Hooked (7 page)

Where things stand

In a way, there was more to cope with later on, when I finally found out about my dad's addiction. When he first told me about it, I wasn't sure what to say and was just kind of speechless. I never talked about it much with my mom or brother, because I think it affected us all in very different ways, and we've each dealt with it privately. But since coming clean, my dad has become a very different, very calm person. In a funny way, coming off drugs and going through therapy has made him more unfamiliar to me than drugs ever did. He's very obsessed with spirituality now, because of the support meetings that he goes to, and he can be a little pompous sometimes. I once told him that I had started drinking coffee, and he said, “You know that's an addiction, right?” It was like he was saying, “I'm an expert on addiction, so now I can lecture you about coffee.” So in some ways, sobering up has changed him for the better, but in others it has also made him less real to me. He's so Zen and health focused that he's hardly anything like the dad I used to know.

Virtually all hard drugs cause personality changes. So coming off those drugs also causes the user's personality to change. To someone like Karl, who only ever knew his father as an addict, a sober parent can be a very unfamiliar one.

One of the ways that I've dealt with finding out about my dad's addiction is by supporting other people who are dealing with addiction issues. Whenever I have a friend who is having a problem with drugs, I tell them about my father's experience. I tell them that drugs are a crutch and that I've seen what they can do. I tell them that being a functioning addict isn't okay. After all, even though drugs don't seem to have changed my dad's behavior that much, I know they hurt his health. He sometimes slurs his speech or forgets words, and I think it's because the drugs damaged his brain. He used to joke about it, but he doesn't anymore. Now he says, “Shit. Why am I doing this?” And I know the time he spent doing drugs will affect him in the long run. So I guess this whole experience has made me more sensitive when it comes to drug problems, and has given me a feeling of responsibility to help anyone I can.

She Thought We Were Beautiful

Carmella's mom was not only an alcoholic—she was also bulimic. It didn't take long for Carmella to realize that sometimes your only option is to walk away from your parents … even if you aren't ready.

Finding out

It wasn't because my mom was drunk that I found out about her alcoholism. I was too naïve to realize that booze was the reason she acted the way she did. Instead, I found out because I liked to borrow her clothes. She had this big walnut dresser and there was a drawer in it that was full of scarves. One time when I was about eleven, I was rooting through this drawer and found a huge, half-empty bottle of wine. But I didn't suddenly realize:
Oh! I'm the child of
an alcoholic.

At that point, my mom was still a high-functioning addict. She was not abusive, and she wasn't lying on the couch during the day or skipping work. But she had lots of self-esteem issues. She didn't think she was smart enough, or good enough, or successful enough. So my theory is she drank to escape feeling shitty about herself. And although she kept her drinking under control until I was ten or eleven, it eventually became impossible to ignore.

Many alcoholics suffer from low self-esteem, which often contributes to their decision to start drinking. Their feelings of worthlessness then make it even more difficult for them to deal with the addiction they've acquired.

Things changed

Something happened around the time I hit puberty that caused things to fall apart. I think it might have had to do with the fact that my mom had just finished a PhD. She wanted to be a successful scholar and it was a lot harder for her to do that than she had expected. So suddenly she found her career very disappointing, and all her other insecurities began to catch up with her.

Even then, my mom hardly drank in front of my younger brother, Graeme, or me. So when I started getting older and having friends whose parents would come home from work and pour themselves a Scotch, I thought that was so strange. I was confused by the fact that they didn't try to hide it, and by the knowledge that my mom had a problem and they didn't, necessarily—despite drinking so openly.

How it played out

Although my mom didn't drink in front of us, sometimes it
was
painfully easy to tell she'd been drinking. One weekend, for instance, she took Graeme and me up to a cottage that our family owned. We were actually having a fairly good time. But then one of my cousins showed up with his girlfriend. My extended family doesn't get along very well. I could tell my mom was unhappy that they were there, and I guess that made her drink.

Mom had the pullout bed in the living room and I was in the room next door. The evening after my cousin arrived, I woke up because I heard some really awful gagging noises. I discovered that Mom had made herself incredibly sick and was sitting on the floor trying to clean up her own vomit. I had to clean up the mess and help her back into bed.

It's really awful to feel disgusted by your own parent. I sometimes try to think about what it would be like if I had an abusive parent who punched me or hit me, and I assume then you'd feel powerless. But seeing them weak is the opposite: it makes you feel stronger than them, except you don't want to. It sounds terrible, but it's kind of like you want to put them out of their misery.

Trying to stay thin

It took me a while to realize that, in addition to being an alcoholic, my mother was bulimic. First, I began to notice that she had a lot of unusual rules around food. Whenever we'd go out for meals, she would get a salad. Once in a blue moon she would also get muffins for breakfast, but would only nibble around the edge. She took no pleasure in cooking, and only ever made Jell-O. My dad wasn't much of a cook either, so we had lots of TV dinners growing up.

Despite all this, it wasn't until I became bulimic too that I finally understood just how far my mom's disease went. I was fifteen when I started sneaking away from the table to throw up after dinner—and that's how I realized my mom had been doing the same thing for quite some time. We had two bathrooms in our house, and after a while it got so that my mom and I would each be in one of them puking, while my dad and brother sat at the table.

Dad didn't intervene

My dad never did or said anything about my mom's alcoholism, and he was the same with her bulimia. When I asked him about it later, he told me that he was terrified, and didn't know how to intervene. But he certainly knew what she was doing. And eventually they both knew that I was doing it too. They sent me to therapy for it when I was sixteen, and I hated it.

I didn't want to be there. I simply wasn't ready to stop throwing up. My mentality was: I'll stop when I'm really sexy and pretty. And on top of that, I thought it was so ironic because my mom had been in therapy for years and obviously it wasn't doing her any good.

