The Family Scar

Audio version now available.

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.

They did ask about our boys’ fondest memories, and our sons can be trusted to read a room and stay above the line of appropriate pre-dinner conversation, but this move has stirred a lot of memories for me, and I guess some of the worst ones are more accessible than usual. In fact, I have been sober now for the vast majority of the time our hosts have lived across the street. But when they first moved in, they invited us for dinner, and I came drunk and drank more. I passed out briefly in my chair. My wife, Sheri, covered telling them of the long hours I had been working. I wonder if they remember? I know I’ll never forget.

Emotions are raw in my house. For the two boys still living with us, they are leaving the only home they’ve ever known. I moved around a lot as a kid. Moving had its social disadvantages, but on the upside, I never got attached to a house. I struggle to understand their struggle. But I don’t doubt that it is real. Even while I don’t have experience, I have a dose of sometimes-impatient empathy. I’m doing my best. We are all doing our best.

There are lots of “I’s” to dot and “T’s” to cross to get from contract to closing, including some inspection-induced work. Work on a 111 year old house never goes smoothly. In addition, two decades is a long time to acquire material possessions. There is a classification of things that have potential value worth keeping, but not enough potential value to make them worth moving. My wife and I spend hours each day in decision mode in that particular gray area, sometimes consulting with each other, sometimes acting unilaterally. Then there’s the physical toll of moving. I work out regularly. Somehow, my workouts seem to have missed the particular muscles used to move a piano or an oak table.

There are so many opportunities for squabbles. “Why did you put that there?” “Where is this going?” “Why are you working on that when this needs to be done first?” “I know you are in the middle of something, but can you help me carry this?”

This house holds so many really great memories for us. It is the singular structure that protected our family of six through all of our kids’ formative years.

But it is also the museum of our alcoholic chaos and trauma.

Moving is stressful. I had hoped that the mutually embraced change would drive Sheri and I closer together–that I’d be the yin for her yang–that as the nights of packing and moving after full days of work got hard, we’d laugh and fall into each other’s arms in exhaustion. I really should have been a writer for the Hallmark Channel.

Instead, we’ve bickered. I seem never prepared when Sheri gets emotional about something that reminds her of the kids being younger, or a family memory, good or bad, that infiltrates her consciousness. I can’t stop saying the wrong things. “When do you want to start sleeping at the new place? Should we move the food and mattresses and make it a goal to be done sleeping in the house by the end of the weekend?” “No,” she responded quietly. “I can’t think about that yet, and certainly not by the end of the weekend.” I found just enough maturity and fortitude to reserve my reminder about the fast-approaching closing date for words mumbled under my breath and out of her earshot.

She is working so hard, never taking her eye off the ball. She delivered the children’s sermon at church on Sunday, because that’s her job. She took our youngest to his piano lesson, because that’s her job. She roasted a turkey because moving it from one freezer to another seemed inefficient. She made Thanksgiving dinner in March, because that’s her job. She made a perch out of a cardboard box and a towel so our cat can look out the front window now that we’ve taken the couch he spent roughly twelve hours a day perched on the back of, because that’s her job. On top of all of her occupational and nurturing responsibility, she’s taken on a temporary gig as packer and mover. All the while, she’s wading through strong emotions, some of which remained inaccessible for years or decades.

It is like when you drop your sunglasses in a mud-bottom lake, then try to find them with your toes. By the time you dive to look for them, you’ve stirred up so much muck you can’t see a thing.

We are living in swirly muck. And we aren’t handling it as well as I hoped.

There is something permanent about trust destroyed.

My alcoholism took a bond between two innocent young adults, sank it to the bottom, and buried it in the muck.

Trust broken can be restored. We are living proof. We have processed the resentments. We have created an environment of almost entirely consistent emotional safety. We have stacked days, stacked weeks, stacked months, and stacked years of sobriety and growth. We have healed trust.

But there’s a scar. And the scar will be forever visible, tender to the touch, unnecessary and unwanted, a constant reminder.

And when stress is high, sometimes the scar, and everything it represents, wins out over the hard-earned consistency of recent years, and hard-earned trust of healing. Sometimes we remember the pain. Vividly.

Sometimes my stress pushes me closer to my unsavory instincts of snippiness, inconsiderate decisiveness, and a lack of patience. Instincts I have mastered control over in ordinary times. Instincts that rise to the surface when time for conscious attention is short.

Sometimes Sheri remembers what I was capable of all on her own. Sometimes I remind her whether she likes it or not. Either way, the painful memory blocks her view of what I’ve become.

When we are doing something hard, when we need each other the most, sometimes the distance between us grows. The scar keeps us apart. It is a tangible reminder of the lingering damage of alcoholism. To forgive is not to forget.

Our boys did not recount traumatic experiences for our neighbors. My mini-panic subsided as, along with Sheri, they talked about playing Pickle and Knock Down Daddy. Pickle is not Pickleball. It is a form of dodgeball played around the outside of our house that requires jumping over a fence and an aspen and a black walnut tree as bases. Knock Down Daddy resembles a gymnast running toward the vault, then launching at my kneeling torso trying to roll me onto my back. With kids ages 23, 21, 19, and 16, we haven’t played Knock Down Daddy in a while. Our neighbors remembered a particularly heavy rain when they watched from across the street as our kids danced in the puddles in their underwear. As pre-dinner conversation as daylight was first saved, those memories topped the list. There are countless good memories that didn’t make the cut.

But living a full life, an aware and engaged life, also means some indelible memories we wish we could forget. Trauma means we never will.

Recovery is not to forget as a part of the rebuilding of trust. Recovery is getting comfortable with the scar, and using the lessons of history to make the best of what is yet to come.

If you are ready to work on getting comfortable with your scar, as the drinker or the partner of a drinker, please take this brief survey so we can share resources, including a free ebook.

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