Welcome Back, Chef!

Once upon a time, I was happily married to my prince. Over two decades together, we’d settled into a routine that worked for us. Throughout the formative years of our relationship, we’d struggled in almost any area of life you could imagine, and we’d weathered them all. We were a magnificent team…unstoppable. Neither of us thought we had any reason to fear the future. And then, in a blink of an eye, the ride came to a screeching halt, and I was pretty sure one, or both, of us weren’t going to make it out alive. Mainly, I pretty much was sure he wasn’t going to make it out alive.

In April of 2012, I wrote a post called I’m A Casualty In My Husband’s War Against Time. For many months preceding this post, I’d been freaking out secretly about my husband’s sudden addiction to meth, this growing ego he was developing from being blitzed and in an outlaw motorcycle club, fueled on by the sudden realization that young girls can be stupid enough to want to ride on the back of a motorcycle with a man who is talking to his “special friends” that no one else can see (as long as he has a patch), and pretty much doing everything in my power to get him to want to stop using drugs. Turns out, I’m not as powerful as I’d hoped, and I not only failed, but I failed miserably. You can’t help someone who doesn’t want help, and it only took me a whole year and some months to figure that out. In the meantime, I’d suddenly found that in my frenzy to save Chef, I was in fact, losing myself.

While I would definitely describe myself as a very devoted Christian woman, I still have a lot to learn about God, His Son, and what He expects from me. I haven’t been a very good example throughout this drama. I can admit freely that I was pretty sure at the beginning of this crisis I wasn’t going to be. 🙂 It is always easier to know what you should do than it is to actually do it. But I have striven to share honestly, even though some of it was beyond humiliating, and now that life is not so chaotic these days, I’m even beginning to appreciate all that I’ve learned throughout this saga.

Chef has been on a related, yet different journey this whole time, and he had the added misfortune of having pissed off a woman with a blog who doesn’t really give a crap if people judge her, and had no qualms about talking about the most intimate issues a person can possibly have. I’d apologize, but I would probably do it all over again. So, I basically took something awful, painful, and full of big emotions, and broadcast-ed it for the entire world to see. Step by step, I mapped out my journey through hell. And Chef’s head would just explode every time he read about his life on my blog. My therapy was his worst nightmare. 🙂

Chef is sober these days, and has been for a little while now. Lessons – By Bekkie was a cry from Rebekkah, our daughter, for the salvation of the man she calls “Dad” and she describes the desperation she felt at not being able to force him to make the right decisions. I’m happy to say that Chef is saved now. Thank you again for all of your prayers.

I basically summarized the root cause of this whole mess in my post Satan’s Favorite Drug Ever — Meth, and I often prayed that the real Chef from my life prior to October of 2011 would return long enough for me to say good-bye and thank you to, and thankfully that has come too. Chef’s ex-girlfriend had expressed a desire to write a post of this blog outlining her journey, and while I still hope she eventually does it, I’m not holding my breath. I imagine she’s glad this ride is over, too.

Chef is dealing with some hard realities, and each day is taken minute by minute. It must be horrible to have been so out of touch with reality and made so many mistakes that literally decimated the life you once had, for so long, only to have to face it again. Often, he has expressed the desire to have just died in the middle of his meth-haze rather than have to see all the devastation he caused all around him. But, he is doing it. He’s now employed, and finally he is laughing again. Not nearly what I hope he will be in the future, but that crazy sense of humor is creeping back.

I’d like you guys to all welcome Chef back to Earth. We missed you, Chef!

— Bird

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