Rebuilding trust after rehab with uncertainty, love and scrambled eggs
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The last time Chris had made a move on me, he was doing shots of Grey Goose. I wasn't sure if he desired me at all without the glittery booze effect, and how things would go in the bedroom. Was sober sex like the Diet Coke that now filled our fridge? Technically, the same but with none of the delicious bad bits?
It wasn't just him I worried about either. My understanding of psych is pretty basic – it mostly revolves around believing happiness is a choice and you shouldn't let money, people or the past control you – but I knew the real issue was vulnerability.
While I'd had moments trying to work out if it was better if I didn't still love him, what I also didn't know was if he still loved me or if I represented something punitive and bad.
I'd spent the three weeks while he was away getting ready for his return, telling myself to be strong, embrace this fresh start. But now that he was home, my emotions were a tangled mess of relief, anger and uncertainty. And trust was going to be the hardest part.
Trust, that fickle beast, wasn't just about believing Chris wasn't hiding booze in his wardrobe again. It was about letting myself be open to him – emotionally, physically, the whole package. And it was super terrifying.
Because what if he didn't just f--- me, but f---ed me over again?
Post-rehab, there's no 'congratulations, you can trust him again' certificate. There are no instructions about how to create honesty and fun. It's this weird, exhausting process where you're constantly weighing whether to believe what's in front of you or whether to believe what your mind tells you: Beware. Run!
My profession required cynicism. I'd always tried to save it for work. But it had spilled over into everything else during those last few months before rehab when Chris had mastered the art of casual lying. So now we were like two opposing magnets, always circling each other but never quite connecting.
One sticking point was that Chris was adamant he didn't need me to give up drinking, too. 'Thanks, I get it, you're being supportive, but Christ, I feel guilty enough already,' he said. 'I'm the one who has problems with alcohol. You shouldn't have to do anything different because of that. The world doesn't revolve around me.'
Deciding not to drink wasn't me slipping into the role of martyr. Chris's rehab coincided with my own capacity for alcohol starting to wane. I'd have half a drink and feel gin blossoms firing up in my cheeks, feel weariness and a cyclical melancholy.
And decades after first being a pest while drunk, I was still waking some mornings, worried about what I might have said or done the night before. I was sick of feeling like a try-hard old tragic.
Time to break up with it, or at least save it for best.
Days after Chris came home, it was our seventh wedding anniversary. We booked into a city hotel, met the kids for dinner, toasted ourselves with mocktails.
We had a really good night. Our normal MO would probably have been to have a drink at a bar on our walk back to the hotel, but this time we bought ice-creams from an EzyMart. We put on hotel robes, looked at our phones for a while then lay down to do our annual hashing over of wedding hits and memories.
His was seeing me in the doorway of the Fitzroy Town Hall in my Carla Zampatti dress, a son on each arm. I teased him that the first person he gave a shout-out to in his speech was Jay, and how he hoped to be as good a husband and father as him.
We laughed about our honeymoon, when I was so off my gourd that I cooed over a couple of birds snuggled up on the darkened beach on our way home from dinner. 'Oh my God, penguins. Look!' They were seagulls.
Trying to find the bathrooms at a Merimbula club, we saw the Elvis impersonator in a corridor, geeing himself up to the classic mash-up of A Space Odyssey and CC Rider. He clocked us, we waved, and during the show he hoiked one leg onto my chair singing Kentucky Rain, unrestrained cock and balls outlined clearly in his white jumpsuit.
'The wedding, the honeymoon, I was bursting with love,' Chris said. 'Like that feeling when you've eaten too much and you're uncomfortable but you keep eating because it tastes so good. It was so incredible, it was like it was happening to some other lucky bastard.'
Seven years on, there was lots of sentiment but no sex or even flirting. Chris laid his arm across my waist. 'I feel like we're about a million years old,' he said. 'Like we're about to start playing bridge and looking at river cruise brochures.'
Better than fighting over stupid shit caused by drunken chaos, I thought.
Our conversation was dropping off a bit by then. We'd spent two years working and living in close proximity, so we had forensic knowledge of what the other had done that day. There were no stories to tell, although we did have a running conversation about whether to buy a set of Japanese knives and how long it was until Chris's long-service leave.
During lockdowns, we pioneered afternoon Nude Chat Hour, in which we'd peel off our gear and hop onto our bed after work to just chat about nothing, try to make each other laugh. But even that was losing its gloss.
Increasingly, our entertainment was outsourced to Netflix, maybe so we could avoid hashing over the big question. Was Chris an actual alcoholic or someone who was having problems with alcohol because of trauma and grief? Post-rehab, I'm still not sure he knew himself, although he hoped madly it was Door B.
The hospital offered a virtual one-day class for families to help them on how to look after their loved ones and themselves. Yeah, I'll do it. I wanted clarity.
