Alcoholic – PART I – Growing up in the bottle
A series of essays exploring my experiences with alcohol and alcoholism
My mother is an alcoholic.
I HATE saying this. I hate saying the words, instead of saying “my mom USED to be an alcoholic,” or “used to drink too much.” I would much prefer to describe my mom this way. But, they teach you that once you are an alcoholic you always are. To confront it, to own it, is to take away its power. I often try to lessen the blow of that statement by adding the modifier “recovering,” but, honestly, sometimes it feels like that just adds insult to injury. It is a disease, not an act of cowardice or abandonment. Saying my mother has cancer, though, doesn’t have the same character-assassinating tone. I need to adjust my thinking. At least I have a little pride in the fact that both she and I turned into fairly useful human beings.
Beer and drinking have always been a part of my family's culture. Both maternal and paternal. Nearly everyone always had a beer in their hand (and a cigarette) and I have countless recollections of hiding away with the cousins and the nights grew dim as the parties got more raucous. There were a few stabbings, numerous fist fights, the occasional car crash and it seems, constant yelling.
Among my earliest childhood memories is attending Al-Anon meetings for a time. It is a support group for family members affected by an alcoholic parent. Or parents. I seem to recall it helped. Or they said it did. I was SO young. I don't know how young, but I guess 7-10. There is a fuzzy era in my memory as a preteen where my mom got her act together.
This is probably a question I can ask my parents, but we don't talk about those dark days long, long ago. Even though they clearly still impact my life as an allegedly mature adult.
I do have a very specific memory of me and my sisters sitting in a darkened room around a table for 8. There is a single lamp over the table, a coned lamp shade splashes the light to the ceiling or onto the table, leaving the walls mostly un-illuminated. The room is smoky and in the shadows is my father. Everyone is here for a conversation for us children. I am asked how I feel about my mom's drinking. Does it make me happy, or sad, or angry? What would I like her to do differently? Are there any specific moments that I want to talk about? I don't know what I said. I doubt it was very much.
I do carry a few VERY visceral memories of events with an alcoholic mother. One involves looking for clean socks. I have a thing with socks. A specific order they must be put on (left then right) and that they must be the FIRST garment. It must be a weird foot thing. I don't know. Anyway, when I was very small and getting ready for school, I didn't have any clean socks. So I did what you do when you need clean clothes: you go look through the dryer and hope like hell that someone did some laundry. Only in this moment, the dryer is empty and I'm forced to dig through the dirty laundry looking for socks.
Now, if you have a methodology for sock-wearing, you can imagine how important CLEAN socks are. I am not OCD, I just have a weird thing about my feet. If cleanliness is next to godliness, then my feet at least should be right next to the throne.
I was so angry. Wrapped in my tiny towel as 6-year-old me can't understand why mom can't keep the laundry clean. The washer and dryer tower over me as I stand in the little back room of our house on bare plywood floors while the morning sun shines in the east windows. My dad has replaced the floor (the home was a fixer-upper), and so it never felt clean, even though it probably was. Eventually, I found the cleanest pair of dirty socks I could and accepted it was either that or bare feet. I recall feeling filthy all day long.
Another memory also involves laundry. I am a year or two older and it is wintertime. I want to wear my favorite shirt to school, but it never made it into the dryer. So mom brings it to the living room and hangs it on the mantel of the fireplace to dry. We warmed our old two-story house with the fireplace. My dad had manufactured a wood rack upon which the wood burned that had a blower, and it shot warm air through the bottom rooms of the house.
After 15 minutes or so, mom realized it was taking too long and that we would be late. I insisted on wearing my black, yellow, and red striped shirt, so she proposed laying it on the space heater for a moment . It was the metal kind that didn't shut off when it tipped over. It would be the same heater that would burn my house down in a couple of years. But today's tragedy involved a nice toasty and dry shirt in short order. I would learn about halfway through the morning that the heater had melted the polyester fibers just enough that with a little stress, the shirt began to tear into ribbons across my back. I spent the day with the kids asking me why I had four wide tears in my shirt. It was humiliating, and my favorite shirt was ruined.
I wrote previously about the 'scorpion scar' on my left wrist which I acquired by smashing through an all-glass storm door. What I didn't mention in that story is the reason we had that storm door.
One of the first things my dad did on his fixer-upper on our dirt street was replace the old wooden all-screen door with a very modern aluminum affair that had a window you could open and close to let the breeze through or just have a nice source of light.
