I remember the night that I sat down with the young man (by then quite a few years older) and told him of my plans. I asked him if he wanted to have a child with me. I warned him all about my alcoholism and I told him that the only way that I could see myself with any semblance of a future was if I had a family of my own to care for. He surprisingly accepted the challenge. I took myself off of birth control pills for the first time in decades. We rented a very small home together and began to plan for a child. I made no mention of this to anyone. Even my closest family members had come to believe that I would never have children. I had spent my entire life harping about the state of the world and how it would be irresponsible to bring a child into such a wretched place. Besides, I had always mused aloud, who would want a child to screw up their weekend plans?
Getting pregnant didn't take long at all! Within three months, I peed on that fateful stick and promptly cut alcohol from life entirely. It wasn't even difficult. I knew what I was there to do, and by God, I was doing it. People were genuinely happy for me, and things seemed to be on the "up". A few months into my pregnancy, with my new, sobering mind, I began to notice that the young man wasn't as intent on change as I had been. He began to spend longer and longer stretches of time away from home and from his newly sober, newly pregnant girlfriend. The majority of his time was spent getting jacked up with his drug addicted boss while they drove around town in a work van avoiding actual work. I would argue, and stomp, and rant as he vowed to "do better for us".
One night near my seventh month of pregnancy, my dad knocked on my door in the middle of the night. My only brother, who I had given a ride to just that day, had been killed in an automobile accident. He was high and drunk at the time. My family unraveled over the next few months. My mom was crushed beyond repair. My dad slid deeper into his own bout with alcoholism. Everything took on a dark cast even as my own mind and body fought for the right to be happily and joyfully pregnant. I didn't properly grieve my brother's passing. It was impossible to focus on it. My mind wouldn't allow it, protectively directing all inward focus on my unborn child.
I contracted prenatal diabetes and my labor had to be induced. The labor was long and hard, resulting in an unusual number of epidural injections over many hours. But my daughter was born a healthy 8.8 pounds and looking JUST like her father. I was determined to be the world's greatest mom, learned to breastfeed and care for her, and created one of the most inspiring nursery rooms that can be imagined on a tight budget. I didn't realize that my doctor had sloppily sewn up my c-sectioned innards without making sure all the icky stuff was out, and then he promptly went on vacation. I contracted a horrible case of gangrene beneath my sutures. I didn't even realize anything was wrong at all until a visiting home nurse came to evaluate my newborn. She oohed and aahed over my nursery and my child, and then before leaving decided to examine me since I breastfed. It was she who put me in her own car and drove me to the hospital, insisting that I be immediately admitted and cared for. She stayed with me for hours, clearly distressed and angry at my doctor, even calling him from her personal phone to his personal phone to let him have it for not setting up my aftercare. To this day, she is my biggest hero. If not for her, I would have possibly transfer the poison from me to my daughter, perhaps fatally. At best, I would have continued to rot until I went back to have my sutures out.
Something about that sickness aged me. It took a long time and many daily hospital visits to pack the wound and promote healing. The scent of death kept me in a state of nausea and unrest. I was somehow never the same after that. I looked older, felt less and less energetic, began to withdraw. When my daughter was six months old, I began to drink again. My new depression opened the floodgates of the loss of my brother. It was during that time that my dad was found to have lung cancer. I lost him, and within a year I also lost my grandmother (who had done more than her share of raising me from my own infancy).
My alcoholism fought a day to day battle with the constant care of my young daughter. I would stay sober long enough for her father to come home from work and then I would drink until I passed out. I spent my days in a perpetual hungover state, caring for my child and alienating from the world, waiting with baited breath for the time of day when I could crawl up into the middle of my bed with a bottle of brown liquor and old, sad music. The young man, my daughter's father, really stepped up to the plate. Despite his own addictions, he cared well for our little girl while I traipsed off to Hell in the evenings. I became a shell of my former self in mind, body, and spirit for the next eleven years.
(to be continued...)
It's easy enough to see what went wrong with my life in hindsight. It's simple to understand how a young, American girl can spin out of control...
~from being born into a home of two alcoholic, teenage parents,
~from being left to her own devices with only her own experiences for survival,
~from going boy crazy for attention at a tender age,
~from marrying to escape home at age sixteen,
~from leaving an abusive relationship to travel unfettered around the country,
~from succumbing to drugs and alcohol when she found that nothing on this destructive path had led to a place of safety and security
... Definitely not a study in rocket science, there.
What makes my life now incredible is the overwhelming desire, after decades of rampant alcoholism and a shattered existence, to claw back to the surface for air and life-altering change. What makes my life incredible is that I have joined the ranks of the survivors of the world. Not everyone survives to tell the tale. Unfortunately, I've been privy to the lives of many people like me that did not survive. In fact, a great many people with which I shared my misspent youth did not survive to tell their tale. Maybe my story can speak for them as well. Perhaps if we had all had the tools of today... but I digress.
