I got sober to get laid.
She had divorced an alcoholic and her stories of a neglectful husband and father of her children touched a fearful place in my heart.
I didn’t look into that place. I looked at an opportunity to aleviate the terrible loneliness of widowhood. I stopped drinking out of fear of harming myself, my children, and this rare chance at love.
Before our relationship became sexual, it was marital. We were mistaken as a family constantly and reveled in our roles. We thought we were in control, but I was driven by loneliness and lust. She craved the father figure and partner I was so good at portraying.
Sobriety did lead to love making. The dangerous kind that digs deeper and demands vulnerability and truth. The facades were exposed and our assumptions about our future together crumbled.
I started to face my patterns around alcohol. It was a confounding time. I needed to work on myself, yet I was pouring energy into a relationship that would dissolve, quite literally, overnight.
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Now I had to face two big fears. Was I forever an alcoholic? Would that trap me alone in confusion?
I picked up a book I had been carrying with me for twenty years, Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life. Sitting on my kitchen floor in the early hours before my boys woke up, reading her affirmations and discovering my perilous lack of self love turned my life around. Addiction, loneliness, parenting, and all my fears were finally put up against an immutable power: Love.
Hay doesn’t use Christian language, but her words helped me accept the eternal river of love flowing from God. I got a glimpse of that source in my wife’s last moments on Earth. Mary showed me what was possible and it took me more than a year of hurt before I allowed it into my heart.
I bridged the cavity between believing and worthiness. Until you feel worthy of God’s love, you cannot fully receive it.
It turned out that my first chance at love after loss was not rare. I stopped looking at love as a scarce resource and began discovering it in all its forms and in all sorts of places.