THE INFERNO

I Survived Alcoholism and Spousal Abuse

By: Patricia Oshier Bruening

A few quiet years passed. Bill had enough raises in pay to bolster our finances. We bought a house, along with its requisite mortgage and other responsibilities, and I was able to stay home, be a full time wife and mother, and spend my time writing. My first published story, Always a Warrior, was electronically published in May 2000. I began working on other stories but this first one was my baby. I had based the hero on what I believed to be Bill’s Navy SEAL/combat background but with a significant fictional twist. My created hero is a real SEAL and still active duty, a man of honor, when he meets the heroine. To my everlasting regret, my hero turned out to be the villain though it took me the next several years to realize and acknowledge that.

Settled in the three bedroom house we owned along with the mortgage company, we decided at my instigation to have another child. It may seem silly and old-fashioned to some, but I was happy then. I wanted my daughter to have a brother and I wanted to give my man a son, a boy who’d grow up to be just like his Daddy. These days, while I would never wish my son had never been born, I’m so glad he isn’t like his father.

For two years we tried to get pregnant, but during this time Bill’s alcohol consumption steadily increased proportionate with his discontent at work. More and more often he came home from work, ate dinner, and started drinking. He stayed up later and later, always griping about the job and the company. A job he had enjoyed for the better part of ten years now irritated him. the new department manager in particular. HE complained, often and loudly about how much work was loaded onto him, how office personnel couldn’t do their jobs right, and about the new manager. He didn’t just voice his discontent. He repeated the same complaints over and over again for several hours a night. The drunker he got, the more he repeated his complaints until he began to sound like a sound loop on replay. The more he drank, the more he complained; the more he complained, the more he drank. It developed into a pattern and then into a never-ending cycle. Nor did he confine his drinking to weekends, Friday and Saturday. He drank, getting drunk, more frequently during the week until it became every night. Sometimes we didn’t go to bed until three or four, or even five o’clock in the morning. If I wanted to go to bed before he did, I was told “No you’re not.” And made to stay up. The one time I went to bed anyway, he rummaged through CD’s talking loud enough for me to hear. “No, I won’t snap that one. My wife likes it.” Or he’d say things like, “You don’t care.” That one became a constant litany over the years until I got so sick of it…anyway, that comes later.

During that time, for the first time, he ordered me to get out. The command stunned me so much, I did leave. Now, I had a car but I was so shocked that I grabbed my keys and walked. I got as far as the end of the street before I came to my senses, realizing I had a car and didn’t have to walk. I went back and entered the house to find the lights off. Bill came out of the bedroom, dropped to his knees, almost prostrate on the floor, apologizing profusely. This began to establish a pattern though I didn’t realize it at the time.

Normally I only had beers and drank water the rest of the evening during these tirades. I began to drink a little more and discovered, though I didn’t know why at the time, that I was better able to assert myself if I drank along with him. So my own drinking gradually increased though not the extent his did. I could react rather than my normal reaction of just going along with everything he said and did. I didn’t realize it then but I had begun, in fact, to be afraid to cross him. If I pissed him off, it came out badly for me.

Let me try to explain thought processes that, at the time, were more emotional than rational. I loved him still and didn’t want to hurt or upset him in any way. Nor did I want to anger him, but that element contained a certain amount of fear since, as I believed, he had a combat background and had become increasingly irritable. He’d snap at people, me included, and yell at me when he was actually angry for reasons that had nothing to do with me. Basically, he took it out on me.

Even now I’m not sure if I simply ignored these shifts in behavior or didn’t realize what he was doing. Since I left him, I chose not to think about it often until I decided to write these articles. This is not a Look for These Signs series of articles, nor is it full of advice or How to…. This is my attempt to put straight into my mind how this all escalated and how I fell into the trap of enabling him to not only continue this behavior, but to allow it to get so much worse before I smartened up and escaped.

