Audio version now available.
I made my kids watch Beautiful Boy, the 2018 Steve Carell and Timothee Chalamet movie about addiction. I also made my kids watch a CNN documentary about the internet-induced proliferation of pornography. My alcoholism was traumatizing to my wife and kids. I can’t erase the past, and I refuse to ignore it, so the only thing I can do is be a cycle breaker. But as my kids will tell you, the most traumatizing thing I have done to them might have been making family movie nights out of Beautiful Boy and a CNN porn documentary. To make matters worse, Chalamet’s character has the same name as my oldest son, and when my hair was shorter, I was constantly told how much I looked like Steve Carell. In fact, someone once brought me a life-sized cardboard cutout of Steve Carell promoting The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and I was once chased down a city street by a man screaming, “Hey The Office! You dat guy!” I have not shaved or had a respectable haircut since.
In spite of the trauma my insistence on confronting addiction with my kids has caused, I still feel like it was the right decision. We didn’t talk about this stuff when I was a kid – not in school and not at home. Nancy Reagan insisted that we, “Just say no,” to drugs, and there was a PSA where a fried egg represented my brain, but the only messaging around alcohol that I can remember was that we had to be sneaky until we were 21, so my friend, Brad, and I buried a styrofoam cooler in the woods behind his house and covered it with a piece of plywood with leaves glued to it.
Is talking about addiction with my children hard? Yes, absolutely, but it is also as important to unwanted-consequence prevention as talking about vegetables and condoms and exercise and seatbelts and identifying the arrogant stupidity of the sharp bulb.