By then, I'd read thousands of words online and sat in on a couple of Zoom Al Anon meetings. One was in Wales, so was at 10pm our time. It made me feel worse. Frustrated. Defeated. Women and children hunched around screens, a couple of men, all telling similar stories to what was happening at our place.
'The lies are endless.' 'I've given up caring.' 'He says he just wants to sit in a room with a bottle.' 'The children are scared. So am I. That I'll find him dead one day.'
I'd expected to feel empathy with the other addicts' loved ones because we were in the same boat. Makes me sound shithouse, but I didn't. I could relate to what they were saying but the scope of the problem was so crushing and dreary. It felt like a problem nobody could solve.
And it was always the same vague and unhelpful advice I'd read a thousand times online. Always all about setting boundaries and not enabling. But nobody was saying in exact terms how to actually do that and what the repercussions or benefits would be.
Chris seemed to be doing things by the book – exercising, sleeping, eating properly – but you can't sugar-coat it. Living with an alcoholic is lonely. The constant worry. I was back to poking around in cupboards while he was in the shower. You look for lies all the time and often feel more mad than sad.
Three weeks in, I walked into the kitchen and found him standing by the fridge with a carton of orange juice in his hand, taking a swig. Innocent, right? Except my brain screamed, What if he's hiding a flask in his dressing gown pocket? What if the juice is a decoy?
'We need more juice,' Chris said, smiling, oblivious to the inner interrogation I was conducting.
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I smiled back, mouth like an envelope, like someone trying to pretend they weren't just imagining frisking their husband in a kitchen shakedown. 'Great, yeah. Juice is important.' It was absurd, and I knew it, but that didn't make it any easier to stop worrying he was covering up something.
'Darling,' I said one night over dinner. 'How do I know … you're really fine?'
He looked at me like he hadn't realised I'd been holding this question in for weeks. 'What do you mean?'
'I mean … how do I trust that this is it? That you're not going to ...' I stopped myself before finishing the thought about relapse because even saying it out loud felt like inviting disaster.
'I don't know. I don't have a magic answer for that.' He put down his fork, leaned back in his chair.
'I'm not asking you to just trust me overnight. I get that it's going to take time. But I'm here. I'm not hiding anything from you.'
I wanted to believe that. But it didn't make the doubt vanish, didn't erase the months of suspicion and fear that had become second nature to me.
We did a lot of walking around Ocean Grove. Nothing says 'rebuilding trust' like two middle-aged people silently trudging down the footpath like they're re-enacting a sad indie movie.
What I could give him was forgiveness. That was easy. The day he came home, the first thing I did was tell him that if we were to have a shot at repairing and rebuilding, I needed to forgive him for everything.
So I did. What's the old line? 'Holding onto grudges is like eating poison and waiting for the other person to die.'
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Let's start fresh.
And I was so proud of the hard thing he'd done.
Rebuilding trust was probably not going to be about waiting for some grand gesture or definitive proof that everything was OK, I realised. It was going to be about showing up every day, for both of us.
And it was going to include that rekindling of our sex life, which had ground almost to a halt when antidepressants changed Chris's libido. Now he was off them. So despite my laundry list of concerns, I found myself … hopeful? Curious, even.
After all, we'd made it through worse.
Rehab, barracking for AFL teams who were traditional rivals, moving to a small town where we knew nobody.
Chris wasn't perfect. Hell, neither was I. But maybe that's what made it work. I'd survived his vodka-fuelled misadventures, and now I was staring down the barrel of sober Chris. The Chris who wasn't hiding behind booze any more, wasn't shrouded in a cloud of shame or resentment.
One night, we'd finished a salmon and broccoli dinner, gone to bed early, very polite and chaste with each other. I wanted so much for him to reach out for me. I was thinking about when we used to be effortlessly sexy, when it wasn't complicated by rehab or fear or John dying or the weight of everything we've been through.
I turned to look at him. 'Baby?'
'Hmm?' He was about to fall asleep, a mile away on his own side of the bed.
'I miss us,' I said. I missed the laughter, the easy conversations, the way we used to tear each other's clothes off without a second thought. I missed the sex. God, I missed the sex. I missed him.
He was quiet for a moment, and I wondered if I'd said too much and he'd feel put upon. But then he rolled towards me. 'I miss us, too,' he said. He leaned in, kissed me. Tentatively. The clumsiness felt weird but OK. Maybe what we needed was to relearn each other. To take our time.
'I promise we'll stay married even if it kills us,' he said.
Next morning, I woke to find Chris watering the citrus trees outside our bedroom. He's hardly ever awake before me. And there he was, barefoot, hosing like a man without a care in the world. I watched him, felt the mix of love and wariness that had become my constant companion.
