourteen years. Yes he had a slip, but it didn't erase what Bob knew about how to stay clean and sober. In his case he just said "Fuck It" and picked up the drink, knowing well in advance what would happen. That's the true insanity of this disease.

Bob had nothing but change in his pocket which he was using for the pay phone and his laundry. I'm not really sure why they didn't allow him to have his wallet on him or money at that time, but he had nothing, So he walked to a phone Boothe with his suitcase and called me. He was lucky he even had enough change on him to call me with.

I told him to get in a cab and come home. I never regretted doing that even though the next week would be hell on earth. He was in full blown psychosis from the Valium cold turkey withdrawal. Looking back he had one hell of a law suit against that hospital, they almost killed him out of sheer neglect. It's a miracle he survived the brutal withdrawal he was put through.

I was going to need a lot of help on this one and I had to cry out to his AA friends for help. He was going crazy to put it mildly. I thank God that I never had to go through a Valium withdrawal myself. I had been told so many years before that what a terrible thing it was by a patient in St. Johns hospital years before that. He did not even begin to describe the living hell Bob was about to go through.

When he finally arrived home he was really agitated, but who wouldn't be? It started out pretty OK and then started to get tense. Whatever medication they had given him that day to prevent him from going into seizure and probably to calm him down were starting to wear off.
He was talking and pacing like a caged animal. He was hot and then he was cold. He was really trying to get a handle on his emotions, but he was loosing the ability to have any part in the way he was behaving. His body was screaming out for his medications. I had no idea what I was supposed to do.

I asked him what he wanted to do. He asked me to take him to an AA meeting up near our house. I guess he thought maybe that would calm him down, and prove to me how serious he was about getting sober and making things right with us.

As I write this, for the life of me, I cannot remember where Matt was. He never really went to other kids houses much, but I think I sent him to our friends house who's husband was also in the program. I knew I would never want him to see his father like this so I'm sure he was somewhere other than here that night. I remember so many things to the detail and I can't even remember where my son was during all this, how weird. I do know that Bob came home before Matt got out of school that day, so I must have called one of his friends Mom's to help me out.

I dropped Bob off at the meeting but I did not go in with him. When it was over I picked him up. At first he was telling me that he had met a really nice man who had had a terrible accident on his last slip and he was raising his son all by himself. He was grateful that nothing that terrible had happened to him on this last slip. It was a very sad story and it always stuck in Bob's head. For years when he saw this man at other meetings he always would talk to him and then tell me how kind and
un-judgemental he had been that night.

But when we got home, his mood was starting to change. I tried to get him to eat but he was so agitated by the withdrawal that all he wanted to do was sleep on the floor. It was like he was crawling out of his skin. I felt helpless. The hospital just threw him out, didn't bother to give him any medication to take with him or anything. They treated him like a dog, just because the counselor had an ego problem and couldn't handle someone still detoxing. I had no idea what kind of medication he was being given. But I did know that he was being given anti convalescents and maybe something for his heart after they did the EKG on him.

That was one long night. Bob was never a great sleeper, but that night neither one of us slept. He was going crazy. The first thing in the morning I got him to our local doctor, the one who had given him all the pills in the first place.
To my surprise he laid a Hugh guilt trip of Bob, never once taking responsibility for getting him hooked in the first place. He did not help him but he referred us to another doctor in the same office who we happened to know quite well because he was also in AA. He was now specializing in Addiction recovery. I was lucky to just be able to have Bob see him immediately, He probably saved Bob from picking up a drink that day, because I know he was just hanging on by the skin of his teeth to what little sobriety he had. Actually it wasn't sobriety at all, he was being given a lot of stuff to take. He was just alcohol free.

The Doctor put him back on anti convalescents and gave him some Trazadone. It did help Bob somewhat, but what I didn't know at the time, was that he didn't respect this guy at all because he had been taking all kinds of medication and claiming to be sober. In those days, there was a real rift going on in AA about anti depressants and actually being sober. Half the people in the program were really against it and the other half felt you had to do what you had to do to not pick up that drink, Bob was one of the guys that felt you were not sober if you took any kind of anti depressants at that time. Bob was always judging others sobriety when he was clean and sober, funny how when he was taking all those pills for his bad back he didn't put himself in that category,and now when he should have been happy to have someone help him, he was commenting on this guys sobriety. Wow.

Guess he didn't see the irony in that. He just was crazy or in serious denial at the moment. It really didn't matter because in a few hours all hell was going to break loose again.

Bob and his Counselor

2007-05-08T23:05:00.000-07:00

Bob was calling me everyday with the blow by blow daily accounts of just how terrible it was there.
His brother had found the place. It was famous because of Kurt Cobain having left there and then went home and killed himself.
They had an open door policy. Imagine giving someone that doesn't want to be locked up permission to come and go as they please, especially when all they want to do is get a drink or a drug of their choice. In my humble opinion, what kind of moron thinks that is going to work. Might and well just take their money and never let them in to stay. Same things.

For some reason, it gave Bob a legitimate reason to have a resentment. I agreed with him. What kind of program was it that lets the patients walk out when they want to. I met a woman who was there. An athlete who had been on a show on TV. She was given permission to get a pass to go to a party.

Neither Bob or myself had ever heard of that. In the fourteen years since he had been in a rehab, I guess things had really changed.
Recovery had become Big Business. Doctors were making a lot of money from the insurance companies. Actually it was hard to find an empty bed. Business was booming. Only problem was, it wasn't like the old days. It had become somewhat sheik to be in rehab. What a sick world.
When I first met Bob, AA was the last place in the world anyone wanted to go to, or admit they needed to go to. Now the program was littered with celebrities in every field.
I recently watched a TV show about recovery and AA. There are no sure methods for recovery. Over fifty percent of addicts relapse with or without a program. All those thirty day hospitalizations only helped line the pockets of the doctors. Not even they could figure out how to keep people from going back to the bottle or the drug of their choice.

I must say at the time I did think that Bob was right. They would find bottles of alcohol stashed in the bushes after someone "Went for a walk". It was simply unacceptable to him. He was there to save his life and people were drinking.
When he got into it with his counselor it was basically just a matter of time before the shit hit the fan between them.

They didn't like each other. Bob thought he was a punk who thought he knew it all, and his councilor thought Bob was a no it all with no sobriety.
A recipe for disaster was brewing in there.

His counselor would call me and complain about Bob. What did he expect me to do. I tried to be supportive of Bob, but I knew how he was. When he was mad, there was no reasoning with him. I tried to listen to him, but I was conditioned to think that the hospital staff would know what was best.
This time I was wrong and Bob was right. I just assumed that Bob was going through yet another horrible withdrawal. I knew from years past that Valium was the worst drug to get out of your system.
It has what is known as an "After Life". That means that it lodges into the bones and tissues and the withdrawal for Bob took almost a year. He would be crazy and then calm, hot then freezing, and he was still having occasional seizures. His eyes were dilated for weeks, he could not sleep which added to the strange behaviour. He was in drug withdrawal with severe sleep deprivation.
I got calls several times a week from his counselor. I told him that Bob had announced to me and the family that he was getting a divorce and there really was no reason to keep calling me.
I told him flat out to call Meagan.
That's when he told me she had been banned from the hospital.
I guess they figured it out soon enough that she was trying to bring him "Whatever".
I never did get the story straight.
All I know is that when I brought him a suitcase with some clothes for the month, not only did they go through all his stuff, but they went through my bag as well.
That never happened before and I'm not sure if it was because it was normal or because they banned Meagan.

Things in our marriage could not have been worse really, where I used to visit him everyday in the past now I had our son and his activities to put before the rehab visits. Actually without Bob knowing it, the best thing I could have done for him at the time was not visit him every day. I was too hurt and angry.
It did not do him or me any good to fight about what we could not change. I just backed away more than I ever had.

It truly was self preservation for me at the time. I had no support group what so ever. There were so many feelings in me that I couldn't even begin to understand what had happened.
I was really grateful for the two kids at the time. Even his daughter was really in my corner the entire time.

One Sunday she took me and Matt along with her other brother to the House of Blues gospel brunch. Bob was really upset. What the hell was he mad about? It was always like that with him. He would look for anything to turn it around on me.
He shacked up with a woman he met and he was upset that I went to the House of Blues with his children.
That was crazy. He was still blaming me for the kids knowing about her. He threw that in my face for years. Talk about misplaced anger.
I would not lie for him ever again. He broke the bond and as far as I was concerned it would never be the same and it really wasn't.

Life without Trust

2007-05-08T21:57:00.000-07:00

As much as I wanted to be there for him this time, I could not forgive this other woman, to make matters worse, the Monday I went to visit him in the hospital I had to figure out in my own mind, what I was going to do.

I looked at his bedside table and there was a card from "Meagan". Talk about throwing salt on the wound, it hurt physically and my head was spinning. I couldn't storm out of the hospital, but I was a scorned wife, just like a scene from one of my beloved English novels. I was seething on the inside, but the male nurse asked me if I could get into the shower with him and help bathe him. What would anyone say? Of course. I loved this man and loath him at this very moment.

Nothing prepared me for this. I could handle the slip, looking back it was inevitable. But to leave me and our son for three days to be with some woman he met in a bar, well that was the last straw. Now I was the one who was supposed to nurse him back to health again. What a joke. It was moments like this, that I should have really taken a good look at the lack of support our family had. Of course, once Bob was back in the hospital, there was a collective sigh of relief on all fronts. But did anyone other than me and his kids bother to go visit him? NO!!
Imagine that? After fourteen years without a drink, he didn't deserve a visit from his brother, dad or his dad's wife. I was so busy dealing with my own issues, and so used to doing this all alone it never occured to me that this time really was different from any of the past episodes. He had a family, and a son who had never known his father like this. Why couldn't they be there for him or us this time? I will never know. I guess I had just assumed it was because of the fight he had had with his father that lead up to this moment. But I think it was just the same excuse. He didn't warrent a visit from them. Plain and simple.

It all seemed so natural at the time, but as the years have passed and life has revealed itself like an onion, I know to the core of my soul how much that hurt him.
Was he so terrible that he didn't deserve a visit? He was on his death bed, the first couple of days. He was not important enough for a visit. This was part of the root of his problem. He felt he was never respected, only tolerated and I guess the family really did just sit back and wait for this moment to happen. Well, when it did happen he once again felt the cold chill of rejection.

I wanted to run out of there and never look back myself, trust me. The fact that He had announced he wanted a divorce to his family, but didn't bother to inform me would have been enough to end it right then and there, but, he was sick and weak,not to mention alone, I guess I was supposed to take it and just be the dutiful wife once again to keep a vigil and keep the family informed of his progress. A role I had willingly accepted.

Talk about conflicted, I was more than confused. I had to talk to his brother, father, daughter, our son and really try to keep it together as best as I could.
If I had ever had the disease myself I would have drown myself in a bottle for sure. I really never experienced anything like this.
The betrayal warranted drastic measures, but he was on a 24 hour watch for his seizure's.
I couldn't just leave him alone, I stuck around as the most unhappy, unwilling spouse ever.

I refused to go to Daniel Freeman's counseling program for the family, I wanted to know what they thought they could possibly do to help this situation.

It would take a miracle for me to get over this final blow. Maybe it was my ego, but it didn't feel like ego. My heart was broken, along with our vows and my trust.

If you have ever loved and trusted someone you know how wonderful it is to never question what they are doing when they are not with you. It's sheer bliss. Trust will set you free. And free was how we had always felt with one another. There was never another man or woman I had thought, that could break our bond.

I had really believed that ours was a blessed union, God had answered Bob's prayers.
What happened? I keep asking myself.
Not only was I shocked, so was everyone who knew us. Bob had brought a strange woman into our lives. Without any sign the eye of the storm must have been what life was before this. Calm, but hell was about to break loose.
The best I could do at the time was count my blessings that he would be in the hospital for at least a month. I had some time to figure out what to do. I had no idea. I just needed my son to feel safe and OK.
It's like lying, you tell yourself and your family that everything will be OK, but the entire time you know it's a lie you can't figure out how to get out of.

The more he recovered, the less remorseful in the beginning he was. This only added to my anger. But I had not yet found the inner strength to do something openly about it.
One day his daughter called the pay phone and asked to speak to him. The person who answered the phone thought she said her name was Meagan. She called me and wanted to know who Meagan was. I told her. I saw no reason to keep it to myself. Bob was furious with me. Of course he was. He wanted me to lie for him to his daughter because he knew that she would tell her mom. That made him really angry with me.
I couldn't believe my ears. I was expected to lie for him. I felt he was lucky I was even speaking to him. There was no way I would do that for him. I told him he should have thought about the consequences before he hooked up with her, then I found out that she was coming to visit him.
He was having a little romance. I didn't even know how to react. It was a habit he had learned being a lawyer. Turn it around on the other guy. He was mad at Me? I was not going to take this sitting down.

My anger was festering under the surface. I have always felt free to tell the truth, but I always managed to be somewhat "wishy washy" up until this point. I had become a yes wife, never wanting to be right were I was now. Looking at the face of someone who had just blown fourteen years without a drink, and who had also broken our marriage vows.
On both fronts I was devastated, but I felt sorry for him relapsing, and all I wanted to do was leave him for cheating on me. But of course that emotion was still being kept inside, like a time bomb just ticking away. I wanted him to get better so that I could leave him when he was better. I couldn't bring myself to do anything before. He always had an expression. "You don't kick a man when he's down". Those words kept ringing in my ears. I had to wait.
On the outside I had learned how to hide my feelings from the family, always trying to be stoic, always trying to give him the benefit of a doubt.
It would take more than old behaviour to make myself believe some of the nice words that were coming out of my mouth.
I wanted to bury myself and cry forever. I couldn't. I had to help our son through this.
He had never known the insanity of the disease, only sobriety, all though at times it wasn't a peaceful time, at least his dad wasn't drinking.
I needed to help him understand what had just happened. His dad was a sick man, not a bad man.
I could not bring my rage into it, at least not at the moment.
Bob was really in very serious physical condition. The seizure's continued over the weeks. One night they rushed him up to the cardiac unit to monitor his heart with an EKG. He was not doing well those first couple of weeks.

The real problem was that the Doctor had taken him cold turkey off all the medication that he had been taking for the past couple of years. How could a hospital not realize that was putting his life in danger? They were punishing him for taking a drink and totally ignoring the real problem, He was in major Valium withdrawal and that was the cause of all the seizures and the heart problems.
Today if that happened I could sue the doctor and the hospital for the lack of medical attention Bob had been given.
This is the problem with any rehab program, no matter what they say there is a certain amount of guilt tripping attached to it.
Bob was made to start going to therapy as soon as he could. This is such a joke. His counselor had three years of sobriety from heroine, he had never had the amount of sobriety that Bob had and this guy was a typical example of power corrupts. He treated Bob like he had suddenly forgotten every thing he had ever learned in his fourteen years.
It the thing I had about AA. The new comer philosophy. Shut up and listen. I wouldn't listen to this guy either.
It only made me feel even more empathy for what Bob was going through. No one bothered to stop and think about what it must be like to walk a mile in his shoes and then have to listen to some young punk. I would never have done it either. This guy had no credibility. So what was three years in the scheme of things. He had no idea of the devastation that had happened in our lives. It all fell apart and the best they could do was focus on his being a "New Comer".

Nothing prepared me for this

2007-05-01T00:00:00.000-07:00

I was thinking back about all the events that happened after that surgery and the rest of the "recovery" process from that. prepared

What choice does anyone with a physical ailment have. It simply cannot be ignored because the treatment involves medication.
There is so little one can do once this cycle begins.
I have known so many people who were clean and sober that have been put on pain killers when they go to get "Fixed" They get fixed alright, but it' more like getting a fix, as in the street lingo.

So what you may say and you are right. A life of Russian Roulette begins. Can they take the pain med without going off the deep end? There are no real answers many are fine and so many others are not fine. No one want to even begin to think about the numbers, but it is well known in AA that the odds are not in the addicts favor if they need to take meds. They are advised to have someone monitor the pills, but after a while it's up to the individual.

