Twelve years ago I married my classmate. We had been friends since high school, then we went to technical school together, after which we started dating. He was a good-looking, tall, handsome man at that time, and I was a slim, straight girl. We fell in love, and six months later I got pregnant. We got our diplomas and went back to our village, we had our own house there. I got a job in a store, and he commuted to earn our living.
Everything was good, then he started drinking. He would come back from the shift and go out to his friends – he’d go out for a day, two, three. A disabled child was born. No one blamed anyone, we continued to live, to cope with it slowly. The binges began to happen more often. Soon he stopped going on shifts, they just didn’t take him. There was not much work in the town, only at a sawmill. That is where he worked.
They almost never saw him at home, he either drank, or worked, sometimes combining the two. I was hardly able to cope alone with a sick child, terrible scandals broke out, and one day my little sister, who was at school, came to see us. She came to babysit while I was at work. When I came back, my sister was in tears. I asked what happened, she said my husband came in drunk and started kicking her out, even though she was babysitting our own child at the time. After that I went to my parents.
For ten long years we didn’t get along. He drank heavily, I raised my child, only occasionally allowing myself to have short affairs with guys who needed nothing more than a bed. But a year ago my ex-husband showed up again. He quit drinking, came to me with a proposal to live together again. He is not young, I am in my thirties. There was no one else in the village, and no one else would want a disabled child. I refused, but he kept coming, and so on, until we were both swirling with old feelings.
I am now pregnant again. I know that alcoholics can’t change, but I got pregnant for myself because I am well into my thirties, my eldest daughter will need a family when I am gone, and I want to see all the pleasures of maternal happiness – school, university, the baby’s wedding. It will not work out that way with my daughter, she is being brought up at home.
Everyone in the village is looking at me askew because such a decent and beautiful with a drunkard back together. But no one can even imagine how it is to be alone, to carry this burden for years, to pull on a grown-up child, and not even dream of any bright future.
So I shared my little confession. Don’t judge me harshly.
