A Whiskey Lullaby

The next three years together were some of the wildest times of my life. Together we partied all night long most nights. My friends became his friends and his friends became my friends. We became a group of friends living our best life. We were two young lovers trying to escape a curfew and roam the streets at night in the hot summer nights. I had two miscarriages at the ages of seventeen and eighteen. When I turned nineteen I got pregnant again for the third time with our first son, Jordan. One short month after he was born, Cody and I got married. I married my best friend, and I brought a beautiful baby boy into this world that was made with love. Life was simply beautiful. Life with Cody was an adventure.

We bought a two bedroom trailer house in Holcomb, Ks with our income taxes in 2010. By that time we had a beautiful baby girl, Deyjah, added to the family. I was also pregnant with our third and final child, Christopher. Cody and I were both twenty-two years old with a lot to learn still and with young minds eager to have a good time. For the next three years we made it a good time. Every Wednesday night was “Go Hard Wednesdays” where we would invite all of our friends over to drink beer and hang out. These nights started to get popular with more people coming to join in on the fun. These nights would often last all night long. When I turned twenty-four I started to get wore out on partying all the time. I guess I was starting to grow out of that phase. I started to want more family time and family nights with movies and games. Cody wasn’t on that level yet. Cody was the life of any party, so I figured it would take some time for him to grow out of that phase. Go Hard Wednesdays started to slow down, and then became non-existent. Cody started to go party at the bars more often. Cody partying at bars wasn’t my cup of tea. I had three babies at home to care for, so going with him was not an option. Staying home was not something Cody liked to do.

Cody started to hide the fact that he was going to the bars from me to prevent arguments between the two of us. This lead to him hardly ever being home, and ignoring his phone calls. There were to many nights in that trailer where I would sit for hours, watching out the window, calling his phone over and over again. Most nights he wouldn’t come home till after 2am. Those nights were agonizing for me. It wasn’t the thought of him cheating on me, but the thought of him getting into an accident or going to jail. Cody was a belligerent drunk who liked to fight anyone who looked at him the “wrong way”. He had just bought a motorcycle so he could go places and leave me the car. Being on four wheels while completely intoxicated isn’t safe, being on two wheels is more dangerous. I would often talk to my parents about Cody going to the bars and ignoring his phone calls. I learned that this was something I probably shouldn’t have talked to my parents about. My parents would often get on Codys coat tails about his behavior and poor choices. Which didn’t go to well with Cody every time it was brought up. It started to form a wedge between Cody and I. I started to think that I deserved better. When I said my vows to Cody on our wedding day, I vowed to stick with my marriage for better or for worse. Ending my marriage with Cody was not an option for me. Fixing it was my only option. Cody and I decided that we just needed to move away where we can focus on our marriage and our little family without anyone's opinions getting in the way. So we sold our trailer house and moved our little family to Colorado.

Moving to Colorado ended up being the worse decision we made. We lived in a small town called Florence. It was full of antique shops and retired people. There are no good jobs for miles. Cody got a job 35 miles away working on restoration of fire and flood damages. We thought that getting a roommate would help us out with our finances. That also ended up being a bad idea. Our roommate has two children with a waitress job. We went into the hole even further, adding more mouths to feed. At this point stress and depression could over us heavily, making life impossible. We had no choice but to pack our things back up and go back home to Kansas. We lasted six months in Colorado and came back with a giant heap of failure to carry around.

We moved in with Codys grandparents out on a farm in Lakin, KS in January of 2014. Cody and I both landed jobs to save up for a place of our own again. We just needed some time to get back on our feet. Things start going back down hill again when my babysitter quit on my with no warning in advance. I had to lose my job. Cody ended up getting a second job for the weekends doing maintenance work on apartment units. At that time, Codys grandma fell and broke her hip and was unable to do anything around the house. With Codys grandpa not being in very good shape either, I decided to help out around the house for the time being. The stress on Cody was at a high level from having two jobs and not having his own place to call home, on top of feeling like a failure as a parent and a husband. Any free time that Cody had, he started to spend it at the bar again. Not coming home after work and ignoring his phone calls, and coming home after 2am. This starts again. I’m starting to feel a little overwhelmed. We started to fight about this frequently. I could threaten to leave him and he would still go back to the same behavior. But I knew I would never leave him no matter how bad it got. I just knew there would be some light someday. Love is patient. We must grow together. For better or for worse… fix it.

