PLAYING THE ALCOHOLIC BLAME GAME, OR, ANOTHER SLIVER OF LIFE IN THE TRENCHES

Would you like to play a game?

Back in the 80’s, or back in the day, there was a little cultish breakout movie called War Games. It brought Reaganism and the Cold War to the blizzard level. Briefly, a geeky  teenager hacks into the Pentagon and, thinking he’s downloaded a harmless computer game, nearly starts WWIII. Had this actually happened, of course, none of us would be sitting here. Because there would have been no winners, just moral hubris.

So it is with the game I’ve played. There are no winners in this game, not me, not my spouse. The only winner is the bottle. Regardless of how you spin it or who it points to when it stops, the bottle always wins. Now, let’s put it on a roulette wheel and divide it into possibilities, spin it and see where the clicker stops. Ready? SPIN! 

Clickclickclickclick.

Clickclick.

Click.

Stop.

It’s your fault, you enabled, you allowed this to happen.

Really??? I tackled a 20+ year police veteran, with a sidearm and pepper spray, brought him to the floor, knee-chested him, forced his airway open, intubated him and poured  liquor down his throat. I also didn’t stand in front of his car, or take his keys, or his wallet, thus preventing him from going to the liquor store. I also didn’t bar the front door when he walked in with a couple of cases of beer and a few bottles of liquor. I also did not, like Carrie Nation, take an axe to my ten thousand dollar kitchen cabinets in an attempt to smash bottles and make a point. I know this because alcoholism is a disease which any or all of the above cannot cure.

I don’t buy it.

Next spin.

You didn’t spend enough time with him, so he sought comfort elsewhere.

I don’t have time to think about this one. We each have a full time job. For years, his job required him to work ungodly shifts consisting of long hours, usually in the form of monotonous, mindless duty (at least to my Civilian understanding, but I’m usually wrong about these things), punctuated by intervals of madness and once in a while, a sprinkling of sheer terror. The months following 9/11 were a good example. I also worked. Outside the home, inside the home, the huge yard where I cleared, planted and maintain a rose garden, a vegetable garden, and a hosta garden and mowed a large lawn once a week. Shopping, cooking, cleaning, maintenance, 2 special needs animals and trying to niche out some time for my writing career. Workshops, book signings, conventions, meetings, retreats. If someone where to make sleep a commodity on the stock market, I’d sink my last discontinued penny into it. Perhaps it was sleep deprivation that blinded me. Too busy to notice the extra bottles under the cupboard, to tired to see the effects. Too empathetic to nag. Spin Again.

 CONGRATULATIONS! YOU LANDED ON GUILT.

Double the points, double the agony. Two sets of elderly parents, four of a kind. One set dying, one set chronically ill. Spending what little time we had together up and down the 400 set of highways and the Trans Canada speeding from crisis to crisis. Come home, mother needs you. Come home, father is dying. Come home, mother is in the hospital. Come home, mother is dying. Easier said than done. My spouse’s parents lived in New Brunswick. We live an hour north of Toronto. My parents live east of Toronto. My spouse is Catholic. And we all know, THERE’S NO GUILT LIKE CATHOLIC GUILT!

Late night long distance phone calls from family members. I’ve been through all this from a very young age. I knew what to expect. So-and-so is in the hospital and might not live until the ‘morrow. As a child, I remember being roused out of bed in the middle of the night and sleeping in the back seat of my dad’s car until we got to the destination of crisis, usually Belleville. As I stated in my previous entry, I was born and raised into a family of old people. Old people only get older. When they get older, they become chronically ill. Chronic turns into terminal. Then you go to a funeral. Mom dresses you in navy blue or black. You get to wear a hat and gloves to church. At the funeral home they make you kiss the corpse. That’s when the guilt lands on you and grows roots. Why didn’t they urge me to kiss so-and-so when they were alive? Why not take me to visit more? I read sympathy cards which included my name, but which I did not sign, and sprays of flowers I didn’t know I picked out. Afterwards, you go to the Legion hall and eat sandwiches. Really old people you’ve never seen before hug and kiss you and praise your parents for having a child so well-behaved, “under the circumstances.”  Too bad so-and-so will never live to see you grow up.