In my life my addict could simply not stay sober no matter how hard he tried.
After, Back surgery, there was knee surgery, then another knee surgery, then last but not least the one that finally took him out. Hemorrhoid surgery.
That all took place within two years.
I used to wonder if Bob was getting these surgeries to get the meds, that was except for his back surgery.
It was a revolving door of hospital stays and surgeries, all with the benefit of powerful meds.
Of course he had the "EXCUSE" he needed to use them and not give up his sobriety date. At this time he wasn't really going to AA meetings so no one was actually thinking like that.

One day the unthinkable happened at least unthinkable to me.

Bob went to the office, had an argument with his Dad and walk across the street to the drug store and bought himself a small airline size bottle of Vodka. His and our lives would never be the same from that moment on.

Later that evening we had plans to meet for a Volleyball game at Pepperdine. I talked to him and he was so different on the phone, he was angry, said he would not be coming and he would see us later.

Our son and I went to the game, and when we got home Bob was asleep on the sofa in our room. That was odd, because he was a notorious light sleeper, actually an insomniac.

The next day he slept until after three in the afternoon. I knew in my soul something was terribly wrong but I didn't dare think it was because he started to drink. But I knew it.

He got up and showered and got really dressed up to go out. Bob never went out at night without us, We had not had a fight, had not been fighting or anything like that. I took one look at him and I just knew what was going on. He had started drinking.

I didn't have a fight with him or anything. I told him years ago that if he chose to drink again, I would not be there to watch it again.
With tears streaming down my cheeks, I kissed him goodbye when he got ready to go. It was so surreal didn't think I had it in me to just watch him walk out the door to start a journey into hell. There was nothing I could do to stop him I had learned that from experience his life was his own to ruin. Plus he had not admitted that he had picked up that first drink yet, he didn't have the heart to tell me that the fourteen years without a sip was over. I guess I didn't want to push it because in my soul I wasn't sure if that promise I made to myself when we got married was going to hold up.

Could I really leave him for this. When I made that promise when we got married, I didn't realize I would have someone else to think about. Matt. Our son just adored his father, they had such a great bond and a wonderful relationship. I had to ask myself could I pull the plug on our lives. I simply need time to think, I was so stunned by what was happening.

Needless to say Bob did not come home that night. He did not call or anything. Now I knew for sure it was over. I was sick to my stomach.

The next day my brother in law phoned me. He told me that Bob was at the office with some of his AA friends. I said "What AA friends" He told me Megan and some guy whose name I have since forgotten.

I told him point blank, Bob had not been to an AA meeting in years and if he had I would have recognized the name. It was all a lie,
He also told me that Bob told him that we were getting a divorce.

I wasn't mad which was interesting to myself. I knew the Jekyll and Hyde personality of Bob when he drank. I simply told his brother that his entire story was a lie. Bob was fine two days ago, not this. It was then that my brother in law told me of the fight Bob had had with his dad. It all became so clear to me at least.
It was a Thursday night, and you may wonder how I could possibly remember that well, Bob didn't come home again the next night and on Friday morning my brother in law phoned me again.
He told me that Bob had called him and asked him for help After all he had fourteen years under his belt. I felt he could get past this, so did his brother, if we could just get him into a rehab center.

His brother made several calls that day and finally got him int Daniel Freeman Hospital, the same place that Curt Cobain had been before he took his life. I really didn't care where he went, I just knew that the odds of making it out alive were not good. Historically, a person who resume drinking after so many years of abstinence had a very good chance of dying.
His brother was in constant contact with Meagan that day, thinking that she would keep her word of getting him to the hospital.
Well, they had other plans for the day,
They rented a limo and spent the day going to a Meditation Center off of Sunset Blvd and they then went to Gladstones for dinner and more drinks. All on Bob's charge card of course.
Bob's brother and I were on needles and pins the entire day. Bob hadn't checked in and at times we didn't know where he was.
By early evening he finally showed up, sicker than a dog, to check himself in.
That was Friday night.
I went to see him on Monday, What I saw was unbelievable, he had lost fifteen pounds, had to have a 24hour nurse because he was having grand maul seizures. He was simply lucky to be alive.

If I was calm the night he left to go out,I was now devistated. I hadn't figured that he would spend three days with some woman, announce to his family that he was getting a divorce etc. What happened to our great family? How did this go from see you latter to I'm getting a divorce all without a fight or a hint. What we lost during those three days would never be regained.

TRUST
What had kept us together for all those years just flew out the window. I had excused all his behaviour before we were married, but this was a fatal blow to my heart and my trust. I always said that without Trust a couple has nothing.
That was how I felt. We had nothing left to hang on to. All was not forgiven this time. We were married, this was inexcusable to me. He would never had forgiven me for this type of behavior and that was the bottom line.

I felt my heart break, I really tried to be strong, for me, our son and even for him and his recovery, but I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, regardless of how the marriage turned out. I would never be the same after this. I had every reason to feel this way, the future would reveal itself one moment at a time from this day forward.

That was his disease in a nut shell. Put a drink in him and you never knew what you were going to get.
That was exactly why I did not want to go through a live like that with him again, but I did take all those years for granted. I believed his desire to stay sober was real, I still do, but I didn't really understand that for two years with all the medication, Bob wasn't really sober. That was hard to swallow.
All the mood swings should have given me a good look at what was happening, but I was to afraid to even go down that road. I simply preferred to ignore the signs and gamble on the fact that he hadn't picked up a drink yet.

I DIDN'T SEE IT COMING AND AT THE SAME TIME I SAW IT ALL.

Now What?

2007-04-26T18:02:00.000-07:00

So the surgery was performed, but the only thing that it really helped was it stopped the pain that was shooting down his leg from his siatic nerve.
If you recall, I wrote once before, than even though our lives at this point seemed happy. We loved one another and adored our son, we didn't have financial problems like so many people, but we had Bob's monkey on his back to deal with.

This was the beginning of a series of Pain Management Specialists. Bob's surgeon couldn't help him any longer so he was referred to a Pain Management Specialists.

Well is anyone out there reading this has ever been in this situation, you know first hand that the Pain Management Doctors are in my opinion, just legal drug pushers. Bob was introduced to Oxcontin. Today we all know how addictive this drug is and addicts pay outrageous amounts of money to just get their hands on them. Who knows what the street value is, but it's a lot.

I should have known when a doctor tells you he has to write out a triple prescription for this medication because it's monitered by the government, this was no ordinary pain killer.
Bob was willing to do anything, he went into physical therepy as soon as possible, maybe even too soon, but he did it with his surgeons blessings. Living in Malibu we are limited to the small community resouces at our disposible.
He went to a local guy who by the way, was also an addict. He was way too aggressive in his approach because as a Black Belt, Bob was able to tolorate a lot of pain, what he didn't know was that he didn't need to get hurt to get better.
The therapist made his situation worse. Little did we know before he started that this guy had a serious problem with anger and hurting his patients and several of them were actually much worse after going to him, Bob was in the same boat.

So the doctor put him on Oxcontine and the real nightmare began. Oxcontine is a full blown narcotic. Well isn't that wonderful, an addict now on serious drugs.
At first there was not much difference in his moods, because he was in so much pain that he had been in a bad mood for so long, I almost started to think this was his normal personality.
What I know today, is that the cycle of needing more and more medication had already started. Bob knew it too.
He asked his doctor to take him off of it. It was too hard core a drug for him to justify being on it.
That's when he started his long cycle of Vicodine and Valium not to mention all the other medications that he took that I can't remember the names of.

The most important point of this is that, even Bob did not want to go back to being addicted to anything. He took himself off and the withdrawel wasn't that easy, but I was relieved that he noticed what was happening to him. I had no idea that the alternative pain medications were almost more incideous.

Talk to almost anyone who needs medical care for a surgery of whatever. They are given Vicodine. This one pain killer is more responsible for people going back out as they say in AA. Back to the bottle, which is exactly where Vicodine lead Bob. Back to the bottle.

One might ask how is that possible? Well, no matter if he took a drink or a pill, his mind was altered. End of subject. Dry Pill High vs a drink.

A New Journey

2007-04-24T22:26:00.000-07:00

journey into my world: The Writer

Oops Hospitals can be deadly

2007-04-24T21:45:00.000-07:00

So Bob had his much needed back surgery. The only obvious complications at the beginning, were that he was probably one of the worst nightmare patients a doctor or a nurse could ever want. Something just happened to him in a hospital room. Looking back it is oh so obvious why. He became that angry man. Complaining about everything, causing such commotion.

His dad actually had to come in and try to calm him down and apologise to the doctors. His neurosurgeon was also Bob's. His dad tried to make everything right and because they respected him so much, they bent over backwards to make Bob as comfortable as possible under the circumstances.
The lesson for me was:

YOU CAN'T GIVE AN ADDICT A MORPHINE DRIP THAT THEY ARE IN CONTROL OF, AND EXPECT THEM TO ACT NORMAL. Morphine is a heavy duty narcotic and just because he had a reason to take it, it didn't mean his state of mind was going to be good. It was far from it.

That is just my advice to the medical community. I had so little knowledge about what I was really dealing with at the time, I didn't get it.

I should have searched the back episodes of his life,stored in my mind for reasons to help explain to me, what was happening to him. Back then I didn't really see the connection. I was brainwashed into thinking he would be fine taking massive amounts of pain "Medication".
Just to jolt every one's memory, the last time Bob was given a morphine drip was after he came back from Tahiti the first time, and got a serious staff infection.
His "fiance"/madame/drug pusher, was sneaking him in bottles of Vodka to go along with his antibiotics and pain killers. So he was happy back then, he didn't care that they were about to amputate his leg because nothing was helping him, he felt wonderful, loved being high on it.
All that had to happen to wet his appetite again for drugs was just give him a little taste of morphine and every nerve cell in his body had a certain type of memory that actively cried out for more.
The problem was his tolerance was so large for anything he was given,because he had been taking massive doses of any type of medication he could get his hands on for years before he actually got and stayed sober.
The mind and body does not forget and he was right back where he left off.

It was the beginning of a terrible time in his life. Wanting to remain sober, but not really being sober. Just because your addict mind didn't actively seek the drugs,doesn't mean it won't alter your personality, just try ingesting them medically. The result is the same. A craving is set up that will not be satisfied, at least his appetite was not satisfied.

I still look back on these times and admire the strength he must have had, the courage to not go into full blown alcoholism back then. He was actively practicing what is known as "White Knuckle Sobriety" hanging on by a thread, that's how bad he wanted to stay off alcohol and beat his disease. My hat and my heart went out to him for his courage.
I never had to walk a mile in his shoes, but I can tell you this much. I wouldn't have made it. I'm not quite that strong.
Hell, just tell me I can't have a coke with dinner and just watch me order it. Imagine having such a terrible craving and knowing that if you give in to it, chances are, at least in his case, that you will end up in jail, a hospital or maybe even dead. That was the monkey on his back, day after day, year after year.

I admired him, I rooted for him, I didn't have the strength he possessed and I knew it. He went fourteen years without one drop of liquor passing through his lips. Without the help of AA. He did it just by living a great life. Those were the best years of his life, but his physical problems would be bringing that all to a close shortly.

The Writer

2007-04-23T23:56:00.000-07:00

I have to say I was never so impressed with anyone as I was with him. If he set his mind to something he just did it.
How many people do you know that in a matter of years learn how to fly, get a black belt and write such a great script, that HBO loved it so much they actually stole his story.

Of course in this town people will argue that there are only five stories anyway, but the difference with this one was that Matt named the protagonist, and they were not smart enough to change the name. Oh it was a great story. So ahead of it's time as a matter of fact it is almost like reading the headlines in the paper today.

He would get up and drive to the office with his partner, come back and they would go to Karate and it seemed like he was really enjoying his life so completely. He had it all.
I was happy, our son was happy, I thought Bob was too. I actually enjoyed the company of his friend. We had a social life that I longed for.

During this time Bob even put together a Karate Studio for the community. He leased the space, I helped them get the mats, the rails the mirrors and within a month we had one of the greatest martial artists under one roof.
Both Bob and our son got trained by one of the most respected martial artists in the country. Bob Burbidge. He was tough. One of Chuck Norris's black belts, as a matter of fact when Bobby died I think he may have actually come to his funeral.
We all had a great time during those years, We even took my brother and his wife to Las Vegas to see Bob compete in a tournament being held there. During that competition he got his tooth chipped off. He turned and bowed off the Mat and put the tooth in my had as my brother stood there in amazement. Richard just started laughing, he could not relate to how strong Bob was. Not only was his tooth broken, I think his nose took quite a punch also. My brother loved that he got to be there for that and until this day still remembers it so clearly.
Bob was in heaven, he loved the adrenaline of it all. He was a real man's man. Tough to the core of his soul, but so sensitive at the same time.

Bobby was so tough, that I never left our son Matt alone in a class. I saw how hard on the kids he was. "I don't train Babies" is a phrase I will remember the rest of my days. He would have those poor kids in tears at times. So for five years I sat in a karate studio with our son three days a week. But it was so worth it because if you stuck it out with him, you would be respected by every martial artist around. So Matt and his dad both got their black belts from Bobby. Not an easy accomplishment. By the way I think I picked up a lot subliminally. I never walked around in fear. Hell, I had my own two personal body guards with me twenty four seven most days. I was living a happy care free life.

First Bob took his black belt test and boy did Burbidge put his students through hell to get a black belt. They had to test in front of 50 other Black Belts and they would grade every little movement. From the bend of you legs to the bend of your writs. After sitting there all those years I knew I could never do it. Little did I know that a year later my son would have to sit in front of those same 50 Black Belts. I was never more proud of them or as nervous for them as I was watching the two of them test for their belts. Unfortunately for Bob when he told his family, there really wasn't any pride in his achievement. His own dad just sort of said "Little Boys' Games".
It's funny how certain words just can cut like a knife. His dad probably didn't realize just how sensitive Bob was going to be to that statement. I wished he had just said "Congratulations" because it was right around that time that Bob started to have a major resentment toward his father, his partner and several other people.
Now I realize it was all fueled by the Valium and he was taking. In order to get through his training he had stared the Valium addiction full blown.

Once he had passed his test he started teaching a little, but spent the most of his time finishing the Script with his friend. They would drive down to Hollywood from Malibu at least three times a week and I noticed that Bob really started complaining about how bad his back was hurting him. The drive into town seemed to really be making him worse. His own Doctor told him to get a different car.
I wasn't surprised, as a matter of fact I had begged him to stop karate more than once. He had done so much damage to his already bad back during those five years of Karate, he needed back surgery really bad. The pain was shooting down his leg, he was tough but even he couldn't take that kind of pain without something. He put off the surgery and just started taking pain pills to go along with the valium. I really didn't feel concerned he had a terrible back problem, what was he supposed to do? Suffer just because he was an alcoholic? It's not humane. Our life was great. It was even better now that he actually had rented an office and went someplace to work on something he always wanted to do, Write.
It was a really well written script. Bob just had a gift for great dialog. His father even helped him to get it to influential people. That's how it ended up at HBO in the first place.

The problem was that it really doesn't matter how good a story is because as soon as some low level studio guy reads it, it's never going to be good enough. That's the cover your ass policy of studio hierarchy. I will never forget when it all ended.
Bob's story was about racism, and the Conservative Religious Right.
The studio guy loved it, but wanted to know if Bob could change it to an Indian Story.
No kidding, it's so sad it's funny. Imagine that. Right about then Bob just said "Fuck It". He never wrote or pitched another script to a studio again. He shelved his project but what he had learned and gained from that experience was priceless. If he ever was going to do anything in film it would be and INDI.

We saw the film a year later on TV. Bob, like so many others had simply been ripped off. That's life in show biz, dog eat dog. Bob had bigger problem looming in on his horizon to worry about that. He scheduled his back surgery.

Being Productive

2007-04-05T00:45:00.000-07:00

I guess it was hard to think about all the pills because during this time Bob was quite productive. He was working on getting his black belt and writing a script with his karate friend and writing partner.

They spent a lot of time together and Bob used his friends hyper personality as an excuse for taking a lot of Valium, besides saying his back felt better with it. I wasn't worried because I did believe it would be ok as I mentioned. Bob needed something to do after his flying was abruptly ended.

