That Guy in the Bed Next to Me

      When I realized my son was using drugs - really using, not experimenting any more - I turned to escapism.
      When I wasn't crying (which was often), I was reading. In a year, I burrowed through Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, and blazed on through World Without End; all five books in the Game of Thrones series; most of the novels of T. Coraghessen Boyle; short stories by Flannery O'Conner and poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Words filled up the places where fear and despair threatened to engulf me.
       What I failed to read - 18 inches away from my nose - were the signs that my husband was suffering too. "What are we doing this weekend?" he would ask, and often as not, I'd say, "Nothing."
       "I'll be glad to pick us up something for dinner," he'd offer. "What do you feel like eating?"
       "I don't care." What did it matter?
       Or he'd take another tack. "I need to go to this meeting in Hilton Head in October. Come with me."
      And I'd act like the trip was a punishment. My body might have checked into the hotel, but my head was still back home with my son's problems.
       In an odd way, it mirrored those early toddler years when a man loses his place in the pecking order, upstaged by an infant who requires all his wife's time and focus. Addicts, too, can be big mewling babies who gobble up any spare energy, and tantrum when they don't get their way.
      For a time, my husband must have felt he'd lost his son - AND his wife.
      Women are so sensible: when we're upset, we say so and we say why...volubly. I've never understood why men just can't say, "I thought I would have a different kind of son, and I'm grieving that."
      But, just as our marriage rebounded after the toddler years, we're in the throes
of a marital comeback. I diverted my paperback budget to a streaming movie subscription, and know what? Binge-watching Netflix side-by-side on the sofa is a lot less solitary than books.