theshepherd___ on TikTok has no idea what he’s talking about.
Hi, my name is Amber and I’m (a co-dependent of) an alcoholic.
Tonight I watched my best friend walk out of my house and down the street with a grocery bag of belongings to an unknown destination. Unknown to me, unknown to her.
My twin sister is an alcoholic. I don’t know how long she has been so. Maybe forever. Maybe since she started drinking at age 15? Maybe not? WTF do I know. I drink too sometimes. But I’m not an addict.
My husband is also an alcoholic. He has been for his entire adult life. To the point that he does not have any of the skills in regards to emotions or social interaction that a “normal” adult would have. He is sober 6 months. Yippee. Yay for him. Okay, that was heinously sarcastic and insulting, but seriously, how am I supposed to celebrate a 6 month period of not drinking beer when I spent 11 years in virtual hell because he was drinking? First indication I am not perfect? Lol.
My twin sister is the most giving, selfless, compassionate, caring, creative, talented, brilliant, kind, fun person I have ever known. She achieved accolades beyond what I ever dreamed possible for myself in her academics and career. She is truly brilliant. She truly has a beautiful mind. And so often I have seen this correlation between addiction/madness and brilliance. Albert Einstein. Abraham Lincoln. Silvia Plath. Vrigina Woolf. Beethoven. Andy Warhol. Am I comparing my twin sis to these creative geniuses? Well, yes. Yes I am. She is that bright.
What will I do? What will I do now without my sister? I asked myself that question years ago when she first sunk very low into her addiction and left my daily life. I thought I had her back again 2 months ago when she came to live with me. For a very short time, I was the happiest I’ve been in years. I can’t explain the bond between twins and I won’t even try. But I feel like half a person when she is gone.
She cooks and takes care of my kids, she plays with them and takes them to the zoo and to fly kites. She is wonderful with them and they adore her. They had seen almost nothing of her for years and then all of a sudden they had her here all day every day! And now she is just poof! gone, again.
Inside I kind of feel like I’m dying. Every single thing I see or hear reminds me of her. Maybe if I knew where she was or that she was okay, I wouldn’t feel quite as bad. But I miss her like crazy already and she’s only been gone one day. I worry about where she is and what kind of bed she will be sleeping in and what she will eat. No matter where it is, it won’t feel like home because she no longer has one. I guess I thought being here with me was the next best thing. But she wasn’t very happy here for various reasons, and I do understand.
I want my sister. I just want my sister.
Memorial Fundraising
It’s been a while since I have posted here. I’ve been kind of depressed, which I will post about later.
I said in one of my first blog posts that I would eventually tell the story of my Dad’s murder. Well, this coming Fall there is a memorial dedication happening at my old high school, where my Dad was football coach. The committee has been trying to come up with ideas to raise money for the event (the memorial will be for all of the students and teachers we lost in about a 5 year period in Dryden, NY, which, sadly, was a lot.) I’m not on the committee but I’ve kept up on the news of what they have been doing.
Basically we are running out of time and not much is happening. And frankly if there is going to be a memorial finally put in place at that football field, I would like to decide what it will be. So I started a GoFundMe page to raise the money to pay for it. I am working with a professional artist/sculptor, who ironically was in my Dad’s 6th grade class the year he was killed.
If you go to this GoFundMe page, you will be able to read the full story of what happened to me, my Dad and my family. I wrote it out like an article, kind of, from third person rather than first. I’m not sure why. I think it’s easier for me to tell the story that way, as it leaves me slightly detached from the intensity of the emotions that come up. I shake and sweat when I type it out!
So, for any of you who were waiting to here my story, here you go:
Gone Girl
I have reached my own sort of bottom. I just want out. I have wasted ten years of my life on a man who does not really love or respect me. He has done cruel and horrible things. He makes no apologies; he makes excuses. This is what alcoholics do.
Even if he was showing remorse for all that he has done, which he’s not, I’m not sure if I would feel any differently at this point. I have fantasies of moving on with my life without him. Living with this man has been hell.
Obviously I have a long way to go in my own emotional development, or I would not have married an alcoholic and become co-dependent the way I have. I can’t fix him. But I need to fix myself.
I’m sort of worn out of even talking about this or thinking about it. I have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours crying about all of this. What a waste of time. I had already lost the ten years I had before marrying this man. The ten years following the murder of my Dad were hell in their own way, and in no way was I “living.” So, twenty years sort of down the drain. That’s more than half my life. Those days are gone.
And I know that I am 37 years old now, and my glory days of high school were just a stitch in time; a time long ago and long forgotten by most everyone else who was there with me. But being that I cowered in the little alcove outside my bedroom door and watched my ex-boyfriend gun down my father when I was 17 and halfway through my senior year, I seem to have a big part of my soul stuck back there. Partly because everything before that was wonderful and everything after that has been pretty horrible. Partly because before that, I knew who I was and after that, I have not. Partly because the love of my life, Adam, was with me through that awful time, and after that, and somehow in the wreckage of this tragedy, I lost him. And I have never forgiven myself for the way I hurt him. And I have never gotten over him. And there is a part of me stuck in the past with him, when my life was good, and my family was all alive and happy, and I knew who I was, and I was in love with someone who treated me like gold. Guess it kind of makes sense that I would want to go back there. Especially considering the way I’ve been living the last ten years.
I can’t tell you, should he by some miracle show up at my door, that I wouldn’t run away with him. Run back into his arms. Run back to that girl he knew.
I would like to see a glimpse of that girl just one more time before I die. I don’t see her at all when I look in the mirror. I do not look like her physically or emotionally anymore. This is what she used to look like. She’s in the middle, between her twin sister and her best friend of 12 years, who is also gone from my life now.