How I coped

Despite sharing my mom's struggle with bulimia, I found her alcoholism repellent. I was very afraid of becoming like her in that way too, so I avoided her as much as I could. For the longest time I felt like the world had done bad things to me and that I didn't deserve them. I procrastinated a lot. I would do work I wasn't proud of, and then blame my circumstances. I was spoiling for a fight, and I liked feeling alone and neglected.

By the time I was thirteen, I desperately wanted to move out of my house. It took me years to understand that most thirteen-year-olds don't feel that way. They'll say, “Oh, I hate my parents, and they're no good, and I wanna leave,” but they don't really mean it. I meant it. I wanted to go as soon as humanly possible. I spent my time fantasizing about having an apartment and paying bills. When I was sixteen, my parents split up. I couldn't bear the thought of being alone with my mom.

A place of my own

When I was seventeen, I told my mom that she was making me sick and blamed her for my eating disorder. I was convinced I had to go somewhere else where I would get better and not become crazy. So I got this really shitty one-room apartment with bright blue carpets and a shared kitchen in a pretty shady neighborhood. That lasted about two months, and then I moved in with a friend in an artist's loft with no walls—just one big room.

In some ways, living on my own was great because I'd wanted to do it for so long. But in other ways, it was a disaster. I was still dealing with an eating disorder and I didn't have a clue how to take care of myself. I would sneak back into my mom's house to eat things and throw them up. I was also drinking too much and messing around with drugs.

I think this was mostly because I was never taught how to do simple things like buy groceries and keep food in the fridge and have it not go bad. My parents never went grocery shopping or cooked or did anything like that, so I had no model to follow. I'd eat cake at the desserts café where I worked, or I'd buy seven zucchinis because they were on sale and then watch them all go bad. I remember one of my roommates once said, “What did your family eat? Didn't you watch them cook?” Laundry was the same. It would just appear on my bed, folded by my dad. I simply had no idea what to do, and my life deteriorated because of it.

Back with Dad

After about a year, I ended up moving back in with my dad. He was living in this tiny apartment above a fruit store. It was hard to see him like that, because we'd always been pretty well off while I was growing up. But my time there ended up being really good for me.

After years of doing next to nothing, my dad suddenly tried to help me with my eating disorder. At first, we went to a group therapy session for families of bulimic kids, and there were all of these parents there talking about how their daughters weighed eighty-nine pounds. And I remember my dad looking at me with raised eyebrows that said:
We don't need to do this for you,
do we? You're not this bad, are you?
And I really wasn't, and we both knew it. So we left. Instead, he got me this great book that talked about how to overcome bulimia. I think he realized that I was too independent for group sessions; he knew I had to do it on my own. I read the book from cover to cover really fast and then started fighting. It happened slowly, one meal at a time. I began by keeping breakfast down … then lunch … and eventually, one day, dinner.

Bulimia affects everyone differently, and is hard to beat. For Carmella, it was easiest to fight the disease on her own. Some people find group therapy helpful. Bulimia can also cause health issues such as tooth decay, heart problems, and stomach ulcers, which may need treatment.

My dad did his best to treat me as an equal and didn't yell at me. It took him a while to come around, but I think he finally realized that trying to push me into anything wasn't going to work. So instead, he just gave me a place to get better. And a year later, when I wanted to move out on my own again, he didn't object. He believed me when I said I was ready—and that time, I really was.

No sympathy

My dad and I became a lot closer while I was getting over my bulimia, but I still didn't want to be around my mom. I just couldn't find it in me to try to understand her. I remember there was this really sad lady with no teeth named Eleanor who used to come by my work. She was pretty beat up and probably an addict herself, but I liked taking care of her. I'd give her free coffee and ice cream, and we'd sit around in this swanky café and talk.

One day my manager told me that I couldn't let Eleanor in anymore because she was “scaring away the other customers.” She came by the next morning while he was there and I had to turn her away. She cried, and it was awful. For years afterward, I worried about her. Thinking back on it, it's strange that I had such sympathy for her but no compassion whatsoever for my own mom. I couldn't put her and my mom in the same category at all.

One time after I was living on my own again, I was Rollerblading home from work and I noticed this little car—a hatchback like my mom's—that had crashed into a traffic pole. As I was approaching it, I realized that it
was
my mom's car, and that she was standing outside it, crying.

I don't know if she was drunk at the time, but if not, she was probably hungover. And it was this really surreal moment where I had to decide: Do I keep going, or do I stop and comfort this lady? In the end I did stop, and I remember hugging her. I was taller than her on my Rollerblades, and I remember thinking:
I hate this. I hate
being bigger, and stronger, and more capable than this
woman who's supposed to be taking care of me!

From bad to worse

After my parents' divorce was long over and I had moved out, my mom deteriorated even more. My dad started dating someone else and moved to another city to be with her. I think he had always felt so out of his depth with Mom that he was happy to get away. My brother had a room there and was welcome, but he didn't want to travel so far for school, so he ended up living in our old house, alone with my mom. She'd stopped doing any kind of maintenance on the place, so it was full of old wiring and aging appliances. Finally, there was a fire in the furnace one day.

The house was pretty badly damaged, and after that, my mom and brother were living in a long-term-stay hotel for a while. During that time, she lost control completely. I went to see them once while they were there, and she was wearing a robe and wandering around with a glass in her hand. Poor Graeme had to live through that while he was in high school. He said to me once, “You and Dad left me with her! That's what you did.” He was right. I mean, he could have gone to live with my dad, but he was in a different city at that point. And I had long since moved out and wasn't prepared to be around my mom again. So we left Graeme with her.