Bob had been teaching aerobatic flying until one of his students crashed the plane into high tension wires. It was a miracle that they did not burn to death. His dream of flying and teaching had come to a halt, so did the days of being pill free.
When he flew he never even took an aspirin. Now that was all over. The incident was quite a blow to him. It wasn't his fault, but of course he had to be investigated to make sure he wasn't drinking or using drugs. I felt sorry for him. It seemed that in his life, whatever could go wrong did. This was one example of something he loved going sour on him.

The student pilot flew the plane ran right into the high tension wires. When they hit the wires the plane started to turn upside down, Bob had also taught EMT emergency maneuver training and as miraculous as it was, he managed to turn the plane right side up, before landing on the back of a pickup truck.
He flew out of a small airport in Santa Paula, California which had no control tower.
It is very popular with celebrities and pilots who just love the older planes.

When they hit the wires of course they snapped and tore off one of the wings. also the fuel tank was leaking fuel. It happened so fast Bob said. The pilot in control was sitting in front of the plain and Bob as the instructor was sitting behind him in a Super Decathlon. The student pilot froze on the controls as was not even thinking when it happened.

Bob kept telling him to relax and let go of the stick, let go of the stick. Finally seconds before they hit the student did let go and Bob was able to regain control of the stick. If he hadn't they would have both died. Bob had to kick the door open from the back seat, his student was just frozen with fear.

The man who owned the truck was not a very happy man. Instead of trying to help Bob and his student out of the plane he was screaming at them and threatening them. Meanwhile sparks are flying all around the fuel that was leaking. Bob got his student to safety and then ran back to get the parachutes out of the plane.

That's the kind of man he was, at times just fearless. He wasn't afraid of dying, ever. In fact there were times when I thought to myself he put himself in places and courted it. He was fearless because he at times was sick and tired of being an alcholic. Tired of having to fight the demon who was always lying in wait to creep up on him when he least expected it.

Bob was taken to the hospital for observation, he came out with a slight concussion.
He called me from the hospital, his first words were, "Don't Worry". Of course that set my heart pounding. Bob had never called me like that, I knew something had happened. I was grateful that all he suffered was a slight concussion. I had always had a fear of him flying those little planes upside down and doing dives and stuff like that. We did not tell his father what had happened. The story made the front page of the papers in Santa Paula, but their local news never hit the LA Times. We did tell his daughter and his brother I think, but Bob didn't want to worry his Dad.

I never flew in his decathlon with him, because I was terrified that once he got me in it he would just do one little loop or something. We had our son to think about, and I wasn't comfortable having two of us up there in one plane.
What would happen to Matt if we weren't around to be there for him?

The examination at the hospital proved that Bob was absolutely clean and sober, but he still had to pay $1,000 to the man who owned the company to help with his insurance to cover the plane, which was totaled and the damage to the truck.

After that incident, I begged Bob to not teach flying anymore he told me he would think about it, but he didn't want to appear like he was afraid to fly after that. It was a lesson well learned. He was a great pilot, but as a teacher, you never knew what the skills of the other pilot were. He had placed his life in a stranger's hands and I almost lost him that day. I was so grateful he had dodged another bullet.

So Bob thought about it and didn't have too long to make a decision. There was some sort of divine intervention lurking on his horizon. He took a photographer up to do some aerial photography and a few days later he got a call from his boss. Someone in the area they were photographing called the FAA. They took down the number of the plane Bob was piloting and reported that someone that morning had been flying too low above their house. They said it was the call letters on Bob's plane. Only problem with that was that Bob did not go up until after 1pm that afternoon. The plane that was flying in the morning was not Bob.

In order to appease the homeowner, the FAA launched a full investigation and Bob had to hire an attorney. This court is not like other courts. It is run by the Federal Aviation Association. It was a hung court. From the moment they called him he never had a chance to prove his innocence. They had a pilot and any pilot would do to make this all go away.

Bob had all the phone records to prove that he was not even called to go in that morning until after 9, around the time the first plane was spotted flying to low.
The log that records what time a plane leaves the hanger proved he was not the pilot of the incident. It did not matter. They suspended his license for 6 months.

It was an outrage. The FAA was out for a body, any body to appease the neighborhood in which the incident took place. I never would have believed it was so corrupt unless we had lived through the experience. Bob was told to mail his pilots license into to the FAA. He never did. He told them he lost it. They knew he did not lose it, they also knew he was not the pilot flying the plane at fault. He was not fined for not turning in his license and they never replaced it as they said they would after the six months were up. Bob was right, he would have never gotten back his license had he mailed it in.

It was a sad time for him. He lost something that meant a lot to him, his ability to fly, to feel free, to teach others. So he started taking Karate with our son.

Years before Bob had studied another system. He really needed something to do everyday to feel productive. Our son was really happy to have his dad to look up to.
It gave them something that really bonded them. The only problem was that it was not good for Bob's body, he was getting hurt.
They went full out in their workouts and his body wasn't in the best shape when he started. He went in with a bad back and before he got his black belt five years later, he would also have two bad knees.

Another Rehab on the Horizon?

2007-04-02T00:17:00.000-07:00

Of course there were so many signs pointing to the fact that Bob was losing control of his emotions and his pill intake. His temper was flaring all the time. He was irritable or just plain out there in his own world in his own head. When he was home he was sitting in our room smoking on the sofa, or when we were going out to dinner or a movie the first thing that would happen is, We would get in the car and of course he would ask for his pills, he had me keep them in my purse. He used his back as an excuse. It started out simple enough but by the time a year had gone by he would snap until I handed him his pills, then he would have me count them to see how many he had left. He was obsesessed with counting those damn pills. He was so afraid of running out.

He would say he couldn't stand to drive any place. Sitting was bad for his back, it caused him more pain. It was an endless chain of reasons why he was such an unhappy man. He was in Hell and I didn't get it. Imagine not being able to recognize addiction when it's looking you straight in the eye.

Another bout of denial on my part. I didn't want to face the truth. I wanted to believe the propaganda put out by the medical community. We watched a 60 minutes report on how people suffering from serious pain could not possible become addicted to the medication. What a lie. I even sent for a copy of the program to have on hand just to validate the fact that Bob needed 500 pills a month, I wanted to convice myself that there was no way he can get addicted, after all that was the reassuring message to families and victims of this pill abuse. If it was on 60 minutes, it had to be true. I will never forget that episode. an elderly womany lying on her sofa writhing in pain until she took her "Pills" then a bit later, WA LA, a miraculous transformation. From non=functional to fully functiional.
How comforting it was to know he would be safe, that our family would not be affected by his pain management as it was called. PROPAGANDA I also remember the cover of TIME or NEWSWEEK declaring that Cocaine wasn't addictive also.

That was the beginning of the Pain Management years.

We both wanted to believe the lies so desperately I was willing to put up with all the mood swings, after all, I made a promise to myself and Bob that I would stand by him as long as he didn't pick up a drink, it never changed, in my head he was Sober.
Crabby, but Sober. I was once again the oh so loyal enabler.

Dejavu A new Way

2007-04-02T00:00:00.000-07:00

Pills, Pills and more Pills.

I can't blame Bob for getting so strung out on pills because I was involved from the beginning. Our local Malibu Family Doctor asked me how Bob's back was, and I told him even after surgery, he was still in a lot of pain. The physical therapist hurt him even further. Life in our house was miserable.

Our Doctor told me to make an appointment and send Bob into see him, I couldn't wait to tell him that our family doctor was actually going to step in and help him.
What he did was prescribe many many pills. Bob was given Vicodine, Valium, another pain pill and he was getting large amounts. He started out with maybe 100 of each which was supposed to last a month or something Bob was refilling his precsciptions every two weeks by the end of several months. He was also going to a doctor in town that I wasn't aware of in the beginning.

Then there was the Karate injuries which always lead to the emergency room for a demeral shot and more meds.
He was on a rollercoaster ride with addiction again and this time even I didn't realize how far gone he was.

Pill addiction is so socially acceptable, it's even more so when your doctor is giving them to you. Our world is full of addicts that don't even know what a problem they have. Got a little ache, here's some pain killers. I learned this from experience.

I was having problems with my sciatic nerve and went to a very reputable medical firm specializing in athletes with all sort of problems. After my test were taken and all the X-rays were read I was given a prescription for Vicoden. I was told to just call a refill number 24 hours in advance for as long as need for my refills. I didn't need to be seen again. That was that. If I hadn't been watching the amounts of pills Bob needed to take to help his pain, I probably would have been in the same boat as he was in.

No doctor told me that Vicodine is addictive, that I would start to develop a tolerance for it or that I would have to take more and more for the pain relieve to work. All I was told is that I had to take them every 6 hours so that they would not have time to wear off. Once the pain cycle starts up again, it's harder to control
it.

Until this day I regret speaking to our Family Doctor and after a year and a half of giving Bob more and more pills, he went to see him fresh out of his first rehab in 14 years and our doctor gave HIM a lecture on how he abused pills, taking absolutely no responsibility for giving him hundreds of pills a month. Imagine that.

Reality

2007-03-17T15:17:00.000-07:00

As most parents of college age children know, this is an incredibly stressful time for the entire family.
Bob and his brother were Stanford Grads and so were some of their cousins. His daughter was very smart and spent every summer going to summer school just to make sure that her GPA was really high. A method that I never knew about before.

If you take classes in summer it's easier and faster to complete the essential classes and during the school year you can do all the extra curricular stuff that is so important on your college applications.

Well Bob's daughter had her mind set on going to Brown. She fell in love with it.
She did not get in, but she did get into Stanford.
One morning she called her dad and asked him if he could please call her grandfather to find out if she had been accepted. Her Grandfather had been a large contributor to Stanford and had asked someone high up in admissions to keep track of her application.
Bob called his dad and that's when we learned the great news. His daughter had been accepted into Stanford. He immediately phoned her to give her the good news. It was only hours before the mail had come so she knew a little bit in advance.
The entire family was so happy.

Her Grandfather was having a Passover dinner the next day and we brought balloons to the house to congratulate her achievement. Well, instead of being happy, she of course was upset. She told us all that we should have never given her the news of her acceptance. I was stunned. We did not offer to find out in advance. She called her father and asked him to find out.

She told me that her mother was upset by her father telling her. Whether she admitted to her mom that she called him I will never know. This was normal behavior for her. Her dad did what she asked of him and then she would turn it against him.
This was not the first time that the tables had turned against Bob. Right before his daughter turned 16 her mom was out of town so she asked her father if he would take her to look for cars. He was really happy she wanted him to take her.
It was agreed that her grand-father and her father would get her the car of her choice. So off they went to look.

I got a call later that afternoon and Bob told me he had made a great deal on the car that his daughter picked out. We were all so excited. His dad had agreed to pay a certain amount so it came to a little over that and Bob just paid the rest.

They got the car to her house. We were all thinking that everyone would be so excited, but not in this family. Her Mom and step dad were really upset with him. I guess her step father wanted to go pick out the car and just have them pay for it.

When her Mom called I told her it was no problem we would just keep the car in our garage and then they wouldn't have to deal with it, if they were so upset. I never heard another thing about it. But for the rest of the time she had the car, a brand new Toyota Celica, convertible, they referred to it as the piece of shit car.
What ingrates. I know they wanted her to get a BMW, but they forgot that it was his daughter's choice not theirs. She picked it out her Dad didn't.

So when everyone was so upset with the news of her admittance into Stanford we should have not been surprised that there would be conflict once again. He could do nothing right, no matter what it was, and she always sided with her mother's opinion not ever caring how it affected her father.

How could such a wonderful moment be turned into a bad thing? That was his daughter in a nut shell. He could do nothing right in her eyes. On several occasions I tried to find out what the hell she was so upset about. I think it always came down to whatever her mom said. If her mom didn't agree, she held it against her father.
I guess no matter how book smart a person is, the ignorance is still there.

She simply could not separate one parents opinion from the other. One's opinion was written in Gold the other's was nothing except BAD. I now know that there is so much more to the anatomy of this kind of thinking. It is the product of a very confused child that needs help figuring out how to think for herself without anyone swaying her thoughts. Years of therapy have not been able to accomplish this either.

After a while it all calmed down, but this event left an indelible mark on our lives.
It was now so clear that even though Bob had not had one drop of liquor pass his lips he still had not been forgiven for past "Sins" nor would he ever be. He started to distance himself emotionally from her. It was etched into his brain that all she needed was cash to buy things and do whatever she wanted that her Mom didn't want to pay for. It is when the phrase "The Human Credit Card" started to be thrown around by Bob when referring to his daughter. He would say, "I'm just a human credit card to her. He was right.

She never called to see him to just hang out with him,but she would call me at times and ask me if I wanted to go shopping with her. That translated into getting whatever she needed, put on her father's credit cards without him having to be there to annoy her. I admit most men don't want to stand around watching a teenage girl try on clothes for a couple of hours, plus we had our son along always and he didn't have any patience after a while. How terrible of me to go along with it. I'm ashamed of myself for not doing the right thing.

I simply was tired of fighting with Bob about his family. At various times things would come up and I was always defending someone in his family to him. It was never ending. He began to have major resentments which was definitely not good for his sobriety.

I loved his family and I could never begin to heal his demons about his past actions and how they affected everyone around him. Even his years of sobriety had not gained him the respect I think he wanted more than anything from his family. It was never going to happen. He lost their respect many years ago. He had slipped from the "Golden Boy" the the family waiting for him to get drunk again.

He would sit on the sofa in our room night after night and chain smoke. I could see the wheels turning in his mind. Lost in his thoughts sometimes not even able to hear me call him or ask him a question. Our son and I used to laugh and say "Earth to Bernie" as I like to call him. Lights were on and no one was there. Many nights he would call his daughter just to hear her voice. But what he really needed was a real relationship with her. She wasn't really interested in spending time with him.

This was the beginning of him dropping his cigarettes and burning holes in the pillows, the sofa and even one night he started the bed and the carpet on fire.

At the time I did not realize what was going on. He had started taking Valium, given to him by his doctor for a very serious back problem. He had gone through a major back surgery and he was still in a lot of pain.

We had turned a new chapter in our lives. One that is even more insidious than the drinking. It is non detectable, you can't smell it. Bob wasn't stumbling around but make no mistake, he was not Sane and Sober.
Because of his addictive personality, the pills just started to replace the alcohol.
He was now obsessed with his pills. We couldn't leave the house without him counting how many pills he had in a little bottle just in case he needed them.

Later I would learn that he had several doctors to give him duplicate prescriptions.
What most people don't know is how easy it is to get several doctors to give you whatever you want when you have a real issue. His bad back was real. So was his addiction. He needed more and more just to feel better. There was no shortage of doctors willing to give him what he wanted.

At this time Bob was working on his Black Belt in Karate with our son and a friend of his. They rented an office at the Studio and went in several times a week. They were writing a screenplay together. His friend was very high strung and Bob would say that he needed the Valium just to be around him. Then he would say he was tense around his Dad and Brother. There was always a reason to take a Valium.

He would get hurt during Karate Classes and started going to the Emergency room afterwards for a cracked rib, broken nose etc. I begged him to stop karate. We fought about that a lot. I saw a pattern taking shape here. Get hurt, go to a doctor or hospital. Get a shot of Demerol or whatever and get sent home with pain pills. It is not a new thing. Many people have figured this one out. Doctors are like legal drug dealers to some addicts. They get what they want and they cannot get into trouble with the Law for it.

No one was taking into consideration the damage all the pills were having on Bob's memory, moods or even the fact that his body seemed to be creating more pain so that he could take more and more pills.

Can't buy Love

2007-03-01T22:14:00.000-08:00

Now that our lives had normalized we really tried to be a united family, the four of us. What we never really looked at was how a child really handles adjusting to a life that they had no say in putting together.

Children cannot pick their parents, step parents, siblings or have much say in where they will spend their weekends or anything for that matter. Life is simply thrown at them, and they have to deal with it, like it or not.they have to just go along with everything.that is until they get older. That is the time when a parent should start to pay close attention to what is and isn't being said. I think we have generations now of really messed up adults that haven't ever recovered from the effects of coming from a divorced family.

