Addicted Like Me (5 page)

My father had driven to work that morning and called the house to check in with my sister, who was staying with us to help care for my mother. She told him that my mom was doing very poorly and that he needed to return home. In his desperation, my father got back in the car but drove the opposite direction from where we lived. By the time he stopped the car, my dad was in Boston, sitting in front of his brother's house, a two-hour drive away. My uncle sat him down and told him firmly that he needed to
turn around and go home because his family needed him. Before he could reach home, the ambulance had come for my mother.

I remember standing there watching silently as she was being loaded onto the stretcher. I knew it would be the last time I would ever see her. I felt terrified as I silently watched her being taken away. I wondered what would become of me and my mother. I did not get to say goodbye. I was lying in my bed that night, unable to sleep, when I heard my father burst through the door crying, telling my sister that it was all over. My mom had died alone.

I felt frozen in my bed, with my heart and head racing, not knowing what I was supposed to do. The next day, family members were in and out of the house as arrangements were being made for the funeral. Everyone worried about me because I was showing no emotion. The next night, I slept across the street at my cousin's house. In the middle of the night I was awakened by a shadow in the dark bedroom, which was dressed in a full uniform. It was my brother. He had wanted to see me when he arrived home from the Air Force for the funeral. After he left, I crawled as far under the covers as I could get, and it was my aunt who later found me, sobbing alone in my grief and fear.

I didn't understand what was going on inside of me. I didn't want anyone asking me any questions about it, either. I was playing out the behavior I had learned growing up in my family, to push feelings back until I was numb. At first my mother's death seemed surreal. Other times I felt guilty, wondering what I had done wrong so that God decided to do that to me. I was so confused. My mother's funeral was a blur. The large church was filled to bursting, and
there was not a seat to be had. As we were leaving the cemetery, my grieving grandmother grabbed me and led me to the casket. She tore a flower off the casket and gave it to me. I took it, hoping no one had noticed, because I just wanted to disappear.

I was eleven years old when my mother died. I was left alone with my father, and I truly don't think he had a clue what to do with me. I was sent away during the first summer after my mother's death to stay with relatives, where I overheard many discussions about my future. They spoke about where I would live and who would take care of me. I ended up staying with my father in the end. Unfortunately, he was an emotionally immature and angry man. He had no idea how to communicate with an eleven-year-old child. My father had rarely done any parenting while I was growing up, always on the outside of our inner family circle. Sometimes, I wonder if it might have been so difficult for my dad to take care of me because of his own abandonment. Nobody cared for him when he was left in the situation I was left in following my mother's death. Perhaps he didn't know how to go back to that place in his life.

The only thing we had in common was the fact that we were both devastated by the death of my mother. My dad coped by getting drunk and yelling. I pulled within myself to cope. Since my dad rarely made it home after work because of his drinking habit, I spent a lot of time alone in the house, in my room vacillating between sadness, loneliness, and fear, never knowing if or when my father would show up and start screaming at me. What had once been a home filled with a vibrant family now felt like an empty shell. My mom's family had distanced themselves from us by then,
due to their own grief, and I felt so isolated by this distance. That's when the addictions began. I recall starting to eat when I wasn't hungry to try and feel better, which seemed to numb the pain. The legacy of addiction that had belonged to my father and grandfather was becoming my beast, too. I blocked out a lot of what happened during those years, but no matter what I did, I couldn't get away from feelings of shame.

My father constantly raged at me. I remember one night he came home and got me out of bed on a school night, at two in the morning. He was angry because the medicine chest in the bathroom where I kept my makeup was too messy. He threw all of my makeup away and made me sit at the kitchen table with him, where he screamed at me and would not allow me to speak. He told me I was a slut because I wore makeup. He told me that I was worthless and would never amount to anything. My dad pounded his fists on the table and said that my mother would be sick if she could see what a mess I had turned out to be. None of his kids had gotten a higher education, he told me, and by God I was going to be the one to go to college. The things he screamed at me were full of contradictions. My father yelled for several hours that night, repeating the same issues while I sat silently in a chair.

