I have just been re-reading M´s reply and it is so heartfelt and supportive, just really lovely to read! Living with this addiction in our lives seems to teach us patience. We definitely need to learn patience, and to step back and sometimes just let things go their course….very much the Serenity Prayer! I have been finding it particularly hard in the past few days. I have now been in Mexico for over 6 weeks, and they have been days very much alone, day after day. When I arrived I really wasn´t sure for how long I´d stay, or even if I would return to Cuba. But I had left Cuba very hopeful, ad thinking I might even return within 2 or 3 weeks, the final few days there with my husband had left me feeling really hopeful that he was really trying to tackle the addiction, that he had hit his low and that he had realistic options for supporting himself. I was going to go away to see how he fared by himself and to give myself some time and space. And to eat good food! The previous weeks and months had been truly terrible and then before that it was a year on my own waiting for and tending to him in prison. In the first few days he told me he was behaving well so that I would come back quickly and that he hadn´t gambled at all…nada…and then after about 10 days his voice was different and then he got angry with me on the phone for an insignificant question and in my gut I knew he had been gambling again. Then a couple of days later a cry for help, desperation, shock, needing money, the admittance of lies. He had got through everything I had left, money I left with his mother 30 km away, money he had earned, money from selling the last few things of value I had left, at least $800 all in 3 nights of poker. And so….I decided to stay longer here and give it more time. That was now a month ago and it seems he hasn´t gambled since, perhaps also because he simply hasn´t had the money, but he keeps saying…no, I won´t do it again, and as I have written, I do see his resolve increase each time even if he has nowhere to turn for support. Even if they are small steps, they are going in the right direction, there is a change. He is much clearer now that he can´t continue to live how he has and that it won´t work for us.
So it´s only been a month since then, and the time in between our communication has been dominated by his stress over paying his debt from his last gambling. I resisted and resisted and then helped him, but it really will be the last time, and I understand all about the enabling and even more so now. The payment was delayed and delayed and so he suffered more, checking for it every day, being hounded by the guy looking for his money, him being on parole, and really I knew that I wanted this. I wanted him to…sweat. I wanted him to feel more consequences and to have to deal with the situation without me around and to know that I was standing firm and not offering other options. I know I enabled one more time, but I have remained much stricter in my communication with him and resisted several of his requests for various forms of help. Cuba is so complicated and the situation with the economy and our own money dynamics even without the gambling and me having supported him for over a year and a half now, most of our relationship, is very hard. But he has the minimum he needs to live each day. And of course he would have much more if he weren´t a cg , and he knows that.
I have read so much on this forum. Hours and hours each day. Sometimes it just feels too much. So much suffering and so much frustration. People searching for how to truly change their lives…change themselves. Maybe I really need to step back. It feels so intense. But I also feel I have just these few weeks to be able to read and learn and have to make the most of it. And then I am spending all day every day alone and don´t know how to fill the hours. I know the social isolation is bad for me, but I haven´t figured out yet how to change it, and am also trying to spend as little as I can. And then all this questioning…what really is love…how selfish is it for one´s own needs…how much is it its own addiction….who does it really serve….what purpose…aren´t there so many ways to love and so many people “out there” we could love? I have no children, I am in the early stages of my relationship. Why don´t I want to just walk away now? What is it that makes me want to stay and support and journey through this with my husband? I am in love, but that passes too…life goes on. Is it just now that I feel I know more and have more tools and can “do things better” and want to try another way? And me missing my life in Cuba, so lonely as it is there for me. It would be so easy to fly back tomorrow. But not yet 🙂 More days, one day at a time…but if I keep thinking so much, my head will explode! 🙂