Jen, part one
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Mindfuckery.
That’s how she described the cognitive dissonance of sitting in the waiting room while her son’s wisdom teeth were being extracted–doing one of the most motherly things a mother can do–while her husband sat it jail.
It was one year and one day after the failed intervention. Anniversaries always seemed to spark a flame for Jen’s husband. The previous evening, after copious amounts of red wine, and mumbling about the many ways she was an insufficient wife, Mark started yelling–belittling, demeaning, and gaslighting. Alcohol fuels our warped sense of injustice, and he was leaning hard on his side of the scale.
His volume got their sixteen-year-old’s attention. When Mark threw her glass of water in Jen’s face, her oldest son could witness the abuse no longer. He stepped between his mother and his own father driven by both unconditional love, and a growing sense of revulsion. Jen called the police when her son’s defiance was met with physical aggression. An hour later, she sat on the couch with her four boys trying to make sense of their fresh batch of family trauma.
“Do we still do that?” her oldest asked, referring to his wisdom teeth extraction scheduled for the next morning. “I guess so,” Jen shrugged, truly in uncharted territory, confused and heartbroken.
He had threatened before–both overtly, and also like a mafia boss expressing his hope that nothing bad would ever happen to her. He once ripped her phone out of her hand, bending her finger in a painfully unnatural direction. But his often relentless emotional abuse had never before turned violent. Jen and her boys sat in stunned horror. No playbook. No plan. Just terror from the man they were supposed to love.
***
As is so often the case with the diabolically slow progression of alcoholism, there really weren’t red flags early on. Not that Jen would have noticed them. She was raised in a tiny town in New Hampshire where drinking was ingrained in the culture. When pressed about alcohol induced dysfunction in her family, Jen recalled so often seeing her grandfather’s truck, parked next to her uncle’s pickup, in the dive-bar parking lot, and thinking their routine quite sad even before she really understood that they were avoiding the family while drowning the frustrations of adulthood.
Jen balanced academics, athletics, and alcohol experimentation in high school before being immersed in 1990s college drinking culture at UNH. It is rare that a woman makes it to her mid twenties without a traumatizing sexual encounter, and Jen was in the unfortunate majority. After drinking too much on a double date, Jen passed out briefly, stirred awake by the man she met that night trying to get her pants off her unconscious body. Back then, we called sexual assault that fell short of rape, “a close call,” and moved on with a temporarily heightened sense of caution. No cultural introspection necessary. Try to be more careful next time.
Degree in hand and internships under her belt, Jen moved to Atlanta to start her career as an occupational therapist in time to party in Buckhead the night of the Olympic pipe bombing. She fell into a weekend routine of finding a 5k or 10k race to run with friends on many Saturday mornings. After a cold and rainy race, she found herself as a substitute player on Mark’s softball team. “I picked her up on third base,” we would often joke, outgoing, charismatic, and always eager to be the life of the party.
Mark became quickly obsessed with Jen, fawning in a way that might raise concern. But when the attention is being paid to you, it feels really good, and Jen was flattered. Mark was meeting the need to feel noticed of a young woman in a new place with a fledgling career. To Jen, he felt like a bastion of safety in a world of uncertainty.
The next few years brought engagement, marriage, and the birth of the first of their four sons. The space alcohol occupied in their lives diverged sharply. Jen prioritized her nurturing role leaving both frequent social drinking, and her career, behind. Mark took the party on the road with a thriving sales career that necessitated lots of travel and entertainment with customers.
He switched from beer to red wine, explaining that the carbonation was too filling. The switch also correlated with Jen and Mark watching The Sopranos together before binge watching was a thing, back when the networks controlled our viewing schedules. Mark would make pasta with red gravy and drink his wine during their weekly mafia drama. For an alcoholic, our drink of choice becomes ingrained in our identity. Perhaps red wine was about more than avoiding carbonation. Capiche?
There are few things more painful for the partner of a burgeoning alcoholic than being replaced as top priority for the drinker. Jen was chastised for committing the family to attend a preschool carnival on a Friday night. She was told, in no uncertain terms, to never again schedule Mark to be somewhere that doesn’t have a liquor license at the end of the work week. Their first date was to the theater to watch Titanic. Now, movies were out of the question because Mark couldn’t find relief in a bucket of popcorn.
At home, Mark’s drinking was initially limited to Fridays and Saturdays. Then he got the weekend started early drinking on Thursday nights. Eventually, the Sunday scaries meant drinking the night before returning to work. The rules he put around his drinking were ever changing, subject to his ever-expanding need for relief.
When they went out, driving became a major issue. Either Jen was expected to be the designated driver, or on the rare occasions when Mark agreed to drive, he drank, too. They celebrated one of her birthdays with a very intoxicated, very public argument because she refused to get in the car after dinner, with him behind the wheel. The chaos, the drama, the tension, and the unpredictability was ramping up. The red flags were waving, and Jen was more than concerned. With four kids and financial dependency, she felt increasingly stuck and hopeless.
Then Jen received the phone call the wife of an alcoholic most dreads. If you are expecting a story about a tragic consequence for Mark, I suggest you reorient your thinking to the mindset of a mother. At age seven, Jen’s youngest was found wandering around a ball diamond by a stranger. Mark had dropped him off at the wrong field with the wrong team, not bothering to talk to a coach or even a parent, and in a hurry to get home to his drink. The stranger stayed with her son as Jen drove across town, in a terrified panic, to get him. The two returned home to find Mark drinking on the couch, incredulous, mad at their son that he didn’t give his dad better directions.
The divergence was about a lot more than alcohol consumption. Jen embraced every possible moment with her kids. Mark chose wine, more often than not, and Jen couldn’t understand. She could not imagine missing the development of their little lives. And yet, again and again, she watched her husband prioritize alcohol over the physical blossoms of their chosen bond. This is not a holier-than-thou moral judgement. From the perspective of a mother, it is inexplicable. Like watching live as the second plane hit the second tower, what she was witnessing defied rationality and all of her instincts for what was normal.
As the alcoholic progression continued, Jen was the target of Mark’s temper, his abuse, and his terrorism. But for Jen, it was never about her pain, her confusion, or her fear. It was always about protecting her children. As the alcoholic progression continued, Jen realized that she had to find a way out.
To be continued…
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