This is me now. No hair dye, no make-up. I don’t do those things anymore. I wear rags, literally. I’ve gained 120 pounds. It’s kind of funny to me that when I look at this picture, I see a ghost.
My Dad
Stephen A. Starr, murdered by my ex-boyfriend, J.P., December 30, 1994 when I was 17. He was just 42.
J.P. had been stalking me for the three months since I had ended our relationship. Ultimately he broke into our home in the early morning with a 12 gauge shotgun and tried to take me from the house. My Dad got in between us and was shot twice and killed.
Over time you will hear a lot more about my Dad, the murder, and what life has been like as a homicide survivor, if you follow my blog. Someday I will tell the whole story, terrible details and all.
I wrote this poem for my Dad, a teacher and football coach, a few years after his death.
I’ll Be Waiting for You
By Amber Lee Starr
I’ll be waiting for you
when the football field is empty,
and crisp autumn leaves dance
across the bleacher seats,
whispering, rustling like distant laughter.
As the paint you chose is fading
from the scoreboard, and the rock they left
behind for you is long forgotten,
I’ll be waiting for you.
When the years and rain and sun wear
the memory of your footsteps from
the cinders where you used to teach,
and the grass is grown a thousand times
over the place you made your life,
I’ll be waiting for you.
When you gaze down through the cold human
sky, past the goal posts and rippling flag,
I’ll be waiting there,
laughing, crying,
cheering you to victory one last time.
Always One More Time
Today is my eighth wedding anniversary. Hard to believe. In many ways it feels like it’s been longer, and in other ways, shorter. We have three children, ages 7, 6, and 2. They have consumed our lives since only a few months after we were married. We never had time for just “us.” It was quite a whirlwind, and it has never really stopped.
Last night my husband went to his first AA meeting. He has been an alcoholic as long as I have known him. I did not realize this until years after we met. And I did not know nearly as much about alcoholism as I do now, unfortunately. But his illness has progressed, as the disease always does, and I have had to educate myself on the disease of alcoholism, and my own issue of co-dependence, which so often goes hand in hand with the disease when you are close to the drinker. As Melody Beattie says in her book, “Co-Dependent No More,” “Living with an alcoholic is a special kind of hell.” I concur, Melody. Reading that one sentence in that book made all of my thoughts and feelings from the previous 8 years or so crystallize into something finally recognizable. No, I’m not crazy. No, I’m not overreacting. I am married to an alcoholic.
It’s hard for me to put into words the way my husband’s drinking has hurt me. No, he has never hit me. No, he does not call me names. No, he is in no way abusive towards our children. No, he has never been in legal trouble. On the contrary, he is a reliable, hard worker who never misses a day of work. He is a great Dad: hands-on, tender, fun, and loving. He is a great son. He is a great friend. He is a great neighbor, customer at a restaurant, co-worker, etc. But he is a terrible husband. He is emotionally barren, immature, selfish, self-absorbed, entitled, spoiled, and defensive. Recently I described him as “emotionally made of glass.” And he agreed with it. No wonder he is difficult to be married to.
He, like all alcoholics, is not capable of meeting my needs as a wife, partner and friend. Since I am a woman, most of my needs are emotional. And unfortunately, this is where he has the most severe deficits. It has been a lonely, lonely life. I’ve cried an ocean of tears for this man, and because of this man. All the while he is stoic, aloof, disconnected, oblivious. He does not deal in emotions. He drinks to avoid feeling things. If he cannot handle his own feelings, how could he handle — or even identify — mine? For one thing, he is not paying any attention to me. He is in a fog; as he described it to me, a self-induced coma.
He has been cruel, and emotionally abusive. Someday, perhaps, I will go into more detail about what that has looked like for me. Today I choose to try to look forward instead of back.
My husband has not had a drink for two weeks. I will not say he is “sober.” I understand that sobriety implies having a system of support in place to prevent going back to the drinking, and it implies having an understanding of how and why one became an alcoholic. My husband is not there. He is a dry drunk at the moment.
This is the second time he has had this “awakening.” The last time he reached a sort of “bottom” and quit drinking, it lasted three months. The first three weeks were like a honeymoon between him and being sober. And then they grew disenchanted with one another, and they broke up before my husband could find a deeper, long-lasting love with sobriety.
It is imperative that my husband get himself into counseling, and preferably with an addictions specialist. I believe a huge part of his potential recovery will be based upon an education that he does not currently have. And I am not the one to give it to him. I am no treatment center. If I were, I would have long ago been fired.
I pray. I understand his drinking is not my fault, and in fact has nothing to do with me. I try to take care of myself, since he has not been able to. I hope for better times. There is a corner of my mind that hopes for a “happily ever after.” I don’t let myself go there too often. I can’t let myself get my hopes up. Disappointment is one of the symptoms of addiction. I have to be prepared for that.
Despite the pain I feel, I love my husband. I know he is a good man. My heart aches not only for myself and for our children, but for the man he has been drowning. I am sad for him. I want him to have real emotions…true joy and happiness that he has not been able to fully experience under this anesthetic: beer.
Happy Anniversary to me, and to my husband of eight years. I believe in the possibility of forever for us. I won’t give up.
“Have enough courage to trust love one more time, and always one more time.” Maya Angelou
If I Owned A Bakery…There Would Be A Lot of Crumbs
After baking four boxes of cake mix and having them crumble into a million pieces when I removed them from their pans, I did my best and frosted a cardboard box and then drove to Wegmans at 11pm to buy a small round cake for the top layer.
Honestly…I love the way my cake turned out. I envisioned it and made it happen!
I Did My Best 