We went into the interviews with our newly found agency with an innocent honesty. We hadn’t really ever been questioned or judged, we were used to being viewed as a stable couple and ideal parents. This confidence led us to say some things without thinking and led the agency to question us more deeply.
The social worker did an interview, brought the results back to the whole group of social workers at the agency and returned to us with some follow-up questions.
In the initial interview, we talked about everything from our pasts, growing up, being teenagers, meeting and getting married… Actually considering how much was discussed, it is amazing that there weren’t more issues that required attention. I didn’t have a particularly happy childhood and was not raised with standards that would suit that of the agency.
The only issue they ended up tagging was J-’s drinking. Our friends actually thought it was a joke when we told them. He was having about 5 drinks a week. In and of itself, that was not that much, but he does have a history of other drug use AND I said something that made me out to be total co-dependent, that was what concerned the agency. Immediately after I said it, I knew I had screwed up…I felt like Dobby, I just wanted to hit my head against the nearest bookcase. “Bad Dobby!”
In the course of talking about drinking, the social worker asked if I was concerned about his drug or alcohol use. I responded, “I actually encourage him to drink, I would much rather have him drink than smoke. I even bought him a bottle of whiskey for the holidays.” Doh! Bad…bad Dobby!
They also asked us about how we dealt with stress. Part of J-’s answer was that he unwound with a drink… NO!! Alchohol should not be used as a coping mechanism!! I think I remember learning about this in high school. We had a class that was part driver’s ed, part sex education and part alcohol and drug education. No alcohol-based coping…remember?!
As soon as the agency had expressed concern about alcohol in our family, J- immediately cut down to 2 drinks per week. He started keeping track of exactly when he was drinking and how many of his drinks were social versus at home alone.
In the end, the agency asked that we do 3 months of therapy to discuss our relationship, with some attention to drug and alcohol use. We were lucky that J-’s work paid for it. It seemed like such a luxury to go to therapy and talk about our relationship when we were actually getting along very well. We would spend 10-15 minutes just chitchatting with our therapist about restaurants or life in general, then we would spend 30-40 minutes on a topic that we had usually tried to pick beforehand. Other than it being a time committment, it was really a non-stressful thing…it really felt like treating ourselves to some time to talk about our relationship with a qualified professional on hand.
At some point, we just stopped buying alcohol to replace what ran out. The whiskey went first and J- was onto vodka. Eventually that ran out and he finished the wine. I just drank the last of the tequila that we brought back from Mexico. I may have to get some more since we have some really yummy margarita mix. We have started developing a taste for beer, which is interesting because it is such a serving-size drink, which changes it somehow. It is easy to just keep a little bit around the house and not seem like such a drunk. Having a 6-pack in the fridge rather than having 4-5 bottles of liquor in the cabinet just seems different.
The good news is that reducing his drinking hasn’t really affected J- at all and we are appreciated even more by our agency for going through what we did in order to qualify to work with them. And now, we will be able to use that cabinet space for new and improved beverage choices. Like uh, Capri-suns and Quik.