No matter how sensitive we were to Bob's daughter and her feelings it seemed he just couldn't do it right. Could not seem to make her happy.
Sometimes we wondered, perhaps we should have moved further away like we had originally planned on doing. We stayed close to Beverly Hills to make sure his daughter did not feel left out but that certainly wasn't the answer. Malibu may as well have been the end of the earth. As far as the life styles went. weekends at our house was almost like putting a mirror up to her and making her face it head on. She had two sets of parents whether she liked it or not.

What she wanted more than anything was to have her parents together again, not to be from a divorced family. I think many children feel that way. She never really forgave her dad for the divorce and simply refused to believe that perhaps maybe both her dad and her mom wanted the divorce. I think it was inconceivable to her that maybe her Mom didn't want to be married to him any longer either. They were young and he was in the middle of his newly diagnosed alcoholism and the death of his Mom. It was so apparent in her every unspoken word that she was not happy. At that time she was the only one of her friends to come from a divorced family.

The resentment or maybe disappointment was just too real to ignore. She probably wished in her subconscious that her step dad was her real dad. That way she would only have one Dad and not two.

It really broke her father's heart. He didn't know how to make his little girl happy. But she wasn't really a little girl any longer. She knew how it affected him, at least I think she did, but even she couldn't help how she felt. She just didn't want to pack her bags every weekend and come to see Daddy and the other family. It's a common problem.

As a step parent I felt that there was really very little I could do to help the two of them get along except to try and be a friend to both of them. I tried my best to make excuses to Bob as to why it was OK for his daughter to not spend every weekend with us. I listened to her when she tried to explain why she couldn't come over. I defended her position every chance I got. There was a very fine line between interfering and upsetting either of them. I was very aware of how sensitive he was of her not coming over as often as he wanted her to.

Being the kind of step parent like I was, I felt more like a spectator in their relationship and more like a friend. trying to stay neutral. I enjoyed shopping with her, baking cookies going to movies, etc. When it came to other things that parents and teens have to go through, I just didn't have to. I never could have or tried to be another Mother to her. We didn't discuss the important decisions much. We didn't fight all those years and only in her later years after college did we actually ever have any words spoken in anger. Looking back our relationship was rather shallow for all the years we were in each other's lives. I was an outsider, the woman she called when she needed permission to charge something on her Dad's credit card. Of course the answer was always yes. No wonder why I thought she loved me. She just loved the fact that I never said no.

We just learned not rock the boat and hoped she would spend more time with us. Much like the philosophy that the more you protest with a child the more they want to do what it is that they are not supposed to do. We thought it was a phase she would grow out of. The moody teen age years. She never grew out of it and the distance just kept growing larger and larger. It was the beginning of the end of his dream of gaining her unconditional love again.

There were years that went by when she didn't spend any of the Holidays with her dad or her grandfather. We didn't want to "Put Pressure" on her, as her dad would say. So we didn't. Our family rarely saw her even on Father's Day. She spent it with her Step Dad. He didn't want to upset anyone. We were basically given the one week Summer Vacation and the One week Winter Break. There were a total of seven of us in the family. So that meant we got together for most of the birthdays. The Obligatory birthday dinners. In the end even that would be put on hold when she grew up and went to college. Bob's dreams of a close knit family of four was more than over. It was too painful for him. He carried on with us. We were the "Three Musketeers".
We did everything together.

We just stopped discussing the fact that our feelings were really hurt. Unless Bob was willing to discuss the situation with her Mom things would never change. He would not do it. His motto of "Don't rock the boat" was alive and well in his approach. He simply let his daughter do what she wanted, this way he wouldn't loose her love he thought. What he didn't know is that every time he gave in and didn't fight to have her with him, he lost her a little more at a time.

She was now referring to her step-father as her Dad. Those words cut like a knife straight to his heart. I couldn't help that pain go away. I watched it fester inside of him for years. Little by little his feeling would surface and the bickering would start between them. In the end even our once happy family vacations turned into a nightmare for us all.
We continued to go on our annual ski trip. It used to be something that we used to look forward to so much. Of course the anticipation was great, He would proceed to buy all of us new ski outfits, trying to make her love him.she always got a head to toe new outfit, actually Bob would buy us all whatever we wanted. Then he would get upset with her if she was quiet and moody. It didn't occur to him that he was doing the same exact thing to her. Being moody. Bob had a way of making a person feel uncomfortable with just a look or the tone of his voice. Matt seemed to be the only one oblivious to his Dad's mood swings.

The first thing Bob would do when he was upset was to throw in our faces how much he spent on us. It wasn't pleasant. Looking back on those years I now realize that what was really going on was Bob wanting to relieve his anxiety with something to take the edge off his feelings. We spent years battling the "Dry Drunk" syndrome and didn't even realize it. During those years it was later pointed out to me by our Son that I was so "Wishy Washy" as he called it. I was so terrified of setting him off I was the consummate Yes wife. Yes to this, yes to that. Whatever he wanted I did, whatever he said I agreed with. It was like I had no real opinion. If I did I simply buried it. Remember "DON'T ROCK THE BOAT". Bob's sobriety was the most important thing in the world to me. I picked my battles and the battle of His daughter wasn't one I could win. I could only try to make it better for the two of them.

We would go out to dinner and they would get in arguments about silly things. Like hypothetical examples of what would happen if she dated someone not of her race.
Or the time they had a fight about some plastic surgery he mom had gotten that I guess she never knew about, but he paid for it while they were married. Unpleasantness was the norm. She didn't like the way he ate or dressed, he didn't like the way she sulked and ignored him. He simply didn't like the fact that she didn't like him for who he was. He made it worse trying to make things better.

One year he brought her boyfriend along with us hoping that maybe they would connect again. All her friends liked him. He was really cool. She never got it. Blame it on Teen-age angst, hormones I really don't know what it was. Finally, she just stopped coming on our family vacations.

Now the bad times really reared their ugly little heads. It wasn't better without her it was more obvious that he had lost the love of his beloved daughter somewhere along the line and he couldn't regain the once great love she had for him.

Who knows how a child goes from loving a parent to being repulsed by that same parent.It happens all the time, he was experiencing what a lot of parents go through with their kids. So what if She criticized everything he did, said or wore. I felt sorry for him and for her. I'm not sure if She ever saw how handsome, funny and cool he was. She wanted him to be just like all the dad's the other Beverly Hills kids had. She even wrote about those feelings in an essay to get into college. They were just like Oil and Water. It would never change.

Pure Joy

2007-02-22T23:42:00.000-08:00

Being a Mom for me is pure joy. It was something that I never sought. In fact I didn't think I would ever have children. I had some physical issues and I just accepted it. But when Matt was born, our lives changed for the better.

I don't think I know of two people that were happier. We had gone through so much in the past six years and to have it all turn out with this smiling beautiful baby was surreal. We had a real life miracle baby and God answered Bob's prayers.

We were lucky. Neither of us had to go to work and we spent all our time being a family and being together. We now had two children. We didn't get to see his daughter much because five months before our son was born, her Mom gave birth to her new son.

It must have been hard for his daughter. No child likes to pack a suitcase for the weekend trips and we understood that she was being asked to leave her "Life" during the week and come to her "other" house to see us and her brother every weekend. We just wanted her to be a part of our lives and to get to know her new brother.

When Matt was four months old we all went to Hawaii for a family vacation. It had been years since Bob had been able to do anything special with his daughter. It was important to him that he make the years drinking up to her. He wanted more than anything to make her happy, to try and give her whatever her heart desired. He wanted her to know that she was still the love of his life, nothing was going to change that, certainly not a new baby.

We had a wonderful trip. We spent the day's at the beach and at night we tried to just spend our nights with Marisa alone. We left Matt at the Hotel with a sitter. We were bonding the family together. Bob always felt that he had a lot of making up to do to her. He tried his best and to the best of his ability, he never strayed from that goal. Make his daughter happy, make all the things he was not proud of go away. It was important to both of us to make sure that she did not feel that she was not taking a back seat to her two new brothers. Actually her dad and I now went out of our way to make sure she knew how special she was to us. We began spoiling her and giving her anything she wanted.

At the time it really seemed like we were doing the right thing. Many years later, I'm not so sure. It seems we failed in our parenting abilities. We failed to give her the proper boundaries. It would come back to haunt us both later on. We had the best intention with her for her entire life. We failed to do a good job.

Sometimes being a parent means having to risk your kids be mad at you when they don't get what they want. Bob was not willing to take that risk. He simply couldn't do it. Even when he wanted to make her come to see us on the weekends because he missed her, he didn't force it.
The years went by and she came over less and less. Bob suffered in silence at first and later became pretty verbal about his disappointment. But never to her or her Mom. He didn't risk the disapproval. The years of drinking made him feel like he didn't have the right to demand anything of her.
I wish he had found the courage to say something. In the end his daughter was probably the thing we fought about the most.

If he expressed his anger and I agreed, he turned it on me. I learned to keep my mouth shut for many years, but even I couldn't do that forever.

We simply put all our time and effort into our son. He was the love of both of our lives. The three Musketeers is how we referred to our self as.

When Matt was two we moved out to Malibu. The drive to Beverly Hills to pick up his daughter became a nightmare. Bob had a terrible back problem and His back was always bothering him after a two hour drive there and back and the fact that his daughter would barely speak to him all the way home only made it worse.
There was a subtle storm brewing on the inside of both of them and all the money in the world wasn't going to stop what would happen. The more they tried to be close the further apart they were becoming and the more tension they would bring into the house.
She was living two completely different lives. Her life with her Mom was the one she embraced. After all her house, her room, her school, friends, family etc. were all in Beverly Hills. Disrupting her routine to come to our less than glamorous life in Malibu wasn't her thing. We had an angry child in our mists, silent, but angry.

Finally

2007-02-10T15:52:00.000-08:00

Well two weeks later I actually went into labor it was around 3 am put I waited until the doctor's office opened because my contractions were pretty mild and far apart.

When I finally did call the Doctor he told us to go to his office and he would meet me there. He didn't think I had dilated enough to actually go to the Hospital yet.
I was so confused I had no idea what I was supposed to be feeling. All I knew was that I didn't want to drive all the way back to Santa Monica from Beverly Hills and then back again once labor was really full blown.

I guess I was nervous because of all the complications I had experienced. I really thought that I would give birth relatively fast. Like the baby was just going to come flying out, silly me. I was fully prepared to have a natural child birth experience, no drugs, no inducing nothing.

We called Dad and he arranged for us to wait in his office at the Hyatt on Sunset. It was so much closer to Cedars where I was going to give birth.

We hung out there for several more hours and when labor started up again we checked into the hospital. Then labor stopped they wanted to send me back home. I refused.
I asked them what I had to do to get labor going and they told me to start walking.
I must have walked the halls for hours.
My father-in-law and brother in law came with dinner for Bob and they all took turns walking me up and down the halls that night. It was so surreal. I really had no idea how much time was passing. But after twenty two hours of labor a very sweet nurse asked me if I wanted something. I asked her what she had. I was so over the whole Natural Child Birth experience I can't even tell you.

The anaesthesiologist came in and suggested that he give me a spinal epidural. We agreed. The problem was, this was 1984 in Los Angeles around 5:30 am. He was totally loaded on some kind of drugs. He was telling jokes, doing magic tricks and actually did the epidural wrong. The baby went into Fetal Distress, and my blood pressure started to drop really fast. I had an emergency C Section.
Even in the Operating Room this doctor was still doing Magic. Bob was freaking out, he normally had a very bad temper but he was helpless. At any moment he was about to loose me and our son. My Doctor delivered my son less than five minutes later and he was fine. They put him on my chest so I could see him and then they knocked me out to put me back together again.

My Doctor was so apologetic he thought we would sue him and the other doctor plus the Hospital for the ordeal we had all just been through. We were just so happy our son was OK, we never did do anything to that doctor. I was hoping he would be turned in by my Doctor. He may have been but I didn't want to go through all the legal stuff. Especially with a brand new baby.

I had to stay in the Hospital for several days because of the medication I had to take for the pain. I was on a Morphine Drip. I didn't feel a thing. Bob was so concerned that I wasn't getting enough pain medication that they "Asked" him to leave the hospital that night.
So much for a natural Birth. I was high on Morphine and my husband was experiencing some sort of dry high anxiety. It is just that was it always went. We had a great life, but what could go wrong would go wrong.

He left and I got a good nights sleep. Probably one of the last I would have for many years to come. My son was and is a total night owl. He never slept. He never cried but he was always awake.

Life was getting really fun and interesting.

Preparing for The Birth

2007-02-09T12:53:00.000-08:00

We were just like any other expextant couple. We started to prepare our baby's nursery. It was all such an exciting time. During this time we made sure to include his daughter in what we were doing. She was still wanting to come over and see us on the weekends at that time.

I never really gave it much thought, but as I look back I often wonder why no one I knew ever gave me a baby shower. I guess my life with Bob had always been quite isolated. My family was all in Wisconsin, and he only had his Dad and Brother. No one from our AA friends really cared about us much either. I guess they were all betting that it would never last. People are funny that way. There was no shared joy just curousity about when it would all fall apart.

We knew better. Bob didn't return from Hell to pick up another drink, at least not for many many years.

Two weeks before my due date my doctor had me come into his office and he removed the stitches that were securing my Uterus. He sent us directly from his office to the Hospital Maternity Waiting area. We were all convinced that our son was going to just be born that night.
I wasn't really sure what was supposed to be happening, being my first time in this situation, but nothing happened. We sat there for over two hours, just waiting. It seemed rediculous.
I called the Doctor and asked him if I could just go home. All those months of thinking I would lose the baby didn't happen. And he sure wasn't ready to be born tonight. Not a single contraction happened.

We went home.

By this time I was so big. Not being able to do much more than sit and eat had taken a toll on my body. I went from 118 to 180 something. I was fat and uncomfortable.

We were Living a Normal Life

2007-02-05T21:36:00.000-08:00

Our life had become so normal it was eerie. How does a person go from high drama and insanity to more than normal in less than a year.
Well I'm living proof that it can happen. The miracles are just around the corner if a person just doesn't pick up that first drink. Sounds so easy, doesn't it?
Well there were days that were living hell for Bob. He really didn't want to drink, it's just that the same old compulsion to drink never really left him.
At this time in our life I really did not understand how a DRY DRUNK could alter his personality so completely, but it could.

As happy as we were about the birth of our child the pressure was starting to build up in side of him. A combination of Bob's old pattern had reemerged. Bob had always experienced in his earlier attempts of sobriety that horrible grey area where he wasn't drinking, but he wanted to really bad and his behaviour was almost like he was drinking.
I had been told that I would probably never have children and don't forget, I had been with Bob for five years before I married him so this was definitely not something he was prepared for.The pressure of having me fairly out of commission and his trying to launch an acting career had begun to stress him out.
I was ordered to have an almost total bed rest pregnancy. All the things I used to do were not put on his shoulders. I couldn't lift anything, couldn't do the marketing really couldn't do much of anything.

Bob was used to me always looking after him. He was in strange waters when I needed him to take care of me. He now had to do almost everything, but clean the house and do the laundry. I could see the mood swings start to happen all over again for no reason.

It started out very subtlety, We were walking down the street in Beverly Hills one afternoon, and he started telling me I was fat. I was simply too stunned to argue with him. I started to cry. I couldn't believe he just told me I was fat. Of course I was fat, I was caring our child. Instead of realizing he had hurt my feelings, he started to get really mad at me for "Making a Scene" by crying. Of course this only made things worse. I think most women are more sensitive when they are pregnant, but I always heard these stories about women feeling so beautiful when they were pregnant, and how great they felt.
I was not having one of those experiences at all, I was never heavy in my entire life and I didn't see that one coming. The tension just kept building that day for some reason.
I still remember what I was wearing, that's how traumatic that day was for me. I had black stretch pants on and an over sized white men's style shirt. Simple but classic.

Things just went from bad to worse. I don't remember what we were doing in Beverly Hills that day, but we just went back to our condo in Santa Monica.
Bob was literally acting like a caged tiger. Nothing I said or did made him happy that day and I needed to be consoled for how mean he was to me. I think I may have asked him to apologize or something and before I knew it, he hit me in the stomach.
Obviously, it wasn't an all out punch, but there was the taboo that was broken. YOU DON"T EVER TOUCH A PREGNANT WOMAN NO MATTER WHAT. There was no turning back from that moment on. I was hysterical, not from pain, but from sheer terror. If he could do that, what else could he do? I had seen the bad side before, I never dreamed I'd be looking at it again, in my condition especially.

