I tried to rescue a turtle today. He was hanging out on the double yellow line of a busy two-lane road on which every vehicle travels about 60 mph. Not good. The trouble was that he was having none of it.  Three times I checked the traffic, ran to the middle of the road, and tried to pick him up. Three times he popped his head out, whipped it around, and made a wicked hissing sound. Turtles hiss?! Each time I set him back down and ran to the shoulder. I envisioned him chomping my hand as I was running toward the grass with him, trying to evade traffic and both of us dying. The fourth time, I tried to give him a gentle nudge to get him going, but to no avail. I had to leave him in the middle of the road.

I definitely need to up my turtle rescue game. The last thing I want is to see a handsome fella like him get crushed by a car. But I’m also not fool enough to risk getting hurt because a turtle decided to cross the road. Turns out that our good intentions and desire to help are not always enough.

After my separation I read a lot of books, articles, and blog posts about bipolar disorder and alcoholism and their impact on relationships. It was, of course, helpful to read about other people’s experiences; it helped to validate some of what our family had gone through while at the same time providing a variety of perspectives.

In the three years since then, one thing I read has stuck with me vividly—a blog written by a person struggling with codependency in her marriage. In it she asked this question: When is it time to divorce an alcoholic? My reaction was visceral. I yelled at the computer: It’s ALWAYS time. But of course it hadn’t been time for me until it was.

I thought I owed my husband so much, and surely I did. I owed him a marriage—that’s what I had promised. I meant it when I said in sickness and health, and to death us do part. And that’s the part I got lost in, and it’s why I kept running into the road, trying to rescue the hissing turtle that he was. It’s also why I lived with a railroad car of denial, an unbearable load of minimizing and pretending that things were fine this way. Really.

I had spent years weighing and evaluating the cost of my marriage and the pain I was enduring, trying to figure out whether it was best to stay or go, and all the while the pain got worse and the costs increased. But still: When is it right to divorce an alcoholic? When is it right to end a marriage when you made a promise?

Until one day I knew it was him or us, and I could no longer run into the road, risking my life for a hissing turtle who would not be helped.