I’ll start by saying that historically, I’ve had a lax attitude towards recreational drug use. Marijuana is legal here and I personally have dabbled very, very sparingly pre-marriage (several years ago).
Husband and I were engaged with a young child several years ago, and he was arrested on felony drug charges. I was aware of his marijuana use, but not the other thing(s). He did not call to inform me of his arrest, and after calling all the hospitals and police stations in a tri state area, I learned he was in a holding cell.
Upon posting bail he was awful to me, and our engagement was broken, not because of the drug charges (I believe in second chances) but because his anger and treatment of me was terrible.
After several months, we ended up going through counseling and reconciling. I love him, but also love our child, and I hated sharing parenting time. I have always wanted to be home with my children every night and this was a huge draw for reconciling.
We have since married and have another child. I really thought he had changed… he completed probation and his sentencing was deferred and charges eventually dropped entirely. This was a miracle, as he had originally been facing felony charges and jail time.
Our agreement for reconciling was that he wasn’t going to do any of that stuff anymore, except maybe occasional recreational marijuana use as it’s legal, BUT he agreed to not use marijuana again unless we discussed/agreed on it since we now have two small children. I suspected he was smoking weed again despite our agreement, but opted not to confront him (except for one time) because it’s legal and honestly, I’m exhausted as a now parent of two kids. But this weekend, I discovered an obscene amount of marijuana (like 20 spent vape cartridges) as well as a large bag of white powder and cut drinking straw pieces in his home office. A few times I have noticed white powder on or in his nose but when confronted, he had reasonable excuses and I didn’t have any real proof to the contrary. The powder was all over his drawer and it’s obvious he’s been using it at home.
I love this man but when I asked him to come clean, he lied… repeatedly. Would only confess to smoking one joint, and blew up at me (gaslighting) saying he wouldn’t have to hide it if I wasn’t such a ——-. I finally told him I had found his stash and now he’s understandably freaking out. I don’t want this crap in my house, near my children, and he has been using when we are all at home so I don’t know what to do. If he gets caught with this stuff again he could go to prison and I could be left to raise our children alone and with the stigma of their father’s mistakes.
I took 6 months of unpaid leave to stay home with our youngest child (again, per our agreement, as I saved up to be able to do so), so money is really tight for me and we don’t generally have shared finances. If I leave him I’m going to struggle to keep our house. If I stay, I worry this will continue and he will keep hiding this from me. And also, I’m afraid that he may be seeing someone else, as he belonged to a sports league that plays 45 miles away and he’s been out of town – sometimes overnight and/or for full weekends – but since he is lying about the drugs, he will almost certainly not come clean about any other wrongdoing. It’s been fishy how he has wanted to stay with a friend overnight but his argument – reasonable at the time – was that he shouldn’t drive home 45 miles if he stays to have dinner and drinks with his friends. But now it seems like a really good way to have overnight visits with someone else behind my back.
I have no idea what to do.
**TL;DR; : Should I try to work through my partner’s addiction with him, or leave for the kids’ sake?
5 comments
You would never start a relationship w this person – criminal record and starts off lying – would you?
You need to get you and the baby’s financial documents, get therapy, and get out. Listen to the justifications you are making for him – and think about the risks not just to you but your kid!
OP, I think you already know what you need to do. Your post reads like a laundry list of reasons you’ll never fully trust him. And if there’s no trust, you can’t have a healthy relationship. You can TOTALLY have a toxic, unhealthy one, though. If you let this go, it’ll just be something else, something potentially worse, next time. Staying with him is just tacit permission to keep on trucking with whatever he’s already doing behind your back. He’ll just be better at hiding it from you.
Lead by example for your children. They will base a great deal of their expectations about relationships on what they see happen in their parents relationship(s). Don’t accept less for yourself than you’d want your kids to accept for themselves. They are watching.
What lesson do you think you’ll be teaching your children if you stay?
With drugs being laced with fentanyl , and other shit these days, you don’t want your children around that.
All it would take is incidental contact and you could lose the most important thing in your life.
The husband wouldn’t give a shit, but it wouldn’t stop him from sitting at a funeral soaking up as much pity as possible.