I really don't know how Bob didn't drink through that day.He promised God he would stay sane and sober if he would only give him a second chance at another family and a son. It was all just moments away from shattering our dreams.I can't imagine the instant panic and guilt he felt.

The Other Bob had stepped out into the open that day, and he couldn't seem to control it. I saw the panic in his eyes. We were at a serious cross roads in our life. The very foundation of this marriage was at risk here. I told him if he ever picked up another drink, the marriage was over. He saw his hopes and dreams die in his mind, if he listened to the demon inside his head. He did the only thing he could do to save me,the baby and the marriage from the inevitable pending disaster.
It was a very scary place for the both of us to be in. I couldn't defend myself if I wanted to, I have never felt so helpless and vulnerable in my life. I was literally at his mercy. The next thing he did was an amazing act of love.

He called his dad's house, spoke to the house keeper, and drove me over to have Gladys take care of me.He knew that if we spent any more time together especially with his frame of mind at the moment, anything could and would happen. He just couldn't handle his emotions. So in order to protect me, he did the smartest thing he could have done, he got me to a safe location where I would be taken care of and he would not be able to do anything else to me.

Gladys was so kind to me. She put me into bed to rest because I was so upset and stunned that he would do that to me.I think she was afraid I would miscarry. That's how afraid we all were. She stayed with me and told me to stay calm, because no matter what happened I needed to take care of myself for our baby. She also told me that, the child I was carrying was mine. There wasn't anything that could ever separate me from my child. She just had a gift for calming people down. I totally relaxed and was grateful for our couple of days together.
During those few days, Gladys told me so many stories about how much Bob's mother loved and understood him. He was always plagued with some sort of anger issues, even at a young age, she told me. His mother would always forgive him and tell Gladys that there was something not quite right with him. She forgave him everything always.

It finally dawned on me, why Bob loved me so deeply, but could be so cruel to me at times. That was how he treated the one woman he adored more than anything, His Mother. I too, always forgave him everything he had ever done. I was his rock, I of course did forgive him. Gladys nursed my fragile nerves and me back to health and then Bob came and took me back home a few days later. He was feeling better emotionally. He was back to his normal sweet self. Back in those days I could actually just forget and forgive. We did not dwell on it and we moved on. We had too much to be excited about. The fact that Bob didn't go out and drink was all I needed to know because that night and the next few nights following I really thought that he would go out and get drunk, but he didn't. I'm sure he wanted to but he didn't.
The time alone gave us both a chance to calm down. We never really fought about anything big. It was always the little things that got to us. A pattern that followed us our entire time together.

The rest of the pregnancy went along as most peoples. Except for one thing. Bob was now really so much kinder and really didn't mind that I needed his help. I think I made him feel better by needing him after what we had just gone through. He was cooking me breakfast every morning now to make sure that I was going to have a healthy baby. He made me the only thing he knew how to cook. Scrambled Eggs, every morning, scrambled eggs.
I have to tell you that till this day I have such an aversion to scrambled eggs, but I didn't tell him that at the time. I needed to show him that I forgave him and I knew it would never happen again and it didn't.
Of course we were normal and would have the occasional stressful days, the great times and the bad days. We were just like anyone else we knew only we were happier. We felt we were witnessing and living a miracle. Not just living a normal life.
We felt we were blessed but we also knew that if something could go wrong it would.

I started to break out with little red "rings" on my legs. The doctors did all sorts of tests on me, but they had no Idea what it was. So on to the next specialist it was. Then came the bomb shell. The Doctor said I had "Lupus".
We had never heard of it. We wanted to know what to do next and he told us that it was an incurable disease which could be fatal.

To be honest with you, the only thing I could do was to just block that out. I did not focus on what he said and quite frankly, I just didn't believe it. I had no desire to be sick, especially with a fatal disease.
I got better, and the spots never came back.

Is it mind over matter? I think it was. I would not engage that thought. Nothing in the world was going to stop me from having this baby and being healthy to take care of him for the rest of my life. I never did forget those words Gladys had told me. In my soul I felt that the life of my child was going to be my responsibility. Bob would be there, but there might be a time when he couldn't be and I prepared myself emotionally from then on. Me and my son against the world. Oh how prophetic that thought would turn out to be.

There is no logical explanation to why it just went away. Either the Doctor was wrong or I willed it gone. Whatever. Here I am twenty two years later. No signs of whatever. Bottom line, man becomes what he thinks about. I thought myself healthy. I always have.

TRUST

2007-01-31T22:13:00.000-08:00

I'm sure I don't need to remind anyone that without trust there is really nothing.
If you can't trust your partner to the core of your soul, in my opinion you just have nothing. So many times in my life I have felt that knot in the middle of my gut, you know the one, the one that keeps you up at night, the knot that makes you physically sick. It's our inner voice telling us that something is wrong, no matter what another person is telling you to derail the consequences of their deceit, that little voice and that knot in your gut seems to always know the truth.

I had gone through five such years with Bob, never being able to fully trust that he would stay sober. That's why when ever he asked me to marry him I would always tell him "Someday". My gut told me it was not the time for such flights of fancy, I learned to trust that voice.

But this time things really were different. Everyday was filled with the knowledge that things would be OK even if we had the morning bad moods, before coffee or the little argument about whatever. My gut knew it was OK, we were only human. I also knew to the core of my soul that Bob was going to remain sober. I don't know why God removed the fear I once had of him relapsing, but he did. I no longer feared that.

I have recently been watching the video "The Secret" and I am reminded that I have lived that way for many many years. My thoughts became my truth. I knew from the moment I laid eyes on him that I would marry Bob, and I knew from the moment that he told me he had a drinking problem that it would all be resolved one day.
I never believed it would take him five years to reach this point, but he did finally get and stay sober, and I was sure it was going to last. I also knew that we could have a happy, normal life together, and we did for many years.

Positive thinking on both our parts kept us grounded on our path and our commitment to our relationship. We made it happen, then one day I started to feel really sick. It wasn't like anything I had ever felt before. It seemed like I could literally taste the smog from the traffic.

We were living in an apartment on Olympic Blvd. and I thought because it was extremely hot that June that maybe I was just sick from the heat. I was vomiting which I never did so I went to the Doctor.

I wasn't sick at all, I was pregnant. That in itself was really a miracle. I had just miscarried our child before Bob's last journey into his private hell, and the doctor told me that I would probably never conceive again. I was actually using birth control at the time so being pregnant was the last thing that I was expecting.

Bob on the other hand, just kept telling me that all his prayers were answered.
He promised the man upstairs that if he gave him a second chance at a family, perhaps give him a son so that he could be a great dad and take him to the ball games like he went to while in Kansas, that he would stay sober.The nun had kept telling him to pray and his prayers would be answered. I never saw him so committed to staying sober, and I had now been with him for over five years.

When we told our family the first thing that Dad did was tell us to start looking for a new place to live. He would help us buy a house or a condo so that we could bring this child into the world in a new home. Everything just seemed to fall into place. We looked all over town and finally found a beautiful condo in Santa Monica, right across the street from the ocean. It was so great for Bob, he loved being near the ocean and it really was close to where he grew up. He was putting his life back together. It was a fairy tale and we kept saying, "If it's easy it's meant to be."

I don't know how Dad managed it but by the time we actually saw the condo and brought Dad to see it, he had arrange all the financing for us to buy it. Now if that's not the "Secret" being put into action I don't know what was. I had no credit to speak of or a job for that matter and neither did Bob. But here we were with the help of Dad moving in to a new place. All within the first three months of my pregnancy.

We moved in and I was really sicker than a dog for those first three months and then the scare of our lives happened. Bob had to rush me to the hospital in the middle of the night. It seems I had lost our baby. It was close to three in the morning and the doctor told us that there was a 90% chance that I had already miscarried, but he scheduled an ultra sound in the morning just to be sure. It was the longest and saddest night of our lives. We were devastated, but we clung on to a faint thread of hope. In my soul I just refused to believe I had lost our baby and so did Bob

Morning came and I was wheeled into the ultra sound room. I will never forget the sight of our son on the screen. There he was. His little hands up near his face, maybe even sucking his thumb. I did not lose him he was alive. Another Miracle.

Our prayers were more than being answered. Bob was keeping his commitment to God and God was answering his prayers. I will never look at this as anything other than a gift from above and I'm not particularly spiritual or I should say I wasn't at that time of my life.

It was not going to be an easy pregnancy and as a matter of fact the following month I was told that I would have to remain in partial bed rest for the duration. I was more than happy to comply. I would do whatever it took to keep this child.
When we found out for sure through the amniocentesis that we were having a boy we decided to name him Matthew, which mean gift from God, and so he is.

I started knitting what turned out to be the smallest baby blanket on earth. I guess I just didn't have the talent for it, but it sure helped to pass the time away.
All I could do was go to the doctor, go to the dentist and knit or watch TV. I did not cook or clean anything during that time.

Bob would either make me scrambled eggs for breakfast or take me out and dinner was always delivered or eaten out. Up until today I still have an aversion to scrambled eggs. I never used to eat breakfast, but I had to then to have a healthy baby, so Bob made me eat and it's the only thing he could cook that I would eat in the morning.

It was a very surreal time for us. We bought our first video camera and started to document just how enormous I was getting. It brought us so much closer together and we had a lot of laughs and we were grateful for everything in our lives. In AA Bob was told that the miracle's were just around the corner, all he had to do was stay sober to get them and we knew that it was true. We did not falter from that belief.

His daughter's mom was also having a baby. This poor girl was an only child for nine years and now she was going to have two new siblings within 5 months of each other. That's an entirely different topic.

Living Together Again

2007-01-22T10:38:00.000-08:00

It's amazing how great it felt to be living together again. The two halfs were now whole. Our lives had always been intertwined, even when things were going bad it's like we always had that connection. I was always Bob's life support his floating device sort of. Now we could get on with the process of living a healthy sober life.

People wondered how I could just jump into a marriage with a man that for the past five previous years could not stay sober, but I just knew to the core of my soul that this time was differant. If you knew Bob as well as I did you would know that I saw it in his eyes. This disease had taken him to his bottom, a real bottom. He was changed by this experience to the core of his soul. We were both grateful that he had survived everything he had been through. Bob would always say that he knew that God had a plan for him, he just didn't think he saved him for no reason. That would come to pass later.

As soon as we left Wisconsin we came back home and began figuring out what we were going to do with the rest of our lives.
First thing Bob did was start connecting with AA again. He found a little meeting just two blocks from our apartment and began a commitment to set up the meeting once a weekk there. Then he signed up for some acting classes at the Strausberg Institute and began a dream of his, he always wanted to act, instead of real life drama, the stage now was going to be a place for him.
The first thing he did was shave off his beard and his mustache. I could not believe just how young and hansome he looked without it. He never grew a beard back again.

Life was so good, we were living in our honeymoon phase.

My brother and his wife came to visit us two months later and his dad offered to let us all stay at his Palm Springs house. It was so much fun. There was a full time housekeeper and her husband living there and they took really good care of us.
We played tennis, swam and had all our meals prepared. I was so grateful for this. It showed Bob and me that his dad trusted him again. It meant so much more to us than he would ever know. This act just reinforced Bob's sobriety. His family was mending. It was the most important step in our new life together. TRUST

Meeting my Family

2007-01-04T23:20:00.000-08:00

After Christmas we flew back to Bob's apartment in Kansas with the future looking so exciting. We would drive to Wisconsin so Bob could finally meet my family and from there it was on to Colorado to find a new city to live. After seeing his daughter before we left the other mission he was on was to retrieve my engagement ring which I didn't know that he had given to his cousin to safeguard for him. I guess deep down in his soul, he had known that we would be together some day and he didn't want it around or he may have sold it. I was deeply moved by that.

We weren't sure where we would end up we just thought maybe a quiet ski town would suit us just fine.

Kansas in January was surprisingly free from snow, but it was cold out. We decided to go to the local mall and hang out, there wasn't really much to do there in Topeka. We were literally two of five people at the Macy's store that night. The place was eerily empty.

We wandered around and bought Bob a new jacket because he was really freezing without a warm coat. After we grabbed a bit to eat at the food court we decided it was time to go back to his apartment and get ready to leave on our road trip.

We walked outside to where we thought we parked his "Jeep", it wasn't there. Now Bob did have short term memory issues and I wasn't paying attention to where we parked. We could not find the car. How could you not see a bright orange Jeep in an almost empty parking lot. It was surreal. The car vanished.

Here we were in the middle of nowhere and his car got "jacked" unbelievable. We called the police and alerted the security from the mall, The car was gone without a trace. Until today there has never been any information on that car.

We later found out from the police that there was a very active car jacking ring in the area and the take them and send them off to a chop shop before you can bat an eye.

Knock on wood, I have lived in Los Angeles and have had radios stolen but that's it. Imagine being out in the "Heartland" and this happens.

We both looked at it as a sign that we were not supposed to drive to Colorado or live there as a matter of fact. So the old saying goes "We make plans and God laughs". We had to come up with a plan B. We still went to have Bob meet my family but we flew instead. We arranged for all Bob's things to be shipped to my apartment and we mad plans to leave Kansas for good. I had called my oldest brother and he told me that we could stay at his house. We flew into Milwaukee and he picked us up. His three kids no longer lived at home and they had plenty of room. Or so I thought.

When he picked us up at the airport everyone was really happy to see me and meet Bob, or so I thought. My brother took us from the airport to my mother's one bedroom apartment. I thought he was taking us there so she could meet Bob. I was wrong. When he arrived he took the luggage out of the trunk and brought it into her apartment. He never explained why he changed his mind about us staying there. Not one word was said about it. I think it was because Bob was a Jew.
The only reason we even were invited to his house during our stay there was so that I could give his wife a perm. They didn't invite us for dinner or anything. I will never forget the rudeness of that.

My other brother Richard on the other hand, opened his home to us so graciously. He loaned us a car, and had us come over for a really special dinner which he went out of his way to make Bob feel at home. It was so funny because Bob's father was from Poland and there is a really large Polish population in Milwaukee, where I'm from and he had prepared some special Polish Sausage for us. Bob had never tasted Polish sausage before in his life. It was so funny but Bob never told that to Richard or his wife until after dinner. Actually it was really good.

The kindness that Richard and his wife showed us during our stay bonded them together for life. They remained close from that day forward. Bob did not get to meet my third brother, they were living out of town someplace else at that time.

While we were there we ended up having a really nice time with my Mom. She was getting pretty forgetful and would call Bob
Ernie, his real name is Bernard anyway she really liked him a lot. He had that effect on everyone.

We were really keeping up our AA meetings and everything. I will never forget going to one down by the LakeFront. I never knew there was AA so active and alive in my home town. I shouldn't have been surprised, after all the local pastime is drinking. There is a beer bar on every corner. It's one of the reasons that in the beginning Bob's telling me he was an Alcoholic didn't scare me. Hell everyone in that town seemed like they were one once I started going out as a teenager. We had beer bars we could drink in at 18 back then. It didn't seem unusual.

I just happened to be blessed, even when I was sneaking into the bars before I was 18, I was only there to dance and drink Cokes. That was my passion, still is as a matter of fact.

After Five days we headed back to my apartment in L.A. Now Bob no longer had a car to his name, but we knew we would manage, we always did land on our feet when we had to. We just shared my car, it wasn't even a problem. I had quit my job, thinking that I was moving away, so we were pretty much on the same schedule. Bob started taking acting classes at the Lee Strasbourg Institute and I started doing my clients that were left back home as they had been doing before I left. There wasn't any glitches everything was running smooth or so it seemed.

I was still hanging out with all my former AA friends who had really been there for me during all the chaos. It was a good environment for Bob also, all my friends were sober in the program. No temptation. He immediately started being the secretary of a small meeting right across the street from our apartment so he wasn't really stranded too much without a car if I had someplace to go, he could just walk.