He saw me, gave a little wave. 'Want to go out for breakfast?' he said.
I did. And it was terrific.
That's the thing about trust. It's built on small moments like watering plants and eating scrambled eggs opposite each other. On little moments, day by day. It's not flashy or dramatic. It's sitting across a table, talking about nothing important.
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I missed being silly. I missed the days of not having to cautiously ask Chris how he was. I missed our fantastic intimate romps. From our first date, we'd been fun and dirty and willing together. But then, pre-rehab, our sex life became more of a negotiation than a passion-filled affair – I wanted it way more than he did – and now we were four weeks into the whole sobriety thing. Loading The last time Chris had made a move on me, he was doing shots of Grey Goose. I wasn't sure if he desired me at all without the glittery booze effect, and how things would go in the bedroom. Was sober sex like the Diet Coke that now filled our fridge? Technically, the same but with none of the delicious bad bits? It wasn't just him I worried about either. My understanding of psych is pretty basic – it mostly revolves around believing happiness is a choice and you shouldn't let money, people or the past control you – but I knew the real issue was vulnerability. 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It's this weird, exhausting process where you're constantly weighing whether to believe what's in front of you or whether to believe what your mind tells you: Beware. Run! My profession required cynicism. I'd always tried to save it for work. But it had spilled over into everything else during those last few months before rehab when Chris had mastered the art of casual lying. So now we were like two opposing magnets, always circling each other but never quite connecting. One sticking point was that Chris was adamant he didn't need me to give up drinking, too. 'Thanks, I get it, you're being supportive, but Christ, I feel guilty enough already,' he said. 'I'm the one who has problems with alcohol. You shouldn't have to do anything different because of that. The world doesn't revolve around me.' Deciding not to drink wasn't me slipping into the role of martyr. Chris's rehab coincided with my own capacity for alcohol starting to wane. I'd have half a drink and feel gin blossoms firing up in my cheeks, feel weariness and a cyclical melancholy. And decades after first being a pest while drunk, I was still waking some mornings, worried about what I might have said or done the night before. I was sick of feeling like a try-hard old tragic. Time to break up with it, or at least save it for best. Days after Chris came home, it was our seventh wedding anniversary. We booked into a city hotel, met the kids for dinner, toasted ourselves with mocktails. We had a really good night. Our normal MO would probably have been to have a drink at a bar on our walk back to the hotel, but this time we bought ice-creams from an EzyMart. We put on hotel robes, looked at our phones for a while then lay down to do our annual hashing over of wedding hits and memories. His was seeing me in the doorway of the Fitzroy Town Hall in my Carla Zampatti dress, a son on each arm. I teased him that the first person he gave a shout-out to in his speech was Jay, and how he hoped to be as good a husband and father as him. We laughed about our honeymoon, when I was so off my gourd that I cooed over a couple of birds snuggled up on the darkened beach on our way home from dinner. 'Oh my God, penguins. Look!' They were seagulls. Trying to find the bathrooms at a Merimbula club, we saw the Elvis impersonator in a corridor, geeing himself up to the classic mash-up of A Space Odyssey and CC Rider. He clocked us, we waved, and during the show he hoiked one leg onto my chair singing Kentucky Rain, unrestrained cock and balls outlined clearly in his white jumpsuit. 'The wedding, the honeymoon, I was bursting with love,' Chris said. 'Like that feeling when you've eaten too much and you're uncomfortable but you keep eating because it tastes so good. It was so incredible, it was like it was happening to some other lucky bastard.' Seven years on, there was lots of sentiment but no sex or even flirting. Chris laid his arm across my waist. 'I feel like we're about a million years old,' he said. 'Like we're about to start playing bridge and looking at river cruise brochures.' Better than fighting over stupid shit caused by drunken chaos, I thought. Our conversation was dropping off a bit by then. We'd spent two years working and living in close proximity, so we had forensic knowledge of what the other had done that day. There were no stories to tell, although we did have a running conversation about whether to buy a set of Japanese knives and how long it was until Chris's long-service leave. During lockdowns, we pioneered afternoon Nude Chat Hour, in which we'd peel off our gear and hop onto our bed after work to just chat about nothing, try to make each other laugh. But even that was losing its gloss. Increasingly, our entertainment was outsourced to Netflix, maybe so we could avoid hashing over the big question. Was Chris an actual alcoholic or someone who was having problems with alcohol because of trauma and grief? Post-rehab, I'm still not sure he knew himself, although he hoped madly it was Door B. The hospital offered a virtual one-day class for families to help them on how to look after their loved ones and themselves. Yeah, I'll do it. I wanted clarity. By then, I'd read thousands of words online and sat in on a couple of Zoom Al Anon meetings. One was in Wales, so was at 10pm our time. It made me feel worse. Frustrated. Defeated. Women and children hunched around screens, a couple of men, all telling similar stories to what was happening at our place. 