At any rate, we had been trying to get pregnant again and one day, after missing the start of my period, which had always been regular as clock work, I used a home pregnancy test kit. It was positive. I was so excited, I called everyone even before a doctor confirmed it. I had called my mother when we decided to have another but her reaction was less than supportive. She only said, “Well, if you think you need another one.” I didn’t realize then that Bill’s increasing alcoholism had affected the rest of my family even though they were so far away.

If he’d said anything horrible to them, I wasn’t aware of it. We did often call, even at night, but I thought it was all in a friendly, keep in touch manner. My mother did mention she thought he was an alcoholic but I didn’t listen to her. My father drank often but his behavior was quite different. But, I digress.

When I found out I was pregnant, I told everyone. I even called Bill at work on the company cell phone and told him. That night we celebrated. Admittedly, I did have a couple of glasses of wine but limited my intake to only two glasses. He didn’t limit himself and our celebration soon turned into his usual litany of complaints, loud and obnoxious. When I got tired and drowsy, around midnight, I stood up and stated that I was taking me and baby to bed. He said, “No, you’re not. Sit down.” He looked so harsh, his expression said or else. I forced myself to stay awake, struggling to keep my eyes open as he continued his tirade.

When he finally fell asleep on the couch, I went to bed. My alarm clock went off at around 6:30 or so. I sent my daughter, then about seven or eight years old, off to school and then made sure he went to work. Of course, he had a hangover so he snapped and snarled, grumbling the whole time. After he left, I slipped back into bed and slept for the next couple of hours. This pattern continued, and got worse. Even now, all these years later, I still have trouble maintaining any kind of regular sleep schedule. I still often find it difficult to sleep at night and often find myself napping in the afternoon, or even going back to sleep in the morning for most of the day.

Again, I digress. I was pregnant and very excited about it. So excited, that during the first week, I had a suitcase packed for the hospital and began thinking about names, I made an appointment with my doctor, our family physician who was also, at the time, an obstetrician. We had excellent HMO insurance through Bill’s company and no financial worries at the time. Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to be. I suffered a miscarriage less than two weeks later. During those two weeks, the late night drunken tirades continued. Sleep became sporadic as I was working on the first book, later published. Even then, I still put a lot of what I thought Bill was into my fictional hero. Now, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to think of that book the same way I did while working on it, or after it was published. To be honest, a lot of what happened between us went into that story but my hero handled it much better than my husband.

It is not my intention here to malign the man unnecessarily but to put the story straight. He had many people fooled, including his own family to a certain extent. They, however, saw the light far sooner than I did.

The night I knew I’d miscarried, confirmed by my doctor, he saw me that day, I let my own emotions get out of control. I attributed it to wacky hormone imbalance and I drank far too much that night. Bill, of course, was drunk, too, but I am not blameless in this incident. Drinking wine, playing with the computer and online chat rooms, I became engrossed in chatting with another writer online. Bill, looking over my shoulder between bouts of work complaints, started telling me what to say. I got irritated, told him to do it himself or leave me alone. He got irate and started yelling at me. From there, things get blurred. I reacted but not in the usual way. This time, I went on the offensive, so to speak. I yelled back at him, even chased him away from me until I finally shoved him away. He stumbled, lay on the floor glaring up at me, and I said, “I won’t be afraid of you anymore!” From then on, I was able to defend myself, both verbally and physically when necessary.

As time passed, incidents became more frequent. He would even, when drunk, pick fights with me that ended in physical confrontations. I did hit back, frequently, and yell back at him but it never stopped the developing pattern of violence. I did have a son, in 1997. The baby was born two weeks early by cesarean section due to his breech position. HE was two years old when my father passed away, also due to alcoholism and liver disease. We made the trip from Arizona to Colorado to see him in hospice before he died. The first night, as I was making Bill a drink, my mother told me after taking my father to the hospital, there was no drinking in her house. I had no problem with that. Bill did. Instead of keeping alcohol in the kitchen, he kept it in the car, where I would make his drinks. He thought no one knew but they did, as I found out when I talked to my mother after we returned home.