If I started to speak during his rages, my dad would scream at me to shut up. My father was a master at using my shame to punish and control me. The result was that I ended up feeling guilty about everything, including my own existence. I let the family illness of addiction consume me to escape the shame I felt heaped upon me by my dad, and just to escape from myself. I was ashamed of who I
was. These outbursts happened often with my father. I remember fluctuating during them from feeling afraid to feeling hurt to feeling giddy, like I was floating around the room, and sometimes I just wanted to laugh out loud because it all seemed so ridiculous. I had to control myself, though, no matter what I felt, because I would have really gotten it if I showed my emotions to my dad.

I saved my sorrow for school, where I remember I would make my way through the hallways on days following my father's rages, dragging around so much shame, guilt, hurt, and fear that I felt like a walking, open sore. My father never let my wounds heal. At the time I did not realize that this was what I could expect out of life as the years would go by, and I would marry a chaotic man who also opened the wounds I nursed and caused them to fester. The only time I can remember feeling any type of hope or peace was when I would go and sit in church sometimes by myself. I felt comforted in church, thinking that somehow, someway, things were going to work out. Then I would return home, and that hope would vanish.

I came home to find every kind of explosion you can imagine over the years, like the time I walked into my room and found my dresser drawers dumped out on the middle of the floor. My father had been going through them, had decided they were too messy, and had dumped them out to punish me. I have no idea what he was looking for or why he did it. I never knew what was going to happen next with my dad. I felt like I was betting like he used to on the odds that he would roll a good pair of dice, but it rarely happened, if ever. What I began to understand about the stories of my father and my grandfather is that their stories were about detachment.
Each man detached from his emotions by using alcohol to numb the pain caused by living. By the time their beast found me, I had also detached from my life. Everything in my world just seemed to be happening somewhere outside of myself, which is why I was able to overlook the effects of my addiction for so long, even after Jason's death. I spent months recovering from this, even healing from my own physical injuries caused by Rick's crash. I resorted to pilfering though people's medicine cabinets after the doctor would no longer prescribe pain medication or tranquilizers for my hysteria, and I stole pain pills as often as I could find them. Rick's drinking and pot smoking escalated at this time, and our lives spun more and more out of control.

We grieved in very different ways for Jason. Rick was extremely emotional about the death and blamed himself. I was stuck in denial and didn't want to talk about it. I turned to school. I threw myself into accounting studies and graduated with a 3.6 grade point average, though my marriage by this time was unraveling rapidly due to addiction, denial, guilt, and stress. Rick became romantically interested in a young girl. This was the knockout punch for me. She called me to say that my husband was in love with her, and that I deserved better. I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

I never recovered from this blow to the marriage. I asked Rick to leave the house, which he did, and I knew the marriage was over. The day after Rick left, I discovered I was pregnant again. I reversed my decision and took him back, deciding to give the marriage one more chance because I didn't believe I could make it without him, not with Lauren and my son, Ryan, on the way. I was scared,
exhausted, and overwhelmed. Shortly after Ryan's birth, Rick took a job in Arizona, and I hoped this would be a fresh start. We continued on for a few years together, but the marriage could not survive. It was extremely chaotic when we separated. Rick got heavily into meth use, which caused me to live in fear and anxiety over what he would try to do next. Before the divorce was over, Rick repeatedly threatened me, slashed my tires, stole my car, and beat me up.

I didn't feel the weight of the disappointing circumstances I had created for myself until so many of them were heaped upon me at once. I had truly developed an emotional numbness that was a coping mechanism. To the outside world, I suppose I came across as insensitive because of this detachment, but dealing with real life and real emotions was just too painful an activity. The only way I could be happy was to self-medicate, so that is what I did. In recovery work for this habit, as an adult, I began to put the stories of my father and grandfather together with my behaviors. Growing up affected by their alcoholism molded my character in their likenesses and also taught me to make the decision they had both made to deny the sensation of pain.