'The lies are endless.' 'I've given up caring.' 'He says he just wants to sit in a room with a bottle.' 'The children are scared. So am I. That I'll find him dead one day.' I'd expected to feel empathy with the other addicts' loved ones because we were in the same boat. Makes me sound shithouse, but I didn't. I could relate to what they were saying but the scope of the problem was so crushing and dreary. It felt like a problem nobody could solve. And it was always the same vague and unhelpful advice I'd read a thousand times online. Always all about setting boundaries and not enabling. But nobody was saying in exact terms how to actually do that and what the repercussions or benefits would be. Chris seemed to be doing things by the book – exercising, sleeping, eating properly – but you can't sugar-coat it. Living with an alcoholic is lonely. The constant worry. I was back to poking around in cupboards while he was in the shower. You look for lies all the time and often feel more mad than sad. Three weeks in, I walked into the kitchen and found him standing by the fridge with a carton of orange juice in his hand, taking a swig. Innocent, right? Except my brain screamed, What if he's hiding a flask in his dressing gown pocket? What if the juice is a decoy? 'We need more juice,' Chris said, smiling, oblivious to the inner interrogation I was conducting. Loading I smiled back, mouth like an envelope, like someone trying to pretend they weren't just imagining frisking their husband in a kitchen shakedown. 'Great, yeah. Juice is important.' It was absurd, and I knew it, but that didn't make it any easier to stop worrying he was covering up something. 'Darling,' I said one night over dinner. 'How do I know … you're really fine?' He looked at me like he hadn't realised I'd been holding this question in for weeks. 'What do you mean?' 'I mean … how do I trust that this is it? That you're not going to ...' I stopped myself before finishing the thought about relapse because even saying it out loud felt like inviting disaster. 'I don't know. I don't have a magic answer for that.' He put down his fork, leaned back in his chair. 'I'm not asking you to just trust me overnight. I get that it's going to take time. But I'm here. I'm not hiding anything from you.' I wanted to believe that. But it didn't make the doubt vanish, didn't erase the months of suspicion and fear that had become second nature to me. We did a lot of walking around Ocean Grove. Nothing says 'rebuilding trust' like two middle-aged people silently trudging down the footpath like they're re-enacting a sad indie movie. What I could give him was forgiveness. That was easy. The day he came home, the first thing I did was tell him that if we were to have a shot at repairing and rebuilding, I needed to forgive him for everything. So I did. What's the old line? 'Holding onto grudges is like eating poison and waiting for the other person to die.' Loading Let's start fresh. And I was so proud of the hard thing he'd done. Rebuilding trust was probably not going to be about waiting for some grand gesture or definitive proof that everything was OK, I realised. It was going to be about showing up every day, for both of us. And it was going to include that rekindling of our sex life, which had ground almost to a halt when antidepressants changed Chris's libido. Now he was off them. So despite my laundry list of concerns, I found myself … hopeful? Curious, even. After all, we'd made it through worse. Rehab, barracking for AFL teams who were traditional rivals, moving to a small town where we knew nobody. Chris wasn't perfect. Hell, neither was I. But maybe that's what made it work. I'd survived his vodka-fuelled misadventures, and now I was staring down the barrel of sober Chris. The Chris who wasn't hiding behind booze any more, wasn't shrouded in a cloud of shame or resentment. One night, we'd finished a salmon and broccoli dinner, gone to bed early, very polite and chaste with each other. I wanted so much for him to reach out for me. I was thinking about when we used to be effortlessly sexy, when it wasn't complicated by rehab or fear or John dying or the weight of everything we've been through. I turned to look at him. 'Baby?' 'Hmm?' He was about to fall asleep, a mile away on his own side of the bed. 'I miss us,' I said. I missed the laughter, the easy conversations, the way we used to tear each other's clothes off without a second thought. I missed the sex. God, I missed the sex. I missed him. He was quiet for a moment, and I wondered if I'd said too much and he'd feel put upon. But then he rolled towards me. 'I miss us, too,' he said. He leaned in, kissed me. Tentatively. The clumsiness felt weird but OK. Maybe what we needed was to relearn each other. To take our time. 'I promise we'll stay married even if it kills us,' he said. Next morning, I woke to find Chris watering the citrus trees outside our bedroom. He's hardly ever awake before me. And there he was, barefoot, hosing like a man without a care in the world. I watched him, felt the mix of love and wariness that had become my constant companion. He saw me, gave a little wave. 'Want to go out for breakfast?' he said. I did. And it was terrific. That's the thing about trust. It's built on small moments like watering plants and eating scrambled eggs opposite each other. On little moments, day by day. It's not flashy or dramatic. It's sitting across a table, talking about nothing important.