The nights that Cody would come home drunk got worse with time. He started drinking whisky heavily. He would become blackout drunk and look right through you when having a heavily slurred conversation. He would become completely intolerable. On nights like these, he would wet the bed because he had a weak bladder, and just sleep right through it. I got tired of waking up soaked in pee, so I started to sleep on the couch or in one of the kids beds on nights that he had been drinking. Drunk Cody did not like this. On one of the nights Cody had gone out to the bar after work, I crawled in bed with my youngest son, Christopher. The kids were sleeping in the downstairs living room area in bunk-beds, right outside of the room Cody and I were sleeping in. Cody stumbled down the stairs and sees that I’m laying in bed with Christopher. Not liking the fact that I’m not in our bed, he grabbed my leg and pulled me off the bed. I pulled my leg back quickly and jumped back in bed and looked at him in disbelief. “What is wrong with you?!” I yelled at him. “You’re coming to sleep with me.” He said, pulling my leg again. Now the kids are awake, and I don’t want them to watch an argument that obviously isn’t going to subside unless I go to bed with him. So I pulled my leg back, stood up and stomped to the bedroom. I laid in bed and pulled the blankets over my face in frustration. I just wanted to go to sleep and not deal with Codys drunk behavior. But Cody now decides he wants to try to seduce me. I’m too pissed off to change my emotions just like that, Cody! I keep pushing him off me, but this starts to make him angry. I made an attempt to push him off me again, but this time he responds by putting his hands around my throat. OK, now I’m really mad! I try to push and kick him away but his grasp gets tighter around my neck. My head starts to fall between the bed and the wall, becoming tightly wedged between the two surfaces, as his grasp gets tighter. I’m starting to panic! I start to believe that he’s trying to kill me. I thought maybe if I told him what he wants me to hear, he will let go? I started to mutter the words “I love you” over and over the best I could threw a tight throat. His eyes were glassy. He was looking right through me. He didn’t care. His grip didn’t loosen one bit. I started to feel dizzy and realized that drunk Cody might not quit until it’s too late. I started to pound on the wall as hard as I could to try to wake Codys grandparents up, who were sleeping in the room right above us. Thankfully, not long after, Codys grandma came rushing into the bedroom and slapped Cody right across the face. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” She screamed at him. He instantly stood up and snapped right out of his devilish trance. He looked around as if he didn’t even know how he got where he is now. He looked at me, then back to his grandma. “I don’t know what I’m doing. That wasn’t me!” He ran out of the bedroom, got in the car, and took off. Codys grandma went to get her phone to call Cody because she was worried about him. I went and crawled back in Christophers bed, completely terrified and shocked. What the hell? That wasn’t Cody… At that moment, I didn’t care if that Cody came back. I was scared of him. I wanted to be far away from him. He ended up coming back home that night after getting lost on country roads. He sobered up some and apologized to me and said he doesn’t even remember choking me. He promised he would never allow himself to get that drunk again. And we went to sleep as if nothing happened.

I never told anyone about that night. The only people that knew about it was me, Cody, and Codys grandma. I knew that if I told my parents about it, it would open up a whole new war that would last years. Cody eventually spilled it out to his best friend Tyler one night when they were drinking. Tyler didn’t approve of that kind of behavior and started to not come around to hang out with Cody as much anymore. I knew that after that night, it was urgent that we eliminate some stress before things got worse. We needed to go find a place of our own with our own space. Well it isn’t easy finding a place to rent in Garden City that is affordable and accepts pets. We looked for months until we finally found a piece of junk trailer home. Cody had to fix the air conditioning and plumbing to make it livable. The front door didn’t completely shut so we would have to tie it shut with rope. But it was a place we could call our own. The rent was cheap and we could have our pets. It was our time to get back up on our feet again and fix this marriage and grow.

I landed a good paying, full time job that summer, taking off a lot more stress from Cody. We were finally doing well financially, had all our bills paid, a new SUV for the family, food in the cabinets, life was going good. Cody would still sometimes sneak off to the bar and ignore my phone calls, but it became less frequent and less late at night. I had come up with a new way of preventing Cody from going to bars. We decided to make Fridays a routine for us to be together. We would both get off work at 3pm and go out together, just the two of us, and have a drink before going to puck the kids up from daycare. After picking the kids up we would either go to a friends house, my parents house, or invite some friends over to the house to have some more drinks.