One night, my parents came home from my aunt and uncle's house. They lived way out in the country in a HUGE glorious A-frame with windows to the sky and massive tile throughout. It made our abode look like a hovel. My cousins had new clothes and great toys (lite-brite and spirograph wouldn't be found in my toybox) and rode mini-bikes and got to shoot guns. They always had money and I resented them for that. I would learn later that the source of this income was running cocaine from Mexico. That was also why everyone called her 'Snake'. My uncle was just plain Charles.
My mom and dad returned earlier than usual and after my grandmother (our babysitter) left, I recall them arguing a lot. After they'd been home about an hour or two and things had settled and we put to bed, I heard screeching tires and a roaring engine. When I looked out the window at the head of my bed, I could see from the second story a car racing down the road to our house. Our home was adjacent to an industrial park, so there were no houses to block a nice view of unfolding events.
It turned the corner where the street turned to dirt and skidded into the embankment. The jolt must have killed the engine because I remember watching the headlights flicker and dim as the engine restarted and then roared. Then the driver gunned it. The vehicle slammed into gear and rocks and dirt flew as the driver spun the rear wheels in the unpaved road.
It was close enough now, that I could see it was my Aunt and Uncle's Suburu Brat, a small two seater car-truck affair, similar to but smaller than the El Camino. There weren't many of these in our small town. Rocketing out of a cloud of dust, the little truck barreled the last block to our home.
Our house set up on a small hill, so when the Brat hit our driveway at 30 mph, it launched into the air and on to our front yard, skidding to a stop right at the steps up to our front porch, its hood level with the porch itself.
I was on my knees in bed, face to the window and my sisters to either side of me as we heard muffled yelling from downstairs and saw my aunt climbing out of the driver's door. She was yelling and cursing and stumbling somewhat dumbly. I saw her digging around in the bed of the vehicle when I jumped off my bed and raced down the stairs to see what the hubbub was all about.
As I turned the corner into the living room, I saw my mother had opened the front door. As she reached to open the outer door something smashed through the plate window, exploding bits of glass all over the room an causing my mom to recoil, lose her balance and fall to the floor.
My father pushed past her, splashed out the door and started shoving and shouting at my aunt, insisting that she leave immediately. While my mother having recovered her senses, found and snatched up the red brick that had been grenaded into our living room and went out to join the fray.
My tiny frame clothed only in a pair of small white underwear stood in the carnage of the smashed window and watched out the door as my mother jumped to the hood of my Aunt's car and proceeded to scream and threaten her with the brick. My aunt finally got into her Suburu and tried to start the engine. Seeing the moment wind down, my mother stepped from the hood back onto our porch still carrying the brick.
“I HOPE YOU LIKE THAT GIFT FROM CHARLES!” my aunt screamed out the window as the engine started. Re-infuriated my mother jumped back to the hood of the car and with all her being hurled the projectile right through the center of the windshield.
I heard her yell “HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT, YOU BITCH!” as the truck roared to life and my aunt shoved it into reverse, spilling my still celebrating mother onto the ground as she tore out of the yard and up the street.
My dad tried to comfort me as tears streamed down my face. As he put me and my sisters back to bed, I could hear my mother downstairs mumbling furiously as she cleaned up glass shards and attempted to restore the evening's equilibrium.
NONE of that came out at Al-Anon mind you. I wonder now if sharing it will finally allow me to let it go.
To this day, I take real umbrage with writers who put children in stressful situations like the one I experienced at Al-Anon, and have the child spout emotional and psychological rhetoric like they are a first-year therapy student at Yale. A real child of trauma is scared. They are afraid of saying the wrong thing. Of getting someone in trouble. Children of trauma know they are loved. But they cannot understand the full context because they are children. Not tiny adults, incomplete humans. Knowledge incomplete, complicated by the feelings of insecurity from the anger, violence, and deprivation at times. This is precisely why it is so difficult to diagnose and help struggling families. Parents won't confess and address the root problem, and children simply cannot.
The Al-Anon room lives with me always. It was first time it was explained to me that mom's behavior wasn't normal. “Go get me another beer” was not a regular part of a child's lexicon. And learning to open the yellow-gold Coors can without making it foam and spill was a skill most don't learn until much older. There must have been other families there. Al-Anon is the kind of group that even flotsam and jetsam like us have access to at no cost. That means group sessions. What else did I hear? Were other children and spouses of a similar experience? No doubt.
End of part one.
This is a long one, close to 7000 words, so I'm breaking it up because that's a lot to ask you to read in one sitting and it's pretty heavy stuff for me to write about. As they post, I'll add links here to continue the story.
Thanks for reading and sharing my beautiful lie.
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