I hated that my father was an alcoholic, yet I also chose to abuse alcohol and drugs. Minutes after high school graduation, I bolted from his house, yet I also chose to be involved in a lifestyle that created relationship problems because of the other addicted people in my world. I felt a huge wave of shame and humiliation when I began to see these parallels between my father, my grandfather, and me. How could I have made so many destructive choices? I had just wanted to feel better, like they had, and yet I had played a
role in the wrecking of my relationships, just like they had. Maybe, I sometimes still think, had I not been drinking that day, Jason would be alive. Perhaps my dad thought the exact same thing about my mom, believing that had he been there she might have hung on a little bit more.

The legacy of addiction that I inherited from my father and grandfather was also repeated on Rick's side of the family. Although I never saw his parents drink, I knew that both of his grandfathers had drinking problems, and one of them had owned a bar. It seemed that the disease had skipped a generation and now grew in Rick, which led him to make destructive choices when it came to the kids and me. After we divorced, he constantly put them in danger. One weekend, when Lauren and Ryan were visiting with their dad, I got a call from Lauren. It was a Sunday afternoon, and she said I needed to come pick them up because Rick was passed out. They could not wake him up and didn't know what to do. At the time, Lauren was eight. Ryan was six years old. “My God,” I thought, “these are babies. What the heck was he thinking?”

I was frustrated and upset as I made the drive to deal with the situation. This type of thing became a pattern, and I became concerned about what the children were being exposed to. I had hit rock bottom with the addiction and insanity in our family when I was with Rick, and when I was thirty I decided to return to church, where I began to realize that I was screwed up and it was time to get help. Because I seldom experienced acceptable behavior growing up, I thought unacceptable behavior was normal, which led to chaos and confusion in my life and relationships. In my initial
recovery work, I sought help around the issues I faced as a result of having grown up in an alcoholic home. Early on I recognized how destructive the consequences of addiction were on the kids when they spent time with their dad, and I knew that my recovery was a critical factor for us in my attempt to create a stable home environment. Although I made the decision then to stop using illegal drugs, it would be twelve more years before I would fully realize the extent of my own addiction and become totally sober.

Rick and I had a joint custody agreement where I provided the primary residence, so it wasn't a choice of whether or not they saw their dad. Rick got to have them every other weekend and for six weeks during the summer. Lauren and Ryan didn't disclose much about what went on when they were with Rick unless they had to, and there were many things I wouldn't learn about until much later, which only served to substantiate my fears. At the time, I was afraid for their safety every time they were with Rick. Being the custodial single parent carried a lot of responsibility. I needed Rick's help, and I remember thinking that it just seemed so unfair that I couldn't rely on him. Between his beast of addiction, my need to work to support the kids, and the decisions I had made to work on my own recovery through meetings, I was overwhelmed and exhausted by the time I had to face the disappointments I had created.

Then, there were the letters to Lauren and Ryan that arrived from Rick through the years. These were postmarked from various jails and prisons where he had been sentenced, due to arrests for driving under the influence. My heart would break for my children as each letter arrived for them. The legacy of addiction continued
for us all in these notes, in which Rick repeated promises I knew he could not keep, like that he was truly going to be there for the kids and make up for the times he had let them down. The sad thing is that I think he meant every word he said. He just couldn't deliver.

The exposure of the kids to our family story of addiction only increased after Rick married his third wife, Sylvia, with whom he opened a new chapter in the book. She was violent to the children. Lauren was twelve and Ryan ten years old when I had to come and rescue them from her abuse. About three weeks into the summer I received a panicked phone call from Lauren, claiming Sylvia had gotten physical with them. They had escaped the apartment but needed me to come and pick them up. On the forty-mile drive to rescue my kids, I was practically hyperventilating. When I arrived, Rick was standing in front of the apartment complex where he and Sylvia lived, and though Lauren and Ryan were there, too, all Rick could say was that he didn't really know what was going on. He just shrugged his shoulders, walked off, and shook his head.