One night I went out to dinner with one of my female friends from the program and things seemed really strained between us that night. I couldn't figure out why she was so distant and acting weird. I finally got it. She was really happy for me when my life was falling apart and I was miserable. Now that I was happy, she wasn't happy for me. It was like a light going off in my head, I just got it. So I told her what I was feeling. She actually didn't deny it, and I never hung out with her again.

It's funny but some people only like you when your down lower than they are. I learned that the hard way. All in all it didn't matter to me, I didn't care what anyone thought about me getting married to Bob. It didn't matter that we had just been through five years in and out of rehabs and hell. I loved him, he loved me, and we made a commitment to make it work.

I knew we would have bumps in the road but who doesn't. Our love had passed the test of time, now all we needed was to clock the days, months and hopefully years of sobriety, together.

Back to LA

2007-01-03T22:49:00.000-08:00

The days in Aspen went by all to quickly and before we knew it, I was on a plane back to Los Angeles and he was on one back to Kansas.
Bob had made several commitments to his Legal Aid people and the play was still running. He would finish out his commitments, and be home for Christmas.
His Doctor was freaking out. What had we done he kept asking Bob. It was bad enough that he went and got married at only four months of sobriety, but moving back to L.A. was as good as sealing his death warrant, he said.

Bob never was one to listen to his doctors advice and maybe the best thing that happened to Bob was his doctor's doom and gloom speech he gave him. It was a challenge for Bob. He just loved proving the "shrinks" wrong. Years before a psychiatrist had told him he would never get sober. Bob was determined to proved him wrong. Several years later we ran into this man at the market, I just loved the look of "You don't know Me you were wrong" on Bob's face when he spoke to him proud to have proved him wrong.

Bob was coming home for the holidays and we had made a commitment that we would leave Los Angeles and move to Colorado someplace. We did not want to find out if the doctor's prediction would come true. As long as we were together we knew we would be happy. I waited with baited breath for his return. He was also so excited he had not seen his daughter since the summer. She missed him too.

Before Bob returned his Dad and Brother took me out for a wonderful dinner at a really amazing new restaurant in town. The chef was Wolfgang Puck, before he owned his own restaurants. They could not have been more wonderful. I felt really lucky to be a part of his family. My spirits were high and I felt blessed. Years later his brother told me that no one ever really thought that we would last as many years as we did. What were the odds of two people meeting in a bar while Bob's full blown Alcoholism was rearing it's ugly head. There was no rhyme nor reason to love and destiny I guess.

It was the longest month I had had in a long time, but the day finally arrived and Bob was home. It definitely was our "HoneyMoon" period. Everything was great.

After Christmas I quit my job at the salon I was working at, we made plans to go back to Kansas pack up his place hop in the car and drive to Wisconsin to introduce Bob to my family and then go on to Colorado and find a new place to live.

We were very excited about our future. The only thing was that Bob was very sad that he would be moving so far away from his daughter, but it was better for her that he was sane and sober and living someplace safe so he could be the father he wanted to be to her.

"Splender In the Grass"

2007-01-03T21:55:00.000-08:00

The movie we watched that night was "Slender in the Grass" with Natalie Wood and Warren Beaty. A classic. As the movie got close to the end I swear it was like a lightning bolt came down crashing on my head.

There's a scene in the movie where Natalie Wood's character gets out of a mental hospital and goes to see the "Love of her Life".
She tracked down Warren Beaty's character only to find that once handsome love of her life, married to a now very pregnant woman and he walked into the house filthy from working in the field of his farm.

She looked at him and knew she would never be with him again. It was like someone was talking directly to me. I knew that if I left Bob in Kansas, I would never be with him again. His doctors told him he could never go back there if he wanted to live.

I did the only thing I could think of, I asked Bob if he wanted to get "MARRIED". He was stunned. He asked me if I was serious and who could blame him. I told him that I was never more serious. He told me that he loved me and it would be his honor.
We went to sleep that night and Bob woke me up really early the next morning. The first thing he did was ask me if I had changed my mind yet. He was adorable. He had grown accustomed to me rejecting his marriage proposals and he just wanted to be sure. I told him that I had not changed my mind, I wanted to marry him.

He got the yellow pages out and we tracked down a "Justice of the Peace" in Olatha Kansas that would marry us without the three day waiting period or blood tests. We got dressed, had breakfast, went and bought two gold wedding bands and found a cab to the court house. Judge Walton married us and his secretary was our only witness.

I got married in a purple fringe jacket and purple cords. It was the happiest day of my life. We went back to our hotel and called our families. Now in our excitement we never thought for one moment that our families probably thought we were both crazy. They all were so gracious. After all we had known each other for over five years it certainly wasn't two strangers eloping. The only person who openly told us the truth was his doctor. He was appalled. It was his plan that Bob never go back to L.A. and he didn't even know I was coming to visit, let alone marry Bob.

We had a remarkable dinner at the Hotel restaurant. I will never forget it. "The Peppercorn Duck Club" was the name of it.
We dined on Chateaubriand and for dessert there was this amazing chocolate bar. Ice cream with all the toppings that you could imagine. It was romantic. Just the two of us madly in love without a care in the world or a plan for that matter.

The following morning Bob decided we needed to go on a Honeymoon. I only had three days left before I had to go back to Los Angeles. We flew to Aspen Colorado. I had never been there. It was a winter wonderland. We spent our honeymoon there and celebrated Thanksgiving at the same time.
No two people have ever felt more grateful to be together. Bob told me a story of a nun who had given him a copy of the book of "Job" to read. The story had quite an impact on his life. It was that book that made the biggest difference in our lives. He told me the story of Job and that he prayed everyday to just please help him stay sober and he prayed that someday he would have a second chance at a family. Perhaps a son to take to the ball games with. The hospital had taken him to games while he was there and it had impacted him so greatly it was all he prayed for. Sobriety for a second chance at a sober new family life. He could never mend his first marriage and he just adored his daughter, but the damage had already been done. She was pretty much "Lost" to him in the sense that a weekend father would never fill the hole in his gut.

I had watched him for years cry rivers of tears over the loss of being a full time father. He desperately wanted a second change. God was going to answer his prayers. He had just answered the first one. He had been convinced that I was no longer an option. He had to move on and get over me. I had tried the same thing. It's funny how destiny took charge.
We were destined to be together. There was no question about that. Most people could have never survived our first five years together and still even talk to one another. This man was my soul mate there wasn't anything that would tear us apart.
Bound by love and destiny. An epic love story unfolding before our very eyes. We just climbed on board and let the gods above show us our future one day at a time.
The Beautiful tortured soul that I had grown to love so completely was healing from the inside out. I thanked my god in heaven that he had given me the ability to see the beautiful soul that was inside this man. I had never known anyone as smart, kind and simply mesmerizing as he was. I had also never known anyone so completely out of control and on a crash course to hell as he had been.

Hopefully that part of our lives was behind us now. It was not a choice, I told Bob I was only staying married to him thru sobriety only. I could never repeat any of the past out of control years. I was in it only thru sobriety. It was enough for him a bargain was struck between us. We both put the past behind us and enthusiastically embraced our new marriage and his sobriety.

Rebuilding

2007-01-03T21:11:00.000-08:00

I spoke to Bob everyday after that miraculous phone call. It was the end of October and I had been planning a trip to Mexico with a mutual friend of ours from AA. Her father was producing a movie in Mexico and I had my tickets purchased to go with her there during the Thanksgiving Holiday.

The more I spoke with Bob, the more I missed him. I decided that Mexico could wait. I already had the time off from work and an airline ticket. I changed my plans. I flew to Kansas to see him.
I had an agenda. I was either going to never see him again or I was going to spend the rest of my life with him. Depending on that little voice in my head and the feeling in my gut.

The day I arrived in Kansas was a day I will never forget. I got off the plane and walked into this small terminal and there was the most handsome face I had ever seen. The face of the man I adored. I ran to him. It really was a scene out of a movie.
There we were, movie star gorgeous, the both of us looking so L.A. for being out in Kansas. People were starring at us and we didn't see them. It was quite a re-union. The last time I saw him I was giving him back his diamond engagement ring he had given me and he was in terrible shape that day. I thought I would never see him again that day and here he was.

I had a purple fringed jacket on and he had a plaid shirt on. He didn't even have a leather jacket left to his name. There was something really different about him a serenity that I had never seen in him before. He was calm, quiet and at peace in his own skin. I don't know any other way to describe him. I liked the new improved Bob. I hadn't felt safe or calm in his presence for many years. I was always walking on egg shells around him. Even when he was "Dry" he was never "Sober". I didn't know him sober it was like someone else had invaded his body. I liked this feeling of security. I was home. I was where I was meant to be. I saw all my hopes and dreams in his eyes. My agenda was confirmed. I was not going to let him go again.

We got my luggage and drove to his apartment. On the way there he told me about the court case he had gone thru. The judge was so impressed with his progress he suspended his sentence. Bob was a free man. He had been doing some "Pro- Bono" work for the Legal Aid offices during the day and at night he was the "Prop Master" at a local Play House. He was going to noon meetings and keeping in contact with his doctor. I had not seen a productive Bob the entire five years before this. To say I was impressed was an understatement.

Bob decided to take me to Kansas City for the weekend. There was a Hyatt Hotel that had collapsed several years back and now it was rebuilt and the rooms were beyond cheap. They couldn't give them away. So for $35 a night we got a great room. We hopped on a Grey Hound Bus the next morning and headed for Kansas City. Neither of us had ever been there before so we were excited.

We walked around town, had a great Italian Dinner, went out to a night club, which did make me uncomfortable, but I didn't tell him and I was glad I didn't because we ended up having an amazing night.
He told me that the Hospital Doctor told him if he went back to Los Angeles to live he would more than likely relapse and die. They had diagnosed him with the beginning of "Wet Brain" He had done so much heavy drinking he had caused severe damage to his brain. The other part of his brain would compensate for the damaged part but it would never regenerate. Bob was 33 years old and he had caused major damage to himself.

"Wet Brain" is the condition that many skid row drunks have. You see them walking funny and talking to themselves not to mention severe memory loss. Something that would affect him the rest of his life. This condition was one of the conditions which helped to put a damper on his relationship with his daughter. She always thought he didn't pay any attention to her when she talked to him, the truth was he had a really severe case of short term memory loss. A condition we confirmed by a specialist in Beverly Hills when he started getting bad headaches years later.

He was determined to keep this condition from his daughter and his family. They never really discussed it. Many years later I told his daughter about his condition trying to let her know it wasn't her, he just couldn't help it. It was a permanent condition caused by abuse.

I fell in love all over again that night. The time we spent together just flew by. I didn't want it to ever end. I was HAPPY something I hadn't been for a long time.

For many years Bob had asked me to marry him, and my answer was always the same. "SOMEDAY" it was all I could ever say. I was never in the frame of mind to accept his proposal so he just stopped asking me. Even thou we had been engaged, it was more of a commitment to not see other people than to get married. He was never in the condition to get married and I wasn't that crazy to marry someone who could be such a Jeykle and Hyde personality at any given moment.

All I wanted to do was just enjoy our brief time together and not worry about anything. That was until we went up to our room and watched the Movie that forever changed our lives.

The months go by

2007-01-03T20:29:00.000-08:00

Bob got to Hazleton in August and I rarely heard from him during his stay there. When he arrived he was "Engaged" to a former call girl or whatever she was. They obviously were never serious especially after they took the trip to Tahiti and things went from bad to worse for Bob's health when she was sneaking vodka into his hospital room.

I'm sure the doctors had Bob trying to sort out all the chaos he had created from his last slip. I do know that he had counted on her to help get all his things out of the house he rented in Studio City after he had trashed it. Of course the one thing you can always count on with the element that he had been associating with is that they could not be trusted. So one day I did get a call from him asking if I could please contact this woman and see if I could get his paintings back from her. She had shipped him his clothes minus all his valuable leather jackets and of course the artwork was also not included. When I finally did reach her she was arrogant and flippant. She told me to mind my own business and not bother her again. Bob's first wife also had spoken to her and tried to reason with her to just give back the paintings. She was not successful either. So that was a lesson he had learned.

It was part of the consequences of his drinking and using. He tended to loose everything he owed of any value but this time he was lucky that he got out with his life, thats how far gone he was when he got there.

So the months seemed to fly by and his birthday, October 27th, came and went. I tried to call him at the hospital to wish him a happy birthday and they told me he had been released. I felt a knife stab deep in my gut. I tried calling information and there was no listing for him. I felt a deep loss and was convinced that I would probably never hear from him again. The last time I spoke to him he asked me if I was seeing anyone and I told him that I was. Actually I was just dating, but I did not want to open a door to enable him again so I was very sure to let him know that things were not the same between us after all he did get "engaged" to someone else during the previous months and I felt it was best to let things remain as they were.
I was just trying to be strong to not cave in, I had to let him go. When we got off the phone I just broke down and sobbed. It didn't matter that I was sitting at my desk at work. I was so heart broken but it was important to be strong, for the both of us if we were ever going to get well. Either one of us. We had to learn how to not be in love or together.

A funny thing happens when you put that much thought and energy into someone you care about, they contact you or you just "Happen" to run into them someplace. And sure enough one morning around 7:30 the phone rang, it was Bob. I couldn't believe it. All I could say to him was how happy I was to hear from him. I told him I had been trying to call him on his birthday and could not find him. I felt so relieved just to hear his voice. A sense of wholeness engulfed my entire body. The missing link to my happiness was in place. I just threw caution to the wind. No more being strong or tough. I just had to be honest. There were no games going to be played this time. I loved this man and he needed to know that there was one person besides his dad that could love him and forgive him unconditionally.
He had been sober for four months this time. One of the longest stretches of sobriety he had reached in severall years. I was overcome with a renewed sense of hope. Genuine hope. Bob had bottomed out. He had lost everthing, including his digity when he was living in the desert. He was sincere about rebuilding his life. I heard it in his voice, I felt it in my body. It was different this time.

So started the beginning of the rest of my life.

Scared Straight

2007-01-02T23:24:00.000-08:00

It's amazing how much fear motivates a person. The fear of losing his freedom catapulted Bob into some serious commitment to getting and staying sober. This was not uncommon for Bob when first entering any recovery place he was always serious about getting well. The problem was that he had been to over 20 some rehabs by this time and the longer he was there or at any place for that matter, the more his restlessness took over. At some point he just wanted to get out and would really stop paying attention to the couselors. But this place didn't have "Counselors" it had shinks.

One day his new Doctor called me. As he started telling me of Bob's good attitude and co-operation I laid it out for him. Bob was one of the smartest people I had ever known in my life. He had figured out what to say years ago to get the staff off his back. He was so charming and sounded so sincere and convincing. I told the doctor that if he really wanted to help Bob he could not let him get away with anything. He was capable of telling him exactly what the doctor wanted to hear. He was an expert at going to Rehab.

The Doctor took my advice and the next time I did talk to Bob he told me how they were really on his case and if he didn't do everything the wanted he was going to jail.

Mission accomplished. Bob was scared straight. He did everything he was told to do and maybe for the first time in a long time he told the truth to someone.

I'm sure it was very painful for him to face the pain he had put his family thru and I was stunned when I got a call from his Dad asking my opinion of what I thought about his going to see Bob in Kansas. I couldn't believe he was thinking of going. I of course told him that I knew he had to go. It was a good thing hopefully for the both of them. Hopefully there would be some healing for the two of them.

His father had always been there for him, but he had never gone to visit him in any of the many places since I knew Bob in the past five years. The fact that his Dad was going was major. Now Bob couldn't blame his father any longer as he used to go on and on about how noone in the family ever came to see him. He used it as an excuse to drink. One more excuse was stripped away from him.

Bob would be left facing his demons and the truth, no matter how painful it was for him.

As they say in the AA program, speak the truth and the truth will set you free. It was all starting.

Thoughts

2006-12-11T00:47:00.000-08:00

I find that sitting here writing about all the things that happened to Bob I have failed to really include the rollercoaster ride that I was taking at the same time.
How does one justify living in a totally out of control environment? What does that say about me? Several things come to mind, but I think the most obvious is that I simply loved and adored a really sick man. I haven't said much about the sober times, but you should know that those were the times that kept me hanging in there, hoping that one of these times a "CURE" could be found.