We were off to a good start to a good life finally. But that didn’t last very long. My oldest sister called me one day and told me that one of her best friends had told her that Cody sent her flirty Facebook messages, trying to have sex with her. I brought it up to Cody and he said he didn’t remember doing that. Right back to feeling frustrated with him again. How many other times has this happened? Who else has he messaged and doesn’t remember doing it? I’m the type of person that doesn’t like to be played a fool. I will avoid it at all cost. Like a survival instinct. Again, I’m not going to give up, or leave. So I began to shut down. I put my feelings on a shelf for the time being. I became quiet and distant. I stopped letting things bother me. I’m wore out from feeling so intensely about things. I thought maybe if I gave myself a break from my feelings for a little bit that I would gather some strength to keep my marriage from falling apart.

Codys drinking binge started heavy again in the late summer. With my feelings turned off for the moment, it affected Cody in ways that I didn’t expect. It was as if he retaliated by turning his own feelings off by getting drunk. He had no cares in the world when he was drunk. He drank to get blackout drunk. His main goal when picking up his first beer is to not remember going to bed at the end of the night. Boy did that put a bigger damper on our marriage. I made the mistake of threatening to leave him when he came home drunk one time. He ended up choking me again. I begged him to stop and told him I didn’t mean what I said, so he would let me go. There was no one else around, the kids were sleeping, so I didn’t have anyone to come save me this time. He let go after a minute and warned me if I ever left him, he would kill me. Things were starting to get scary. I was completely afraid of him when he was drunk. I no longer wanted to be around him by myself if he was drunk. It was as if the devil himself takes over Codys soul under the influence of alcohol. With as much whisky as Cody drinks on his binge nights, he never remembers what he does the next day. But I think he could see with my reactions the next day, he knew he did something that damaged me in some way.

One day Cody had come home from work in a real depressed mood. He didn’t want to talk, and walked with his head down. He went back into the bedroom for a little while, I just let him be alone. Whatever he was going through, I thought he would need some space for. A little while later he came out of the bedroom with a leather strap that goes to my leather coat that ties around the waist, made into a lasso as if he was going to rope a calf with it. He walked past me, out the front door and went to sit next to the shed on the side of the house. I watched him out the window as he buried his head into his hands. I could see what he was planning to do, hang himself from a pillar extending out from the shed. But was he really going to do it? Or was he just trying to scare me into showing him some type of affection? I opened the door and yelled out to him, “Before you do whatever it is that you plan on doing, think about the people that your going to leave behind!” And I shut the door and went back to the window to watch him just in case he really does try doing it. Several minutes later he stood up and walked back inside the house. He walked past me and told me to just not talk to him for the rest of the night. I respected that and gave him some time alone. He fell asleep shortly after that.

Cody told me he felt that he was clinically depressed. So he drank a lot to numb his depression. But the drinking a lot caused our marriage to be on thin ice. It was pushing us apart. It was dangerous. He needed to slow down or quit drinking. He was a very good man when he was sober. As well as a good father. When Cody is sober, I remember why I love him and why I married him. Sober Cody is the Cody I won’t give up on. I love him too much to leave him. I’m giving Cody the chance to slow down and stop getting black out drunk. Things will get better. We just have to be patient. Things started to look up for Cody, as he started to slow down a bit on his drinking and gave the kids and I more of his time. Instead of going out to the bars again, he invited his friends to hang out with him at home. He had one of his friends/co-worker, Josh, over one night for drinks. He had brought his family so all our kids were playing together. This was what I liked. Hanging out with other families. Friends that have kids and are married, they seem to be more chill and grown up. They seem to be on the same level as me. Josh had a bunch of guns in the back of his jeep and asked Cody if he could keep them at our house since he is on probation and isn’t allowed to have them at his house. This idea sounded bad from the beginning. Josh doesn’t know that Cody is clinically depressed, and has no idea bout Codys moments of wanting to hang himself. I also have children in the house. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t allow it, but Josh informed us that the guns were not loaded. So Cody didn’t see any harm in keeping his guns at our house for him. Cody and I had may more nights with friends, and being able to drink without blacking out and becoming the devil. Things were once again going good. It didn’t last long before things took a turn for the worse. Not knowing that this time would be the very last turn. Not knowing that things could in fact get worse than they have ever been before.

To be continued….