‘My number one gift to my family is my sobriety’
(2 of 3) “I was an alcoholic for many years. I’m not blaming it on Pedro. He had to move around for his work as a pipefitter. We were away from each other a lot, until I started traveling with him. When I was in my mid-to-late 20s and we lived in Florida, I was alone a lot with our two young kids. And I just started drinking.
“We both partied a lot. We started using cocaine. After we moved to Texas, we were using even more. Pedro was basically a gangster back in the day. Like, his young, rough days before we met. And all of those people were still around. We’re not blaming them for what we did. It was just that the ease, the access, the environment was there.
“Pedro was making crazy good money, and we spent it almost as fast as he made it. Those are kind of dark times that are still hard to talk about. The kids knew that payday was when they got to pick out whatever they wanted at Walmart. They would get their Happy Meal. And they could do their thing at the house, while Mom and Dad would do their thing. It was not like we had big parties. It was just Pedro and me.
“Looking back on those days, it was ugly. It was terrible. We were very irresponsible.
“We were living here about a year and a half before he had the accident. We had quit drinking and everything about three weeks before that. But while he was in the hospital for three months, I went back to drinking. I don’t know, maybe I thought it helped me cope. It was a really strange and dark time for me personally.
“When he came home, I was going to be his caregiver. I knew I would have to be straight thinking and organized, and prepared to work hard because of all the responsibilities that came with that. So the day before he came home from the hospital was the last time I’ve had a drink.
“My number one gift to myself, to my children, to my family, is my sobriety. I no longer have those chains that held me down for so long.”
— Kimberly Infante
Kimberly got a good job after earning an accounting degree from Lee College with a 3.7 grade point average. “There’s no way I would have had it in me to do all this pre-accident.”
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