The Fundimental Unfairness of Addiction

God, this is awful. Horrible that this exists. Some of the logic I just can't grasp or totally endorse. But so beautifully and painfully written. As the adult child of an alcoholic/substance abuser, I find my empathy strained. I have been hurt. I have been neglected and abused so that my father could use, so that he could serve the unholy twin gods of whiskey and cocaine. I have my challenges in life, but I have never been reduced to helplessness, and for that I am grateful. Truthfully, I want someone to blame.

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/mar/09/russell-brand-life-without-drugs

Some artists have to contend with this unending misery in order to create. And then some get swallowed by it. My own brother went down the rabbit hole of drinking too much and I watched helplessly from a far distance as he went missing and turned up dead on the floor of his own apartment. I had said that he was burning too intensely to carry on for long, and rightly predicted that we would have to contend with putting him in the ground. The circumstances surrounding his death are clouded partially in mystery, but it is well documented by the Navy that he was having a major drinking problem before he died. He was 25.

I want to blame my father, or his father who schooled him in the ways of the bottle and emotional abandonment. I want to rage at the loss of my brother, my college fund, at my hopes for family normalcy. I want to show him how he made me feel worthless. I want to level these things at my dad. But then I look at him, and I see a frail, sickly, and finally sober shell of what my mom says swept her off her feet in hopeless romance. I don't see the man who wrote her drippy romantic, soulful poetry. I don't see the young man who pushed me on the swing as a very small child.  I see someone who, if faced by the full measure of my experience, would crumple like burnt tissue. He's there, burnt already, and holding his shape by sheer force of will. A whisper would scatter him.

Really, that dynamic, romantic artist is gone. Like the angelic boy soprano he was, when he hit puberty he did not mellow into a mature tenor. He cracked and was no more. He couldn't ever after carry a tune any more than he could carry responsibility or joy. He couldn't deal. He was a lead pencil in a broadband world. His capacity was reduced to nil.

I hear from him every few months now. I see that he is trying to be somewhat present in my life. He calls after months of forgotten or failed attempts to remember I am a part of his family. I hear his remorse. If I wanted to reconcile with my father, he is still here on this planet. I see his desire for my forgiveness. I blankly and without much feeling absolve him, my hands in a nonmagic gesture of benediction. I tell him I need nothing from him, not so much because it is true, but because I know I will never truly get what I need, not from him anyway. I am letting him off the hook. I have given what I can to him. I have thrown years of love down a dark hole to him, but he never took my lifeline. He only memorably told me that he wished I was born male so he could punch me in the face. No amount of telling me feebly that he loves me now will erase that. That takes bigger, more fearless and transcendent love that he just cannot produce or hold in his heart. I am left to work on it within myself. Despite being told I am worthless, I have to believe in my worth, love myself, and somehow forgive a man who probably was too wasted to remember saying that to me and shattering me into fragments.

Maybe only other addicts can really understand him, really help him. I am from the other world, with all my judgements and moral superiority for having never fallen prey to the bottle or the freshly chopped line. The hole in me mirrors the hole in him. I fill it with minor peccadilloes, perhaps. I am no saint. But somehow my need to consume Chex Mix doesn't seem to interfere with my ability to love others, although perhaps parts of myself. I am sometimes driven by the desire to be perfect, even though that conceit is the worst form of self-loathing.

But, lacking perfection, how am I to offer myself to the world? How do I consider myself worthy of the love I want in my life? I can bake a killer cake, save the life of a sick person, and even comfort the dying. But what if people knew that I couldn't save my brother? I couldn't heal my father? I couldn't be enough to stop the gnawing monster of addiction from greedily devouring the people I cared most about? Does it matter how kind or good I am? I will bet it does, to people with the capacity. But some people lack that. You can call down to them forever, and ultimately have to rise up from the chasm's edge and step back, lest you fall in yourself.

I am not an addict. I know I can go to Al-Anon for support if I wanted to. I just don't want my father's failings to define me.

I am trying to resonate with kindness and compassion in my life. This lesson is a hard one. It is going to take a lot more work. But I am alive today. I am aware today. I am grateful for that. The frustrated tears I shed over this are just part of the landscape. I don't have to be perfect. I just have to be trying to be good. That is enough. That is a lot more than others may have. Just by virtue of looking at this and attempting to unravel the Gordian Knot , I am better than I was on days when I merely felt sorry for myself. One day I will claim my destiny and cut the knot with one stroke and be done with it. Alexandrian solutions are not lost on me. In the meantime I hope I can at least see it for what it is: a yoke bound to an ox-cart. Just a symbol of what could be. Can I combine my conqueror's heart with the will toward compassion? I can try.

Dead Batteries All Around.

There is something just awful about knowing that you are at dangerous levels of life burnout and you can't take a break. Half the reasons that I am feeling at loose ends are ones that I can't discuss due to confidentiality laws. It seems that as a nurse and as a foster parent, I have to be burdened with more secrets than I am expressly comfortable with. I can't talk about my kids or my work very much.

