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Serving as the facilitator for our Echoes of Recovery group has been the single greatest learning experience of my life. Below are the most important lessons, addressed to people like me. Below the list is how I gained this knowledge.
She loves her kids more than she loves you.
The lying is worse than the drinking.
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(Click here to read part one.)
Confused about the sources of her anxiety, and incapable of confronting Chris for the alcohol or relationship dysfunction, Rose did what she’d been trained to do her whole life. She signed up for 5k runs and thumbed through grad school degree catalogs. Deflection and gaslighting are traits so often assigned to people experiencing addiction first hand. But second-hand alcoholics can get pretty good at them, too. Rose could have taught a grad school class in denying reality and looking for a solution in external gratification.
Rose ignored the anxiety and her partner’s drinking, and instead focused on the next degree, the next job, or at least the next PR in the next Saturday morning race. It is a good thing she didn’t get the euphoric feeling from booze that many of us alcoholics experience. She had the denial and deflection down so well that it’s kind of amazing that she didn’t develop a debilitating addiction of her own.
Audio version now available.
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.
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“You said we would only be there for a little while. A couple of beers, you said. The kids and I left you there at almost midnight. When you stumbled in at 2am, fell up the back stairs, and started calling my name, I was afraid you were going to wake the kids. I didn’t want them to see you like that. I didn’t want them to see me as angry as I was.” My wife brought up that memory more than once.
I used to ask her why she couldn’t get out of the past. “You are stuck, Sheri. That was years ago. I’ve been sober for a long time. Why can’t you be proud of the man I’ve become?”
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(Click here to read part one.)
Old academic papers on the impact of alcoholism on kids are plentiful. The studies from the end of last century usually suggest that the family stay together. That’s one of the things I despise about behavioral health research. Humans are complex and coercible, and an experienced academic can usually design a study to get the results that validate his assertions. People haven’t changed much since the start of this new millennium, but the advice sure has. It is widely believed among family psychologists that what children need is one stable parent, to provide emotional support, physical safety, and healthy adult modeling. Staying in a toxic marriage for the sake of the kids is finally being openly criticised for being as ludicrous as it sounds.
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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.
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Before they served us our farewell dinner, our neighbors of twenty years, while enjoying the evening sun of newly saved daylight on their back deck, asked our youngest two boys what their fondest memories were of the house we are leaving behind.
I froze in a mini-panic. “The time Drunk Dad got so mad that he punched a framed picture spreading glass all over our bedroom.” “Listening to Mom and Dad whisper-fight well into the morning through the heating ducts.” Those were the traumatic memories that flooded my brain as I waited for our sons to speak.
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Confrontation has long been hard for me, and I have worked tirelessly to avoid it. My conflict avoidance is also probably one of the reasons that my marriage has survived. While I acknowledge that past, I am moving into a new version of the future.
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My wife, Sheri, and I just spent a long weekend with three couples. It was interesting to hear that we had all shared the same clear and decisive experience, without which, none of our marriages would have survived.
All four of us men were drinkers. All four of us men begged our wives to let us back in emotionally, and to comfort us as we tried to get sober. All four of our wives, after multiple attempts to be our soft pillows–to cushion the impact of early sobriety, finally stood by a hard boundary.
All four of our wives said enough was enough, and forced all four of us men to do it on our own.
Audio version now available.
It’s Christmas card season. I took last year off for many reasons. I had, for 21 years, come up with the concept, outfits, and the wording of my family’s cards. I also ordered, addressed, stamped, and sent the cards for over two decades. So last year it felt invigorating to NOT send a card. So invigorating that I decided to NOT do it again this year.
But I still had to gather photos, design, write, and order cards for my mom’s Christmas card. I took that job on about five years ago. This meant texting my three siblings for photos of their kids and pets, and putting something together that my mom approved. I care that she can tell her friends and our family about her grandchildren. I’m proud of that story.