My backstory: Last November I had all but killed myself wallowing in a pit of self-loathing. I didn't cut my wrists or jump off of a bridge; I was too chicken for that. What I had chosen to do was simply drink myself to death. Life seemed pretty hopeless. Upon waking each day, I felt very little other than waves of abject despair or emotionless detachment regarding my life and my surroundings. I was ashamed of my home, was disgusted with the man that I had once loved, and watched silently as my daughter began to slip through my grasp like a fistful of sand on the beach. I avoided going out of the house, I dressed in rags even when I was sober (as if I didn't have a closet full of nice clothes), I would go on raging binges of drinking that lasted from two to fourteen days. It was only by the paycheck of the very man that I had grown to hate that I kept the lights on and food in the house for our child. I had no real friends left. Family avoided me with the same uneasy energy that I avoided them. I never answered the phone. I would cancel the family's doctor and dental appointments because I was drunk, hungover, or in the throes of a panic attack. My soul was a ruin. I spent the majority of my day on Facebook or listening to haunted music while writing horror stories. Everything was dark... my mood, my spirituality, my thoughts, my persona, my projected attitude. Hell, I wouldn't even turn on the lights half the time, preferring to sit in the dark.
Things weren't always so bad. Yes, my start in life was rocky but after I moved out on my own, for a while I blossomed into a very pretty, intelligent, articulate, and lively young woman. I traveled around the country with a devil-may-care attitude and was seemingly afraid of nothing and no one. Spring would find me in California, Hawaii by Fall. I'd shed old fads for new fads, old friends for new friends, old scenery for new, and quite often I had a blast. Unfortunately, with no one to stop me but myself, I drank hard and heavy the whole, exciting route.
I could drink a lot... a LOT. Drinking made it easy to stroll into a brand new town, a new situation, a new job, a new dance club with ease and grace. I could hold my liquor. People generally saw me as a young, free spirit- maybe a little on the wild side- but a good girl who thoroughly enjoyed her life with an easy confidence. Truth was that I had no idea who I even was minus the alcohol. A lot of the ease and grace was just mimicked behavior that I picked up along the way from people that I admired and wanted to emulate. I was a mask of whoever and whatever I deemed to be cool.
I was actually blessed to live all over the country. It wasn't difficult for me to pack up and follow the next, big train out of town. I was able to talk my way into jobs and careers of which I had little or no experience. I knew how to survive on a dime and make it appear to be a million bucks. I dated fascinating people. I went on endless adventures and was often the life of the party. I had a mind for experiences. I'd try anything just to make a memory. And I was good at it. I didn't see a thing in the world wrong with partying my way through life, and no one really tried to dissuade me. I made sure to surround myself with people who didn't get involved deeply enough to offer well-meaning advice.
Today, even after thoughtful contemplation, I cannot pinpoint when the pendulum began to sway in the other direction. I only know that somewhere along the yellow brick road, I began to become an angry woman. Even though I could scarce admit it to myself, the constant drinking was insidiously turning on me from the inside out. I became dangerously afraid of (and bored with) reality. I began to want to spend all of my time blown out on alcohol and drugs to escape what was happening to me. Friends began to fall away. Sure, I was still the life of the party in early evening, but sometime between the hours of midnight and three a.m., I'd become predatory, combative, argumentative, distrusting, and distrustful. My choice of playmates downgraded steadily over time from those who I chose to hang out with to those who chose to party with me. I wasn't in control of myself or my surroundings.
I began to be used by men. I began putting myself in situations where I could get hurt just to be around drugs and/or alcohol. I began to black out or have only a fuzzy recollection of the night before. I began to binge drink for days on end, finally ending up on the couches of people that were not my kind of people at all. I would wake up on the couch, fork over a little cash to supply more booze, and continue to hang out with bad, lost people until that particular party dried up or I drank myself sober. I would then return to my home and proceed to be chewed out by housemates, friends, roomates, and lovers about my wayward, reckless bahavior.
Disgusted with that, I changed my tactics. I no longer chose to hang out in bars or clubs, preferring to have a solitary lover and a private home in which to carry out my ever-increasing downward spiral into alcoholism. Truth was that I was getting too sloppy to pull off the whole party girl bar scene. It took finesse to find just the right personality of lover who wouldn't mind the binges, the uncontrollable bouts of violent behavior, who would nurse me through a crushing hangover, and also work a full time job to pay the bills. I was no longer employable. Even though I rarely drank 24/7, I would still lose a job or quit within a matter of months because of a hangover or to binge. To keep my family from knowing the extent of my degradation, I'd stay just outside of their contact, relying totally on my lover to fulfill my dark needs and addictions. It's difficult to add up all the years that I spent in this wayward state of mind and existence.
At thirty-three years old, I began to entertain the bright idea that if I was to ever truly change my ways, I'd have to have a child to pull me into an existence of responsibility. I thought that would be my key to finding an even keel. I decided that I was far too weak to change on my own, and that I had lived so selfishly that only the true love of a child could heal me. As yet another relationship dissolved -meaning that another man had had it up to his neck with my bullshit- I took the opportunity to move back to my hometown. I promptly made contact with a young man that I had spent much of my young life dating. He was a good man, had a good job, wasn't married, and had always told me that when I finished sowing my oats, perhaps we could start a family. Little did he know of how far I had fallen from that lively, wild girl he had dated. Little did I know of his own battle with addiction and codependency.
(To Be Continued)