One night, before my father passed away that Friday, he ran out of rum. IT was dark and Milliken has one convenience store which does not carry alcohol. He demanded that I drive into the next town, fifteen miles away, in the dark and unfamiliar with the territory. I refused. He said, “Fine!” in a very sarcastic angry tone. A few minutes later, he went to bed and passed out, having been drinking all day.

Before that, we had many skirmishes and when we returned to Arizona, that continued. My father passed away in July. Shortly after we got home, Bill quit his seventeen plus dollar an hour job during a hangover induced temper tantrum. During his job hunt time, he began drinking during the day, weekdays, that is. It escalated one night into a fierce fight, this one involving my daughter, who had not yet gone to bed. HE started yelling at me about accepting responsibility. He still claimed to be an ex-Navy SEAL with combat experience and that he had visited the families of colleagues who had died on their missions. He claimed I didn’t love the family and didn’t care. I’d had a few beers myself, had quite a buzz going, and dared to argue with him. Once again, he grew enraged and told me to get out. I did. I grabbed my keys and, since I didn’t’ have a running vehicle at that time, walked to a friends house. It was small town so its possible to walk from end to end in about forty-five minutes. I made it to Ed’s in about twenty minutes. Bill had called to tell him I was coming, correctly guessing my destination. I spent the night with him and his wife, sleeping on their couch.

The next morning, I woke up to knocking on the door. Our daughter had walked our two year old son to join me, stating that her father had kicked them out too. Ed got very upset with Bill and called him. Bill never slept that night, was still drinking and so drunk he could barely talk. He stated he had the guns out but had taken them all apart. At that time, we had three rifles and two pistols.

During this time there had been another incident, another drunken evening. I don’t remember what initial argument was over but I have a vivid memory of looking down a loaded rifle and telling him not to point that thing at me. He left the chair and put it in my face, so close the end of the barrel touched my cheek. I grabbed it and shoved it away. He put it back, pressing harder. I pushed it away again. This time he put it back against my face, pressing hard enough to bring pain. He snarled, “Grab that barrel again and I’ll blow you’re [expletive] head off.”

I made no other moves. He stood over me for a few more seconds, the longest in my life, and finally sat down, but kept the rifle pointed squarely at me. I noticed the safety had been disengaged. If he even twitched a finger, I was dead if that gun went off. I started shaking, tears rolling down my face, and wondered if I’d survive the night. He left the room, came back only seconds later and started asking me who I was talking to. I hadn’t spoken to anyone. The phone was across the room and I was petrified, to scared to move. I couldn’t have called anyone but he was convinced I’d been talking. Finally, and I still don’t know why, he told me to call Ed, who came right over. I left the room and the next morning, he apologized again and swore it would never happen again.

On, the morning he also kicked our children out of the house, Ed drove us back in his truck. Sure enough, all the guns had been taken apart. Bill had called his father, told him he wanted a divorce. His father came and picked him up. Bill, still drunk, raged at me to go back to Colorado. Now, I’ve never lived in CO. My family moved there after I was out of the house for a few years. His father asked if we had enough money. We had over three hundred in the bank. So I considered our finances fine for a few days.

Bill came home three days later, he’d been sober the whole time he was gone, but immediately started drinking. While sober, we talked and, I thought, ironed out some things. But as he grew more drunk, he got nastier. Finally, he said, “Just go [expletive] your friend Ed,” who had been nothing but kind and supportive to me and the children. I stood up to leave the room and he apologized, saying that was out of line. I dropped the subject and we did go to bed.

Our sexual relations also grew more strained over time. I no longer initiated physical intimacy. Part of me, deep down, didn’t want to, but I would respond if he initiated it. Alcoholism and abuse affect all areas of a relationship, not just the obvious.

Not long after he kicked everyone out and came home, we moved from that small town to Tucson, where he worked, and still does, as an electrician doing commercial construction. I thought that with a change of scenery, that by relocating, things would get better as we started anew; in effect, starting new lives. I was wrong. It only got worse until it cost me three of the most important things in my life. In The Blaze Rages, the cost of denial, of burying my head in the sand is far too high.