Rose, part one
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He took a cube of cheese right out of Rose’s mouth. It was the move a parent makes when a baby shoves an unhalved grape past its toothless gums. “You should eat more protein,” is what Rose’s partner, Chris, said.
“You’re too fat,” is what she heard.
The emotional abuse didn’t really ramp up until Chris was sober. The criticism was mostly, but far from exclusively, about food. Clothing choices, housekeeping, what she watched on TV–nothing was safe from the scrutiny of his newly sober perfection patrol.
What was Rose’s reaction? After years of watching him destroy his liver along with the connection between them, how did she respond to judgement from the alcoholic perpetrator?
She absorbed it. It fit neatly into a well-groomed catalog of childhood, adolescent, young adult, and mature professional messages that all said the same thing.
You’re not good enough.
Through critique, criticism, and comparison, first her family taught her to feel like she might never measure up. Then Rose took responsibility for her own self-beratement, and compared to everything else she tried, tearing herself down was probably the thing she mastered most completely. When Chris came into her life, in time, he took the baton like he was running the anchor leg of a long-distance relay. If Rose wasn’t already beating herself up, he swept in to make sure that not a single potential deficiency was missed.
Rose never had a chance. How can someone be expected to notice the burgeoning red flags of a partner’s alcoholism when she is laser focused on what a fuck up she is?
***
Family dinner was as consistent as it was compulsory when Rose was growing up. The discussions always focused on what Rose and her younger brother learned in school, and an updating of the standings in the relentless competition for the best grades and most earned accomplishments. Family dinner did not give, “Who can fit the most mashed potatoes in their cheeks?” vibe in Rose’s house.
When the family moved across the country from California, four-year-old Rose thought they were going for a ride in their 1982 Ford Fairmont. When the ride seemed to never end, the lack of air conditioning took its toll as they crossed the deep south. Ten years later, when her dad dropped her off at high school in the same car, he ignored her pleas to let her out at the corner, and found her friends in the curbside crowd so he could show off the spray painted lion that attempted to cover up the rust spots. If it wasn’t a grade and accomplishment comparison, it was torment and embarrassment. The 1990s cultural fear that children would grow up with too much self-esteem meant parents went to great lengths to achieve demoralization.
Still, Rose grew up in a loving family. As kids, she and her brother helped collect water samples from the Chattahoochee River for their dad’s work. He had a PhD in hydro geoscience, and much preferred conducting research to teaching the “rocks for jocks” undergrad classes to students that lacked his passion and intelligence.
Rose’s brother thought he’d be a physician, but instead earned a PhD in neuroscience because he preferred intense research rigor to how people-y doctoring was. The only thing that kept Rose’s mom from earning her doctorate was her devotion to mothering. When her kids were in school all day, Rose’s mom got back at it and earned her teaching certificate. She lasted three months instructing high school biology before returning to get the master’s that led her to a government career at the CDC. She was much more comfortable working with anthrax than teenagers.
You can probably imagine the disappointment in a family full of hard scientists when Rose finished her undergrad studies in elementary education and started her career with but a measly bachelor’s degree. “You’re teaching little kids. You don’t really have to know anything. You just have to be patient,” her father surmised.
Everything you need to know about Rose’s childhood is in those three sentences. Success was not about money for her family. Rusty cars and government employment were badges of honor. What mattered was that you tried like hell, clawing and sacrificing, to be the smartest person in the room. Anything short of that was failure.
Rose’s career is speckled with false starts, failures, and frequent returns to graduate education to find the next best fit. When she was fired as a third-grade teacher because a class full of nine-year-olds overwhelmed her, the verbal cause of termination from her principal was, “Rose, you just don’t have it.” Judgement and critique was an albatross for her. So much so that she missed the evidence of her successes helping people. After Hurricane Katrina, Rose joined Americorps. She later earned a reading specialist certificate and thrived helping small groups of students. She worked with kids with severe autism, volunteered working with addicts, and interned at a writing center. Rose even spent a couple of years in South Korea teaching English to local kids. Now, back in the States, armed with a master’s degree in applied linguistics, she is back in the public school system, teaching English to high school students for whom English is a new language. That is instruction that is as individualized and specific-needs based as it gets. It takes compassion, curiosity, and connection.
Through it all, Rose compared herself, and her career, quite negatively to that of her parents and brother. They were hard scientists conducting research and informing policy while she floundered around helping people with greater struggles than her own. In the moment, she always, always felt like a failure with neither a plan for the future nor a history about which she should be proud. Now, looking back over the past 20 years, Rose is just starting to see that she succeeded where the rest of her family failed. She connects with people, gets to know their individual needs, meets them where they are and without judgement. Her brother and parents ran from careers with challenging human interactions–where connecting was more important than conquering. Rose thrives supporting people. The work will fill her bucket if only she learns to take off the filter of status and accomplishment.
When Rose moved back from Tulsa after taking a shot at a speech pathology grad school program, she faced a choice. She could again retreat and live with her parents. They would welcome her warmly, but their genuine hospitality would come with a heaping side order of confirmation that she had again failed to achieve superiority in a temporarily chosen path. Instead, she decided to move in with Chris. After a long-distance relationship while she was in Oklahoma, the unknown felt safer than an immersion in disappointment.
***
When they started their life together, Chris drank rarely–a beer or two when they were out, and kept no alcohol in their home. It is unlikely that Chris was just uninterested in alcohol. He had plenty of trauma to medicate. He was probably being cautious to avoid the alcoholic fate that took his father’s life when he was in college. Chris left school to care for his dad, and take him to cancer treatments. It was a true expression of a child’s unconditional love for a father, particularly remarkable because Chris took the brunt of his father’s alcohol-induced emotional abuse. As a child, Chris’s dad screamed at him that he was a loser before Chris watched him pass out nightly.
Chris’s initial caution when Rose moved in with him eventually gave way to Kirkland-sized vodka from Costco. That was the first shift that caught Rose’s attention. That much vodka gone in a week or two felt like something worthy of conversation. If only Rose had any bandwidth for pursuing the imperfections of her partner amidst the many ways she herself felt insignificant and inferior in life and in her relationship.
The progression into alcoholism is foggy for Rose. “It just sort of oozed in.” But there were signs missed. A drunken argument ensued when Rose pursued a state department job that would again take her to Southeast Asia. Looking back, she can see that the move would have interrupted his nightly vodka ritual.
Before the overt disparagement about her weight and other things, Chris grasped for control–an almost universal indicator of high-functioning alcoholism. He made Rose take the public schools job so they would have insurance while he worked from home as a computer contractor. Working from home has clear advantages for drinkers on a slippery slope. When he forced her into therapy for her anxiety, he took her to her first appointment. When she froze as the therapist asked why she was there, Chris interjected, “I drink too much.” Early on, his awareness clearly exceeded hers. His willingness or ability to do anything about it, that was another story entirely.
The pain of the status quo has to exceed the pain of change before drinkers find sobriety. In Chris’s case, the status quo included a clearly articulated death sentence. But not before three critical escalations: His drinking increased dramatically during the pandemic, he learned to manipulate Rose into enabling his addiction, and Rose finally started to detach. She didn’t know that’s what she was doing. She only knew she needed to spend as much time away from Chris as she could.
Accept the criticism, look for a new path–something new to learn, and avoid the conflict inherent in self-confidence. The lessons Rose spent a lifetime learning were guiding her navigation of her partner’s alcoholism. In his active addiction, her tools worked well enough.
But Rose was no match for his sobriety.
To be continued…
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