First, I'd like to say thanks to everyone who has been so supportive.  You're right, thinking of myself as the base that everyone else can lean on is bound to fail - I'll collapse, and no one will be well off.  It's not accurate anyway - already there are indications that MY ideas of what everybody needs, and their OWN ideas, are sometimes different.  My husband is dealing with his illness differently than I would, if it were me (why am I so surprised when this happens - after all, it happens almost every time...)  So, I'm working on clearing the decks, doing the things for him that I know help, and dealing with my own feelings and those of the kids.  He knows better than I do what he needs at this time - I can only follow his lead.

I'm remembering another time when I was trying to be supportive, but finding that I didn't in fact know best. Since it's something that comes up here from time to time, I thought I'd share it.  We often talk here about how to deal with early sobriety, or during slips - do we drink in front of the A, do we tiptoe around him, do we go to places where alcohol is served, etc etc.  Here's how it went, with us.

My husband had not, unlike some, made many attempts to sober up before he finally gave up and reached for a program.  So far as I know, he had never tried to quite drinking, never gone for more than a day or two without a drink or getting high, since he was 12 years old.  He'd quiet down for a while after a major binge, but there was never any suggestion of "quitting drinking".  So when he went off to detox and then rehab, in order to save his job, I didn't think much of it.  No one was more surprised than me, when he called me after three days in detox, and told me he'd been going to AA meetings, and had had a major spiritual experience. 
There was no room for him in rehab that month, so he had to come home after a week, and wait three weeks before going back up.  A few days into this, he got a call from an old friend, passing through town, and made arrangements to meet him in their usual bar for a chat.  "Oh great,", I thought. "So much for sobriety".  "Don't worry" he told me. He came home a few hours later, completely sober. He'd had a ginger ale, his friend had had a couple of beers, he said he never even felt the smallest urge to drink. "I wouldn't have gone in, if I had not felt I could handle it" he said.  "There's a bar on every corner, if I'm gonna drink, I'm gonna drink".
A few months later we were running some errands around town, and wanted to stop for lunch. Since we were near a lounge (bar and restaurant) that served good food, in we went. This had never really been one of his hangouts - it was more MY local than his, to be honest.  Yet, halfway through the meal, he said, "I've got to get out of here" - we left our food and got out.  For some reason, THAT place, that time, triggered his urges, when his own watering hole hadn't, the time before.
Again and again, in the first year of sobriety, I saw that the times when *I* thought he would be tempted to drink were not the ones that bothered HIM. His best friend's suicide, in a haze of crack and meth, didn't give him a twinge (in terms of wanting to pick up), yet things that to me were so minor as to not even be noticable, gave him lots of trouble. It became more and more clear to me that *I* didn't know what was best for him - he did.  All my worrying and fretting about his sobriety was not only useless, it wasn't even aimed at the right target, half the time.

So. At our house, we don't keep liquor in the house. It's a question of good manners - just the way he doesn't fill the place with big bags of chips when I am on a diet. However, if a guest brings in a 6 pack, or if we are out and I want a glass of wine, it's fine. As he says "It doesn't bother me if YOU drink, it will bother me if *I* drink".  When he is out working in the field, the guys eat in the motel's restaurant, which is usually a bar. Mostly he has no trouble, sometimes he gets a sandwich and eats in his room, if he doesn't feel able to walk in there.  He's committed to his sobriety, and takes responsibillity for it.  If he wasn't committed, then no amount of 'making it easier' on my part would help - I don't know where and when his triggers are. I *can't* make it easier for him, I can only keep from making it harder, by working on my own recovery.
What works for us may not work for you. The only way to know if your drinking, or having alcohol in the house, or anything else, helps or hurts your A, is to ask him.  Many sober alcoholics keep a bottle in the house - they find it empowering to know that it is there, and they don't have to drink it. For others, that would be a recipe for disaster.  We cannot get sober for them - if they really want it, they wil find a way to it. If they don't, then it doesn't matter what we do.