Guilt grows inside you. It becomes a parasitic symbiant, and you, an oh-so-willing host. And so it was in the case of my spouse, only multiplied by the number of miles between him and his family. What I could never figure out was what, exactly, were we supposed to do at this end? Oh, the hours wasted debating and agonizing over decisions and events we have absolutely no control over. We are at least a 20 hour drive from New Brunswick. Who do you call in the middle of the night at your place of work to inform that you’ve been called home for a family crisis. How do you get a hold of a cat sitter? What do you pack, how long do you think you’ll be gone? What about the mail?

 And do we drive or fly? Flying is problematic from a locale point of view. By the time we pack, rush to the airport, try to find a flight out, wait, fly, rent a car, etc., we could just as easily have driven. But, families being families, if you don’t show up when called then they get to dump on you for not being there and lending your support in times of crises. We had dozens of nights like that. Agonizing over ‘do we or don’t we’ only to end up playing the waiting game and breathing a sigh of relief when the parent is discharged from the hospital and back safe and snug in their little bungalow. Of course, it never fails that some bass-mouth will always slide in a remark about an only son not ‘doing his duty’ and rushing home at a moment’s notice, even if you are two thousand miles away. These are the ass-wads who don’t bother to stop and think that my man still has to suit up for his shift and go out and protect the unsuspecting public regardless of what responsibilities weigh heavy on his conscious. Is it any wonder then, that a strong hit at the end of the day seems like a good idea?  A good (or a few) stiff ones seem like a convenient remedy for guilt. Turns out all it does is nurture something that doesn’t belong in the first place. If guilt can suck the life out of you, all drinking does it make it thirsty. Ironic, isn’t it.

 I’m pretty sure that guilt was catalyst for the most common form of The Serenity Prayer as I first learned it many years ago during one of my early introductions to what is commonly known today as Al-Anon, and which has been adapted and adopted by AA:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

 

No truer words were ever written. Because this is not a game I can win alone, but at least I understand the rules.

Until next time…Amen.

The Elephant vs. The Blogger

“Hi, my name is Kathy and I am the wife of an alcoholic.”

I have never actually voiced those words to anyone, except to an empty room or to the hydro towers neatly placed in the green space that joins two walking paths near my house.

I have, over the last 50 years, reflected on who else dwells in the face in the mirror.

“Hi, I’m Kathy and I’m a battered wife,” 30 years ago.

“Hi, I’m Kathy and I have anorexia,” 25 years ago.

“Hi, I’m Kathy and I am so the unluckiest bitch on the planet between Post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.” Pick a time.

“Hi, I’m Kathy and despite all of the above, I AM a writer and that’s what kept me from putting a gun to my head.”

 Like the family nobody wants to be born into (but I was), they are all related.

 I have often said to myself, “my husband is an alcoholic,” transferring the patient and his dependence to the pages of fictional third person where I have always felt it belonged. I have never really sat down and reflected on how my husband’s disease relates to me.

 It’s not like the measles or a cold where I can contract it on contact. However, I am a carrier. I was born with the ‘alcoholic gene.’ I come from a long line of drunks! I know this because of the 24 funerals I have attended over 52 years, half were the result, directly or indirectly of alcohol.

