Coming Clean: A True Story of Love, Addiction and Recovery by Liz Fraser

Author:Liz Fraser [Fraser, Liz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Psychology, Psychopathology, Addiction, General, Self-Help, Substance Abuse & Addictions, Social Science, Disease & Health Issues
ISBN: 9781472986368
Google: gsQpEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-09-30T23:53:25.494746+00:00

Having left Cambridge nine months before to start a new, well-planned life, I was back where I started, this time on my own and with no idea what I was going to do next.

The set-up we had now was ridiculous; we had a lovely, newly renovated home in Venice but were both effectively homeless: we couldn’t be in our home as Mike would drink himself to death over there, and there was no way I was going back into a sweltering furnace on my own with a baby, with no family or close friends around to help me more than the occasional five minutes here and there for me to weep into a macchiato.

I needed a solid, calm base in which to stop for a while, think and work out what to do now my best-laid plans had gang and got totally fucked up, and however much I’d been glad to get out of Cambridge, it was still the closest thing to anywhere I could call ‘home’ in the UK: my older children lived there, many of my mum friends and café friends were there, and it was a life and a structure I knew very well. It was also a good place for Mike to be, should he decide to come and live near us.

Cambridge in summer is an English paradise of picnics and parks, punting and Prosecco. It looks like all the films you see about Cambridge with added scorch marks on the grass from disposable barbeques, and it was lovely to be back. This was my university town, the place where I gave birth to all of my children and raised three of them, where I had a strong network of friends, had worked in many places over many years and I felt at home.

But it was now also a Cambridge I’d never known since I met Mike: a Cambridge without him. Cambridge was for us, not me on my own with our child, and it was heavy, almost grieving sadness to know his breath wasn’t somewhere in the air near mine.

But here I was with a 20-month-old child, an absent, drunk partner and no idea what our future held. The time was not for sitting around grieving for what was lost, but to do everything I could to make my child happy and settled, and to make our life work.

I was lucky enough to be able to stay in a friend’s father’s house, but this time it was just me and my little girl, and instead of house-sitting on a family holiday it felt a bit like being given refuge. With my mind still a dizzying whir from the last few weeks of shock and emotional turmoil – actually months, really, with the exception of the brief respite in April and May – I was still worrying about where and how Mike was, what he was doing and what our now very rocky future held, but I did my best to try and make things as

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