Of course I didn't understand then as I do now, that there is no cure for this disease, just simply not picking up that first drink, which by all my witnessing, first hand, was a lot harder than it sounds, especially for Bob.

But during those times when he was not drinking we lived a life that few people will ever know. I loved him to the core of my being and I believe he loved me the same way. How many people ever really and truly experience that kind of love.

We used to compare ourselves to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. Like them inspite of all the fighting, relapse and argument's, there was a bond between us that would never be broken. This disease is not for the faint of heart. It takes it out of you. It will drag you down into the deepest caverns of despair and then suddenly lift you high into Euphoric States of excitement and renewed hope when "normalcy" returns. It's like having a honeymoon time over and over again.

It's funny, but I never ever gave up the idea that one day Bob would loose the craving to pick up that first drink. Silly me, but I could not face a life with him if I didn't believe in his sincere desire to be rid of the demon that had a hold on his soul.
Every single time he got sober again, I seemed to have this renewed belief in his ability to "make it" this time.
I really have lost count of the times I said that to my family and myself.
I simply wanted to believe that every time he got sober he would stay sober. I just knew he could. I knew it.

We would spend all those times being such a normal couple. We shared a passion for movies, we both loved taking his daughter places, we wanted to be a happy little family, and during those times we were. The ideal couple, so in love as we were. I was devoted to his every wish, I never wanted to not be there for him.

Having said that, I was also now fully imersessed in AlAnon and it's "tough love" philosophy.
One time we went to a really large AA conference in Palm Springs with all our AA friends and a speaker actually told me that if I continued too "Help" him the way I had been, I might as well just hand him a gun myself, because in her opinion, I was killing him as much as he was killing himself.
That shook me to the core of my soul. How could she I thought. What a terrible thing to say to someone. Little did I know that she was right.
I had to learn the hard way, that one of the things Bob loved about me the most was the fact that I was a World Class Enabler.
Hell, I still would be if he were here today.
I struggled with that one. I would almost have to restrain myself to not be there for him. It just simply got to the point where I would have to unplug my phones so that I wouldn't be tempted to go and break him out of another rehab or nurse him back to health after getting so sick from drinking.

I didn't know how to say no. I couldn't do it. I just learned to not here the question. But the moment that call came in that he was ready to go somewhere, anywhere to get sober again, he knew I would always be there to help him get there no matter what it took and I guess the fact that I with the help of his dad and the attorney, really did go to any length the help him. And just wait until you read the reward that I got for just being there one last time.

When that last call came in for help I hadn't even seen him for at least two or three months, but I somehow knew it was coming, I always knew.

Not so Fast

2006-11-19T21:15:00.000-08:00

Of course nothing was ever easy as I knew. I was just holding my breath hoping that he would make it to Salt Lake City.
We had arranged a hotel room for him to stay in that night and the attorney gave him permission to charge dinner and toiletries to the room and of course of pack of cigarettes.

He called me when he checked in. The first part of the trip to Kansas was over. He just needed to stay sober for one more night and catch the flight from Salt Lake to Kansas City. I felt relieved that his trip this far went off without any problems. Maybe he really was serious about getting sober. At least he was calling and saying he was. He called to say good night and told me he was very grateful to have a place to go. It must have been very traumatic sleeping in the desert. So traumatic that it seemed he was willing to do whatever it took to get help this time.
I know from being with him for years that he was most likely very sick at the moment. Otherwise he would not be so willing.
Of course he didn't want to alarm me and tried to make it sound like he was in fairly decent shape, I really knew better.

The next morning he got on a plane to Kansas and again the Attorney made arrangements for him to stay in a hotel for a couple of days. The Menenger Foundation did not have the facility to detox patients, he would have to do that himself. They would not admit him until he was sober for at least five days. This was day two. I was worried because this was a critical time for him.
If he was as sick as I knew he could be, he would go into some sort of bad withdrawal and all he would want was a drink to calm his shakes.

This hotel would not let him charge anything to the room but they were willing to accept an additional charge of $10 and they would give him the money to get some more cigarettes. He always chain smoked but even more when he was detoxing.
I didn't give it another thought. Kansas was a dry State and I didn't have anything to worry about.

Little did I know at the time that he would take that $10, find a "Club" that would sell bottles of alcohol and be off and running again.

I called his room before I went to sleep that night, because I had not heard from him. I started to worry. This was not a good sign. I just had this gut feeling that something was wrong. I barely slept that night.
The following morning I called his hotel again, no answer. I called the desk, they said they had not seen him.
What went through my mind was that he was dead. I thought his withdrawal had been so bad that his heart gave out on him.
I was freaking out.
I called the Menenger Foundation and told them what I was worried about. He was simply gone. The admissions people told me not to worry, they would track him down and find out what had happened to him. They told me to just stay calm, they would find him.

Several hours went by and I finally got a call. Bob was in the Kansas City Jail, and was awaiting sentencing for trying to force his way into a local hospital. He caused such a scene that they had him arrested. That's how sick he was. He hated hospitals with a passion and now he was trying to get himself admitted into one. That was a good sign but he just didn't go about it the right was. The staff called the cops on him.
This was Kansas, not Los Angeles. When he went before the Judge the Judge sentenced him to Menengers, it was no longer voluntary. He had to return to see the judge in two months and at that time he would let Bob know if he was going to lock him away in the State Mental Facility. It wasn't like California, where you could get out in 72 hours. If the Judge wanted to he could lock him in there and throw away the key. It was his discretion. He warned Bob that if he heard one bad report from the doctors at Menengers, that would be the end of his freedom. Bob was scared. More scared than he had ever been.
He was sent back to his jail cell. He was not sober enough to be admitted to the Treatment Center. This place was not really a treatment center for drugs or alcohol. It was a mental hospital that he was waiting to get in to Not the re=hab places that he was used to. This would be an totally different Journey. This time they were going to try and get to the bottom of why he just kept going back to the bottle. Nothing had worked for him so far.

He had tried everything conventional and still he would pick up that first drink. It was as confusing for him as for anyone.
This time, this place was going to approach things from an entirerly new direction. But now there was the added kicker of the Judge doing the decision making.

He could not afford to take this lightly. His freedom was virtually in the hands of some Judge in Kansas that could have cared less about his past history of trying to get and stay sober. He wanted results this time or he was just going to lock him up as a menace to Society for as long as he felt was necessary, even if it meant years.

Need I say Bob was just about to get "SCARED STRAIGHT'.

The Real Bottom

2006-11-09T21:57:00.000-08:00

It had been years now, to be exact almost four and a half years of knowing him. He had lived through so many near death traumas it was hard to keep us with all the terrible things that had happened to him.
His heart had stopped once and he had to have the paddles put on him to bring him back. Guns pointed at his head, a knives cut near his eye, slashed wrists, walking on balconeys three stories high and who knows what I don't know. I guess it was never his time.
I had never known anyone who courted death as he did. Whether he was aware of it or not, to me the man had a death wish, I know he wasn't crazy, he had been in enough therapy in all the 31 programs over the years to know that for sure. He just hated being an alcoholic. To him it was a humiliation and he knew it humiliated his family too.

One day I recieved a call from his dad at work. He was leaving for Maui, but before he went he had made arrangements for his attorney to have the power of attorney in Bob's case. His dad knew that Bob was in serious trouble now, so he covered him before he left town. His dad knew that if Bob would ask for any kind of help it would come from a call to me. I told him that if I did hear from Bob I would do everything I could to get him into a hospital. He had arranged for a long term hospitala in Kansas to admit him. the only thing was, they would not detox him, he had to enter completely sober. I had no idea if Bob would even call me for help I thought he still was with the "Girlfriend". But I gave his dad my word. I would do whatever I could should I hear from him. It was Friday and of course I had the weekend off.

Late on Monday afternoon, I got a call from Bob. I could not believe it. It must have been some sort of connection that we always had that he knew I would always be there to help him when he was ready to get sober. I asked him how he was.
The story he told me seemed impossible.

Bob was living in the desert near Reno, under a bush. He told me about how he trashed his house when he thought that he was being followed and that he had spent several days in his closet sure that he was being watched. He explained in detail how he kicked out the sliding glass doors and overturned all his furniture looking for whomever it was that was following him. He told me he sold his car took the money and hopped on a bus to Reno to get away from this person.

Of course it was all paranoid delusion from the substances that he had been using. None of it was real. I asked him what happened to all his stuff and he said the girlfriend was going to pack it up for him.

I told him I had spoke to his Dad and I wanted to know what his plans were. He told me he wanted help. Thats all I needed to hear. I asked him if he had any money and he said he did not. I asked him what he did have, anything that could get him to an airport. He told me he had a bus ticket to Salt Lake City. I told him to get on it and call me when he got there.
I hung up and called the attorney.

We were on the road to recovery. Thank God.

New Lows

2006-11-08T11:27:00.000-08:00

The doctors could not understand why they could not stop the staff infection from spreading. They were giving him massive amounts of anti biotics but still nothing was stopping it. Then a nurse found a bottle of vodka that his new "girlfriend" was sneaking into his room. They immediately banned her from going to see him.

Talking to him on the phone knowing how close to loosing his leg made me more aware of just how advanced his disease had taken him. He was being given so much morphine along with the antibiotics that he actually said he didn't care if he lost his leg. He liked the feeling of being on the morphine. Even many years later he was still telling my roommate this same story.
This is just one little example of how his life was reeling out of control before my very eyes and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

When they finally released him from the hospital, he was now craving morphine. His "girlfriend" had some pretty questionable acquaintances and one night she introduced him to what he called an "Israeli Mob Guy" He was looking for drugs and this man thought he was an undercover policeman. They got into an argument and this guy pulled out a gun and pointed it at Bob's head.
Bob told him to go ahead and shoot him, he would be doing him a favor. The man put his gun down and Bob said he told him he was a crazy Mother Fucker and couldn't be a cop. Bob simply had a Death Wish. It would even show up in his sobriety. He wasn't afraid of dying and put himself in many terrible situations. I thought the man had nine lives.
Bob wore that story on his sleeve for years like a badge of honor. That's how sick he was. That isn't something to brag about in my world. For some reason all these horrible things that happened to him made his"Story" seem all the more interesting to him.
There were times when he was sober in AA that he would comment on what "light weight" some of the speaker's stories were.
He had a tale to tell that was better than theirs. He loved the drama in fact it was as much a part of his addiction and the substance abuse was. He was a total adrenaline junkie. Even starting a fight, he would get his endorphine rush that he was seeking for some type of relief.

This was the beginning of his paranoid phase. Whatever he was taking had pushed him into full blown paranoid delusion.
He started driving around with a baseball bat in his car. One night one of his former friends from the program who was now also drinking again, went out and got into some sort of fight with a guy in a truck. They smashed his windshiel with the bat and then just took off. I got the call from Don that night telling me how out of control Bob's behavior was becomming.
He no longer wanted to hang out with him either.
I wondered what I was supposed to do about it. I was no longer his girlfriend I told Don. It seemed Don didn't approve of her either. Don got sober again right after that incident and stopped hanging out with Bob.
Bob was now pretty much alone most of the time except when someone delivered whatever it was he was taking.

Left on his own his delusions got stronger and stronger. He was convinced someone was after him. Even his cousin who was always trying to be there for him, bailed out. He was simply to far gone to socialize with.
I don't remember if Bob called me or someone else called but one night the call came. Bob had kicked out all the glass doors in his house broke all the furniture, and had to be rushed into the hospital for surgery. The plate glass doors had severed his leg pretty bad and he needed surgery and plastic surgery to save it.

Bob had gone over the deep end. The Bob everyone knew and loved was gone. I had no idea who was in his skin, but it wasn't Bob.

I did not hear from him again for at least a month when he did call it was not good. He was living in the dessert under a bush.

Disappointment's in the Air

2006-11-05T13:47:00.000-08:00

It was the roller-coaster ride I simply could not get off of. Just when things were going great all hell would break loose. The only good thing was that this time around we had separate places to live so that I was not in the eye of the Storm.

By this time Bob's roommate was hiding that he was back on some sort of drugs, he was not paying rent, stealing Bob's clothes. Bob wanted him gone. I'm not sure how long it took to get him out because I wasn't around much during this time again.

I was working two jobs to pay my rent and car payments, I didn't really have much time to dwell on the horrors that must have been taking place in his world.
When I wasn't working I was hanging out with our Sober friends and staying really close to the group. At least I wasn't alone in this next relapse. I was being coached the entire time to just not interfere and let it take it's course. It's a very hard thing to do I must tell you. Especially when I knew the nature of his disease. The outlook was always worse and worse.

The only thing Bob really had going for him was that he would get too physically sick to drink for any really long period of time, but that I mean "Years". This time I think it went on for several months.

During that time he did have a few brief spurts of not drinking which always resulted in me getting a phone call wanting to see me. I always said yes.

He invited me to see the new place he rented. It was a cute little house in Studio City. I was pretty surpassed he moved over there but it was a house with a pool, not an apartment. I know he needed to be out from under the scrutiny of any neighbors prying eyes. It was hard to be his neighbor when he was drinking. I'm sure he thought a house could provide him more privacy.

Once again, there was a special room for his daughter. I was not happy with this choice of a residence because in order for his daughter to reach her bedroom, she had to go outside and up a staircase to get there. I think she was only seven at the time. I worried about that.

He wanted us both to forgive him and start fresh. We took his daughter out and let her pick out a puppy, thinking it was a fresh start and maybe he was serious this time. That little bit of happiness didn't last very long. During the week he had to take care of the dog, and himself. He was inches away from another slip.

The dog was out of control running all over the neighborhood and their neighbors started complaining. I will never really know what happened to that little dog, but one day it was gone. He said it ran away. A little Pomeranian just went missing.
I think someone just took it and gave it a better home. He wasn't well enough to take care of it.

During the time in this house all the "Working Girls" started to come over again.
His disease was progressing so rapidly now it was hard to keep up with him. In and out of hospitals and then back to using.
He was so sick at one point he called and asked me to please come over. I did.

He was living on cold cans of soup which he could barely keep down. He was in bad shape but not bad enough to get sober.
There was evidence of drug use going on in the house all over the place. I had never known him to use needles for anything, but his "friends" did. It was a terrible scene.

During this time he met up with a woman whom he said was a "Madam" or something. Who knows. All I know is that his poor daughter had to spend time with him and this woman and her child. He informed me that this was his new fiance.
One night she called me to give me the happy news. I have no idea why she would do that, but I actually congratulated her.
Of course it wasn't sincere because I knew what she was in for. She said they were going to take a trip to Tahiti, a trip I refused to take with him. Actually I refused to go anywhere with him unless he was sober. I would not have wanted to be her for anything.

So off they went to Tahiti. Only a couple of addicts could turn Paradise into a nightmare vacation. It was a vacation from hell. When he got home he landed in the hospital just about to have his leg amputated from a cut he got on a coral reef that was not properly taken care of.

A new kind of nightmare was about to unfold.

Living alone

2006-11-03T22:58:00.000-08:00

So after all the drama of the past few years, believe it or not living without him was harder than living with him. I was so sad. The world seemed bleak.
One day I was walking down Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills and I ran into his old Legal Secretary. I just burst into tears when she asked me how I was and how Bob was. I was heartbroken. In spite of everything we had been through, I still just loved this man.

I often think about how some people can just end a marriage or a relationship and start dating the following week. I was in mourning. I had a constant knot in my stomach. The days and nights became endless for me so I started hanging out with all of our former friends in the AA program. There was this amazing group called "Try God" that was full of relatively young sober friends of ours. They reached out to me in this horrible time for Bob and included me in all their activities which included dances, movies, barbques and even a outing to Magic Mountain and the State Fair.

Little by little I was learning to have some real fun again. I tried dating a little but my heart was never in it so I just hung out with the girls in the group. I think I've been to more AA meetings than any non drinker I ever knew. I know the 12 step programs like the back of my hand. It gave me hope. Something to grab onto, because in my heart I just knew that Bob wanted to be sober more than he wanted to be drunk. I just knew it.