I was supposed to go to have an appointment with Little A's therapist today to discuss how she is doing. I set aside the time, I skipped putting on makeup because I fully expected to spend the therapeutic 50 minutes crying my eyes out. I packed a bag with lots of under-eye concealer to apply after the appointment and before going to work.

I went out to my Jeep and tried to start it. It went "click, click, click". That's it. The thing was running fine yesterday, and today...nada.

So I open the hood and peer inside. Now, I know how to change my own oil and do a tune up, but fixing actual problems on my car is another matter altogether. So there I am in my pink nursing scrubs, looking under the hood like the answer is gonna jump right out at me, and further that I would know how to fix it. Of course that made me feel like a dork. So I called Tony and he said it was a dead battery, and he was gonna buy me a new one and head home with it.

So I had to call and cancel the cry my eyes out appointment. I went back in the house and made some of those cinnamon rolls that come in the pop-open tin. As I ate one, I felt properly sorry for myself. All in all, it wasn't even a huge crisis. We had the money for the battery, and Tony replaced it pretty quickly. The car started right up. But it had thrown my flow off. It was frustrating on a day when I had multiple things to do before work. As it is, I am not even going to be late for work or anything, but my personal battery feels like it is going "click, click, click".

I am having that thought again. The one where I need to go take a retreat and recharge myself. I need to find my spiritual core and get grounded. I need to do yoga and sit among trees and feel the breeze on my skin. As it happens, I am going to go to work in about 20 minutes and won't be home until after midnight.

I'm lucky that the car didn't die at some other, less opportune time or place. It could have been much worse. Could have been better, too, though,.

If you see me by the side of the road with my hood up, at least honk and wave. I'm just looking for answers even if I don't understand how things work and might not even know how to fix them.

Chien Perdu

Oh, dude. Bad dreams all around last night. Little A woke up from a nightmare in the middle of the night, and it took Tony a while to convince her that there were no monsters in her room.


Then we all got back to sleep, and I had a nightmare that I was out walking Ember by the Truckee river, and someone threw a ball beside her. She ran after it and fell in the river and was swept away while I ran along the bank trying to get her. It was awful. I woke up all upset to find her mink-soft little body right where it belonged, next to me and very warm in sleep.

I gathered her up in my arms and stroked her while my heart hammered. She sleepily gave my face a little lick and wagged her tail.

When Ember came home with us, she was a tiny little thing, and very much still a baby in many respects. At the time, she massaged my mothering need and also helped heal the loss of my beloved Heidi, who had passed away just months before. She was so soft and cuddly, I had no trouble bonding with her.

When I came home from my trip on Sunday, I got a hug and a peck on the cheek from my husband, an ecstatic, leaping, smiling greeting from Little A, and an absolutely crying hysterical reception from Ember, who would not be content until I picked her up and held her against my body. She must have bounced her long body on those stubby back legs for two full minutes while I put my stuff down. It was really funny and only a little annoying and very sweet.

Dreaming that I lost her was horrible. She's my baby in some ways. It really drew my attention that I have an enduring fear of losing those I love. After losing my Grandparents, my brother, and my dog Heidi in the last 7 years, that isn't that surprising. Add to that the multiple losses that we don't even talk about: all those babies we tried to conceive and couldn't, the one time I was just sure I was pregnant and then I wasn't, and the friends that I have fallen out with in the last few years, it is no wonder I stopped talking to God and everyone else.

Funny that I should actually make my living by talking to people. All day. But I am talking to people about themselves, their problems. I'm the fix-it gal. I'm the one they come to when they are sick or suicidal and need assistance. I'm the one they chalk up either as an angelic presence of helpfulness, or as the very personification of the bureaucratic mess that is the VA. I talk to dying people, angry people, mentally ill people, and people that otherwise would be lost in the cracks of this world. I get alternately thanked profusely and berated with long looping strings of profanity. I'm a blank screen onto which they project themselves. In other words, I'm not real to them.

I talk to my pen. I talk to my manuscripts. I talk to my poetry. I talk in soft touches to my dog. But people, not so much. Oh, sure, I prattle on into my phone, but everyone is usually so busy that to take the time to actually deeply talk seems the provenance of old friends that already know much of the back story.

But I have gotten a few things back. Some old friends have come back to me and that is really nice, even if I don't feel nearly as fun as I used to be. It must be entertaining to watch me fall down or something. I never was very graceful.

I did have a pretty deep conversation the other day and found out how out of practice I am at it. My throat closed up a couple of times when I tried to say things that the other person especially needed me to say with the kind of grace I lend to my poetry. I needed to be fluid, and instead I got all twisted in knots trying to protect what felt like a sucking chest wound. It is pretty wounding to my ego that there was just no way for me to keep my cool and I was as awkward and stilted as I was when I was 15. How frustrating. I feel so lame.

I ended up talking about how my brother died and just bitterly weeping over it. Afterward I just felt cracked open and eviscerated for about 24 hours, as evidenced by the previous blog post. It makes sense that I would retreat to being nonverbal, curling around the body of my dachshund like a bizarre semicolon in my bed. My restless hands find acceptance there. It is one of the few things in my life that isn't hopelessly complicated.