Unstable

Chapter 33

What followed was quiet.

For all the fear and chaos that had exploded inside our house before he left, what he proved during those six weeks away was that he loved the boys deeply and that, despite everything, he wanted to be part of their lives. He came over almost every day to see them. Sometimes every other day, but usually daily. I would simply move out of the way when he arrived. I wasn’t trying to keep their dad from them, and I never wanted them to feel caught in the middle of what was happening between us. If he came over to spend time with them, I would disappear into another room and let them have that time together without tension or interference from me.

At first he bounced between a couple different rehab facilities. Apparently the ones recommended through the DART program were more intensive, actual inpatient facilities where you checked yourself in and detoxed under supervision alongside people with severe addictions. He hated that environment immediately. He told me the people there were “real addicts,” heroin users and people detoxing from hard street drugs, and that he didn’t belong there. Looking back, I understand why it frightened him, even if part of me also recognizes that it was probably exactly where he needed to be. Instead, he eventually found an outpatient program that felt more comfortable to him, something less restrictive, less intense, easier to manage.

The biggest revelation through all of it was the Adderall.

He detoxed off both the Adderall and the Percocet, and they transitioned him onto Suboxone instead. At the time, I didn’t fully understand what any of that meant. I only knew that after the Adderall was removed, the paranoia seemed to settle down. The accusations stopped. The frantic energy disappeared. He seemed calmer. More coherent. More like himself.

The night he left, though, I had been terrified.

After everyone walked out of my house and took him with them, I stayed awake half the night cutting boards to wedge into the windows because I genuinely did not know if he would come back in the middle of the night trying to get into the house. That was how unstable things had become. My hands were shaking while I measured the boards in the garage. He hadn’t wanted to leave. He had been angry, agitated, pacing outside with the men while they tried to calm him down. I still don’t know what was said in those conversations because they intentionally kept me away from them, but I remember the energy of it. I remember the fear sitting in my chest after everyone drove away and the realization that I was now alone in the house with two little boys and no idea what would happen next.

His cousin’s wife would call periodically to update me on how he was doing. Usually she called to warn me he was on his way over to see the boys, but she also filled in pieces of what life looked like there. She told me he mostly stayed in the basement sleeping on the couch, which honestly wasn’t much different than what he had been doing at home before he left. She said he was quiet, withdrawn, spending most of the day alone downstairs except when he came up to eat. Apparently he had bonded with their cat. That detail stuck with me for some reason. Even now it feels oddly humanizing in the middle of all the chaos.

She had assumed he would only stay there for a week or two.

Instead, it stretched into almost six weeks.

Eventually he bought her old Lincoln Navigator, which was another one of those moments that felt hopeful at first and exhausting later. Every time he came out of rehab there seemed to be some version of reinvention attached to it. New plans. New projects. New energy. He was going to fix the Navigator up, get things together, start over, make changes. But the vehicle became exactly what so many things in our life together became: another unfinished project sitting in the driveway for years while he talked about what he was going to do with it someday.

It never really ran correctly.

It eventually just sat there deteriorating.

Apparently while he was staying there, his cousin had even offered him his old job back under the table so he could continue receiving disability while slowly working his way back into functioning again. I didn’t learn that until years later because the person who told me expected me not to repeat it, and I never did. But what shocked me was that he said no. He didn’t want the job back. Even now I still don’t fully understand that decision.

At first our conversations revolved entirely around the boys, but eventually he started trying to talk to me again too. And when he finally apologized, his apology was simple.

“I’m sorry for the mean things I said to you.”

That was it.

Not the terror. Not the paranoia. Not the accusations. Not the psychological unraveling that had completely destabilized our home. Just the “mean things.”

At the time, though, I accepted it because I was desperate for any sign that the man I had married was still somewhere underneath all of this.

The agreement before he left had been that all of us would start therapy. Him individually. Me individually. Marriage counseling eventually. The boys too. So while he was gone, I did exactly that. I found a therapist for the boys and another for myself, and we went constantly. Sometimes twice a week.

My therapist was younger than me, probably by quite a bit, and during those early sessions I mostly just told the story over and over again trying to make sense of it myself. Every appointment felt like reliving the same nightmare in slightly different wording. What happened? Was he mentally ill? Was it addiction? Was I somehow missing something? Was I crazy too?

I wasn’t walking into therapy looking for coping skills. I was walking into therapy genuinely wondering if I had somehow lost my own grip on reality.

That was the terrifying part about living inside someone else’s delusions for that long. His conviction became contagious. I knew I wasn’t doing the things he accused me of doing, but after months of trying to defend myself against stories that made absolutely no logical sense, part of me still wondered if there was something fundamentally wrong with me that I couldn’t see. I remember outright asking her at one point what my diagnosis was supposed to be because I truly did not know anymore.

She told me she technically had to put something down for insurance purposes, so she labeled it depression, but then immediately explained that she didn’t actually think I was mentally ill. She thought I was sad. Overwhelmed. Traumatized. Exhausted. She became the third person to use the word schizophrenia after hearing the full story though, and at that point I became obsessed with trying to understand what had happened inside my own house.

I started researching stimulant abuse. Adderall addiction. Psychosis. Paranoia. Delusions. I found articles describing symptoms that matched him almost exactly, right down to the surveillance fears, the obsessive thinking, the conviction that people were watching him, listening to him, tracking him. Some of the articles discussed underlying mental illness becoming activated or amplified through stimulant abuse, which terrified me even more because suddenly the possibility existed that this wasn’t temporary at all.

And oddly enough, a diagnosis almost felt comforting to me at that point.

Mental illness sounded manageable. Treatable. Something with a name and a plan and medication and therapy. Addiction felt much harder, much slipperier, much less predictable. So while everyone else seemed terrified of the possibility that he was schizophrenic, part of me almost hoped that was the answer because if we could identify the problem, maybe we could fix it.

The boys, meanwhile, were reportedly doing fairly well all things considered. Their therapist told me they missed their dad terribly, but emotionally they seemed stable enough. It was late November by then. Their birthdays were approaching. Christmas was coming. The house had calmed down considerably, and honestly, he seemed calmer too. More regulated. The delusions appeared gone. He wasn’t accusing me of things anymore. He seemed normal enough that hope slowly started creeping back in.

And oddly enough, while everything in my personal life was imploding, my business was thriving in a way it never had before. I was building inventory faster than ever, staying ahead instead of constantly scrambling behind deadlines, and for the first time since starting Bay Creek, I felt fully immersed in my own creativity instead of spending all my energy managing chaos around me. That fall I made more inventory than I had ever made before. I was selling Christmas in October. Every market was strong. Every booth was full. And while part of that was certainly timing and a strong economy, another part of it was impossible to ignore once I looked back on it honestly: without the constant unpredictability inside my house, I functioned differently. I could think clearly. I could work uninterrupted. I could actually move forward.

The first time I used the saw by myself, I realized halfway through the cut that I wasn’t actually afraid of it anymore.

Then one night he asked if he could come home.

And against every instinct that should have protected me, I said yes.

That was the dumbest thing I ever did.

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