Several months had gone by since I moved out and I wasn't around when he also moved out of our shared apartment, but he had a new place that was all his own now. He was spending a lot of time with his cousins at the time and I have to say not always the best company where the "Ladies" were concerned. It was during this time that he would meet one of the most beautiful women I have ever met in LA. She was a former Prom Queen in her home town and came to Hollywood to make it big and become a "Star" Well, she was a working girl, but not in the movie industry. Another sad story of a shattered dream.
The reason Bob was always attracted to the "Working Girls" were their access to the things he couldn't get from the doctors. I won't spell it out but you get the hint.

One of Bob's weaknesses was that he just couldn't stand to be alone, ever. With this crown he found he could pay for company so that he didn't have to be alone in addition to the rest of it.

I haven't much to tell of this period until something tragic was about to happen. We started speaking again and he took me over to his new apartment to show it off. He had set up a really nice place for himself and even had a great room for his daughter. I was impressed. I think hanging out with his cousins had curbed some of his drinking for a while. During this time one of his cousins was having some very serious problems with the other cousins best friend. There was a dispute and the friend was asked to get out of the apartment he was renting because another friend was going to be moved in.

Things just started to get out of hand and Bob went to a hearing to testify that Stephen was a loose canon ready to go off the deep end at any moment. As a former Assistant Deputy DA, Bob did have a sense of these things. He had learned to interprete the criminal mind rather well. He warned the woman who was the mediator that Stephen was going to cause great harm to someone. She just dismissed the idea altogether like they were all paranoid. Less than a week later Stephen attacked and Killed his cousin Michael in a park in Beverly Hill's public bathroom.

That event shattered an entire family who till this day struggle with the tragety. Bob tried to warn the mediator, no one listened.

I didn't see too much of Bob after the funeral. He sunk to the bottom of some bottle and didn't surface until he called me from yet another hospital.

This time I really thought he would stay sober. Life was just too painful to relive the scene without Michael. Sobriety seemed his only relief.
It was at this rehab that he was part of what the group "The Wild Bunch" affectionatly named themselfs. Bob was starting to be less and less embarrased by his disease. He had been through enough rehabs and listened to enough other patients to finally believe he was not a bad man, just a man with a terrble disease which when he picked up a drink he was no longer capable of making any rational choices. He was always ending a drunken run now either in a hospital or in trouble with the police like drunk driving or drunken disorderly etc.

One of the guys in this group was Gary, a former heroine addict who did not have anywhere to live when he got out. It was right around Christmas and Bob invited him to live with him until he got on his own two feet.

I thought maybe it would be just the thing to help him stay sober. Two people in a house supporting each other's commitment to sobriety. Things were good.

We decorated the house for Christmas together. We bought a tree, presents. the entire holiday could not be better. Because Gary was living in the bedroom set up to be his daughter's on the weekends they would stay with me. We were back together and we all seemed happy.

Bob his daughter and I even had a great New Years Eve together. We spent it at my apartment and we got hats and noise makers and it was fun. Every now and then I look at the pictures of us wearing our New Years Eve hats and remember how much fun we used to have together. I loved them both very much.

Could this last? That was the question.

And On and On

2006-11-02T20:33:00.000-08:00

To the best of my recollection sobriety lasted until after Christmas that year. I can't remember just when but it started to get a rhythm going 6months sober, six weeks sober, six days, sober and then always another rehab.

I can only remember the worst events accurately because the rest just blended in to one another. As I mentioned I lost count after 31 times. For example.

Bob goes to Camarillo where he is in a locked ward for trying to slash his wrists again and I desperately tried to get him out.When I got there the place scared me. During the day they would lock the patients out of their rooms for some reason and they were just all wandering around the halls until evening. I was appalled. I'm sure I must have called his dad and finally I think his dad had arranged to have him transferred to a private hospital near Westwood. He was grateful to be there. It was there that he learned to make little frogs in ceramic class or something. He was there twice.

The night John Lennon was killed, Bob was in Rehab in a great place in Tustin. I broke the news to him there. It was one of the places I helped him get out early from. At that time I didn't know how to practice touch love yet.

Then he started to hang out with the "MOB" guys again and that's whey I just couldn't do it anymore. He announced when I got home from work that we were having this thug Jimmy over for one of my special Italian dinners. I would not cook and pretend to entertain a bunch of drunken hoods. I gave him an ultimatum them or me.
He choose them. I left and slammed the door behind me. I went to the receptionist house for several hours and when I got home all hell broke loose.

Bob was beyond drunk and he was really angry. He threatened to throw me out of our apartment and he called the police. Fortunately for me after he called them he went outside to wait for them. I locked him out. He created such a disturbance outside that when the Police got there they hauled him off to the Beverly Hills Police department for the night. It was a Friday, I will never forget it because the next day, Saturday Morning his friend, an attorney, who bailed him out of jail, called me and told me if I was smart I would just leave and move out.

I packed a bag, and I never lived there again. I spent the weekend looking for a place to live and my friend put me up at her apartment until I did. I finally found a two bedroom cute apartment and I rented it. I called his dad and I asked him if he could loan me $500 to move in. He was so kind and I got the money to make the move.

Ten days later, I had to pick a day when Bob was not home to move all my stuff out. I was terrified that he would come back, but he did not. All the furniture in the place was mine except for the bed we bought together. I left it for him along with some kitchen stuff and towels.

I was on my own for the first time in almost two years. My how the time flew between dramatic events.

The Cycle Begins

2006-11-01T08:33:00.001-08:00

Bob came out of rehab and we decided to move out of the "hood". With his father's financial help we found a really wonderful two bedroom apartment in Beverly Hills. It was one of those two story fantasy apartment buildings. We loved it and so did his daughter. She was close to her mom's house when we had her on the weekends and I'm sure everyone felt much better that she was in a very safe area now. I was cutting hair in a salon in Beverly Hills now, so it was really convenient for me also.

The only problem was that Bob no longer was practicing law and his days were spent waiting for me to come home from work. In the beginning he would read all day, something he did all the time from that point until the end. I would get home and we would head into Westwood to see a movie and have a bite to eat.

This sober period lasted for approximately six months, then one day he just picked up a drink and the nightmare started all over again. I honestly cannot tell you how many times he started and stopped drinking before the next attempt at killing himself happened. He had been out of another rehab and they released him with antabuse. It is supposed to help alcoholics not drink. Well Bob took an entire bottle with a fifth of vodka and had to be rushed to the Hospital. They held him for a couple of days to evaluate him and make sure he was physically ready to be released. When he left his doctor gave him a really good talk telling him how much he had to live for and wondered why he would try to end his life.

Bob came home and immediately went out and bought a bottle of Vodka. It was baffling to everyone. After several attempts at staying sober again his family decided to step in with a solution.

Bob was going to live in Israel on a kibbutz. His uncle and his family were all on their way there and they would take Bob with them. The only thing was Bob would not go without me. I loved him so much that I agreed to move to Israel with him. I could not leave at the same time as they did because I had to quite my job and sublet our apartment. I made arrangements to leave in two weeks.

I felt really lucky because our new receptionist was willing to sublet our apartment fully furnished. I left two weeks later.
I met him in Jerusalem and he had a great hotel with his family there. It was amazing. The following day we went to Tel-Aviv
and again we stayed in an amazing hotel right on the beach. We went into town and started looking for a kibbutz that would take the two of us. There were not that many that would take a non Jewish person, but we managed to find one out near the edge of the country. If you don't know what a Kibbutz is, it is a community run in the purest for of communism. You are provided with everything for your working. Housing, clothing and food.

It was called "NA ON". They were famous for making sprinklers and it was a very wealthy kibbutz by kibbutz standards.
The following day his uncle hired a car and took us there to make sure everything would be ok. When he was satisfied he left. They took us to get our work clothes and showed us to our "room" It was like a migrant farm workers cabin.
That night I cried myself to sleep. I was in a foreign land and was now going to be picking fruit and working in a sprinkler factory. It was a far cry from Beverly Hills.

I dug down deep and pulled myself together. After all, I had no choice. We did not have a return ticket to go back home. The family sent us there forever. I had brought my life savings with me, $500.
I started Hebrew school the following day. One of the rules for allowing us to stay in the same room was that we both had to attend what they call the Ulpon. A school that is taught in Hebrew to learn more Hebrew. I was the only non-Jew there.
I had to beg the teacher to please tell me something in English. I was simply lost. She was kind enough to teach me how to say "I don't speak Hebrew" that was the only thing I ever learned.

We settled into our routine rather quickly. If we had a good attitude it would be ok. The good thing was that all the other people in the Ulpon were young. Most of them were from South Africa and spoke English. As Halloween approached we all got ready for a party. Now we didn't have costumes so I showed up with a bathrobe and a shower cap on. That was the best I could do I don't remember what Bob went as.

What I do remember is that the punch bowl was filled with a alcohol based punch. The nightmare was just beginning again.
Bob did not get drunk that night, but he did drink. I had hoped that maybe he could handle the few drinks without going off the deep end. The next few days seemed to go ok except for his mood swings.

Little did I know that before I arrived, while he was in Switzerland with the family, he had already picked up his first drink. He was a time bomb just ticking away. He was now what they call, into "White Knuckle" sobriety. There was no support group, no rehab, just his staying dry. That is a big difference from sobriety. The weeks just went by with us picking fruit and on the weekends we would hitch a ride into Tel-Aviv. Bob had relative there who were so kind to us. One weekend they invited us to lunch and the younger cousins took us to see Cesarea. I loved it. An ancient Roman city. On other weekends we went to movies, cafes, the beach etc. It would not be so bad living there I felt.

Then the fateful night happened, Bob picked a fight with me, as was his habit when he wanted to get drunk, and he left the Kibbutz. I was frantic. I had no way of reaching him, no cell phones in those days and I knew he would be in grave danger if he started drinking.

Just like today, it is not safe to wander around as a Jew or an American in Arab territory alone, especially if you were the kind of drunk Bob was. Our kibbutz was right next to what is now famous for being Saddam Houseins home. Ramallah.
I don't know how he survived that night. When he came back the next morning, he told me that he was so drunk, they probably just thought that he was crazy and left him alone. That was the good news, the bad news was that he told me to pack up, we were leaving. I didn't know what we were going to do, but I followed him and we took a bus into Tel-Aviv.

We didn't have much money left from the $500 I brought with me, but we found a hotel for $25 a night. It was in the worst part of town. I didn't know that there was a "red light" district but there is and we were staying in it. Our room had holes in the walls and it was pretty dirty. Except for the sheets which were clean. Bob wanted to go out and get really drunk, I refused to go with him. He was gone for several hours and when he got back another beating was in store for me. This time I ended up with a battered face and a big black eye.

The next morning when he took a look at me I guess he beat me up in a black out, he decided to go drown himself in the ocean. He just wanted to die. I ran after him, and watched him swim as far out as he could. I was screaming for someone to help me. No one did. I guess he had a change of heart, and he came back to shore, exausted.
I called his father and begged him to please get us home. He did arrange for two tickets back to America. We managed to get from the Hotel to the airport the next day and we looked so bad, me with my black eye and him just plain sick. We had to be searched and everything. They finally released us and when we got our seats the worst possible thing for us happened.
We were scheduled to spend the night in Copanhagen. I don't know why. The airline put us up in a very nice hotel for the night. Bob went out drinking, and I took a nice hot bath trying to sooth my aching body. He did make it back to the hotel that night ane we managed to get on the next flight back home.
The worst thing happened to us though, we were seated in business class and they let you have free drinks. Bob started drinking heavily. The plain stopped in Seatle before LA and he was so drunk, he was threatning to get off and go visit one of his fraternity brothers. The flight attendant and me stopped him from leaving. We made it back to LA.

When we got there we literally had no money to get us from the airport to his dads house, where my car was parked. We were told to take a cab and he would pay for it. When we got there we rang the bell and his housekeeper answered the door with cab fare and my car keys. We were not let in the house.

We were lucky we had an apartment to go to. My friend who sublet our place changed her mind and left. His father was just about to take everything out and put it in storage and let the place go. We dodged the homeless bullet that night.

We now had to try and get our lives back together. It was the week before Thanksgiving and he really wanted to be with his daughter. I had $82 in an old savings account and I pawned all my jewelry. We had enough money to buy and prepare a nice dinner for her. I covered up my black eyes the best I could. She was too young to notice, but when I look at pictures of myself I can still see them.

Our life was a Nightmare and I did not know how we would ever get out of this horrible cycle.

Off the subject for a moment

2006-10-30T17:15:00.000-08:00

Today I had to go to small claims court to try and get money owed me back. I have been trying to get back the money I spent on someoneelses business, whom I worked for as an assistant, although under sworn testimony in court he denied it. But this person is a member of the California Bar Association, so I guess that gives him a license to lie.

Anyway I was totally prepared for his denial and I presented the Court with evidence showing that I indeed did work for him. My very own Lexus Nexis folder along with his. You can only get this if you are an attorney and then you can give your employee's access to the service with their very own password. That was how I got one.

I'm sure he was pretty surprised when I showed up in court with that along with emails sent to my email address pertaining to his business stating I was his assistant. He somehow got 5 people to perjure themselves against me stating in signed documents that I had never been his assistant. Two of these people I have never met and the other three I have only met once and it was on totally different occassions. Outside of his legal work.
This is what our world is faced with. You try and get what is owed you and instead of getting paid back they try to discredit you and slander you.

Did anyone see the movie Liar Liar? Well I say no more.

Playing cat and mouse with Oblivion

2006-10-29T11:07:00.000-08:00

The disease was progressing into something I could not comprehend. I had never been in the presence of someone who simply hated his existence and probably himself.
He was acting out, they call it a "cry for help". I heard his crys Loud and clear and still I could not help him.

I would come home and find him lying in bed with his wrists slit, actually there is still blood stains on the mattress of the pull out couch which was our only bed at the time. I would clean him up, feed him, and try to reason with him about how much he had to live for.

He didn't feel that way. His family was practicing tough love on him and simply left him to his own destructive behavior.

He was the "Golden Boy" in the family. They first one to get into Stanford in his family which started a whole line of relatives that would follow in his footsteps.
In the DA's office he never lost a case except I believe one. He was the smartest person I had ever known. I could not understand his fall from all that.

I have witnessed what it is to be a "Torchered Soul" it was heartbreaking and frustrating. We were both now 30 years old and life seemed too painful for him to continue. He tried to jump out of our apartment window one night. I must tell you that this apartment was in the Ghetto. The neighborhood was so bad that we were the only people living in our building that didn't have multiple families living with us.
He was no longer working, didn't have a car and started hocking whatever to get money for booze. I can't tell you how many times he walked down to the corner liquor store with a pocket full of pennies and change to buy a bottle of cheap Vodka.

We had two visitors at this apartment, one was my ex who literally broke into tears when he saw where I was living, it was a far cry from the house in Sausalito that we had together. The other visitor was his father, who offered to move us to a better neighborhood for the sake of his young daughter's safety.

When she came to visit on the weekends I think she must have been so scared when I look back at it. There was always a lot of loud music playing from the neighboring apartments, and once there were people spying on her through their windows.
She lived in a beautiful house in Beverly Hills, with her mother, and had the maids taking care of everything. It was like being in two different world for all of us.

That's what love can do for a person. I never cared about our surroundings. I just wanted to be with him. I wanted to SAVE him from himself. I just didn't know how.

After almost a year of being drunk and sick Bob checked into St. Johns Hospital for yet another attempt at getting sober. This was the first of many attempts at sobriety while we were together. I lost count somewhere after 30 times.

The one thing that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was that Bob wanted to be sober more than he wanted to be drunk. The sheer number of attempts to get sober where testimony enough in my mind.

What I had to learn was how to not Enable him. It was the hardest part of our life together.

The first time the hospital staff made me go to an Al-Anon Meeting, I left there upset and appalled at what I heard. In my world I always thought that you had to help your loved ones. They told me that I was not helping him, but hurting him by taking care of him. I did not agree. Actually had I listened to their advice, I think Bob would have died many years before he did.

The one person he knew that would always be there for him, no matter how tough or how many bad things that happened, was me. I am grateful to my God that I never abandoned him, no matter how angry he made me, I always forgave him. He was a sick man, not a bad man, as so many people viewed him. He simply needed help.