 In AA (Alcoholic’s Anonymous) the disease is referred to as “The elephant in the room.” Growing up, it meant the heavy drinkers sit at the end of the table where they can booze it up, smoke and play canasta.  I was born into it – and the wars as a result of it. I saw my first knock-down-drag ‘em out, donnybrook-cum-brawl when I was three. I remember most of it, despite being injured in the process. Most of all, I remember the Picton county cops showing up on a sultry summer evening in Rossmore, Ontario. Lights flashing, a few neighbours standing in their housecoats at the edge of my grandmother’s property at her small country home, pointing, whispering, shaking their sleepy heads. It’s such grand entertainment, after all. Overturned picnic tables, lawn chairs, broken glasses, loud voices, yelling and screaming. It wouldn’t be the last time. It would be just another story to tell 20 or 30 years down the road just like all the other drunken brawl stories I grew up hearing of the ones that had taken place 20, 30, 40 and more years behind me. Those stories even featured some of the main characters I’d seen in my first brawl. It made those stories absolutely real and not at all enhanced by heresay or fiction. That’s just the way it was in my family. It was accepted.

 I used to wonder if it was because we were Irish. My great-grandmother blamed the vice on the Irish side and not her Scot’s side. I once asked my grandfather if it was true about being Irish. He said, “shut up and eat your whiskey.”

 He died in 1969 of a cancer for which he’d been drinking to deal with the pain prior to resorting to useless surgery and faithful morphine.

 My great uncle, Aaron Babcock, was the brilliant out-of-touch with the world type who worked on developing the first U.S. Air Force Univac (that’s old school for ‘computer’ for those of you who weren’t born back in the day.) Life, however, and it’s day-to-day problems were something a drafting board and a mathematical equation couldn’t solve. But neither could the bottle, but it was – as all addictive substances are – cheap and available. He died of a massive alcohol-induced hemorrhage in 1977, on welfare and of no fixed address. Literally, or so my mother often said, in the gutter.

His sister, my grandmother, an evil piece of work by any description was the raging type of morose alcoholic. Verbally abusive. Self-destructive. Materially destructive. A sociopath who had to cut through the swath of thick blue smoke that surrounded her 98 pound frame as she consumed dozens of stubbies of Carling Red Caps and filterless roll your own cigs starting about 11 o’clock in the morning and carrying through until the wee hours of the following day. That in itself was enough to label her one tough old broad, the kind you’d imagine you’d find camped out in the local bar, wearing a faded silk blouse, tweed skirt and babushka. Her pale skin yellowed by smoke and broken only by a smear of Elizabeth Arden No. 6 Red lipstick. Yep – Mary-Gene – road hard and put away wet. The stench of stale smoke and warm beer clung to her skin to the point that I nearly vomited anytime I was forced to give her the mandatory holiday hug. Shabby. Anemic. Drunk. Hard to believe she used to be same beauty whose photos I have buried in the bottom of the sideboard drawer. Proof to me, I guess that however I remember her for all of my childhood until she died, she was once a person, a woman, with soul and a family. In the end, however, all she had was her booze. Fittingly, she died alone after a breaking her hip from a fall. I understand she lay at the bottom of the stairs in her condo for days before she was found. Not the same stairs she had once pushed me down as a child during one of her drinking binges and then blamed it on Sandy, my grandfather’s dog. In the end, it wasn’t the hip but alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver that took her.

 Born into it? Damn right. From the moment of conception.

 But the grand daddy of historic and renown drunks in my family was my great-grandfather Babcock. The true raging alcoholic. Driven to the bottle to cope with the horrors of WWI, he was, as legend has it, one of the nicest, sweetest people who ever trod behind a plow – when sober. Then he took a drink. The stalwart, God-fearing farmer-turned soldier-turned farmer unleashed a destructive storm of violence that included beating the shit out of my great-grandmother, their children, the shooting of firearms, small animals, threatening anyone and anything that got in his way to the point of spending a considerable amount of time in and out of the Picton jail. He was also a bootlegger during the Depression. Needs must and all that. Another brilliant man, self-taught, for whom reality was too cruel. He believed he had only one true friend. And it too deceived him in the end, ironically, on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1955. Dead of a number of alcoholic comorbidities.

So here it is, my resume into the world of AA. Luckily – very much so – I don’t have the head for binge drinking, or for any drinking for that matter. My stomach rejects anything more than a couple of glasses of wine. The rest of me doesn’t react all that well either so the bottle and I tend to steer clear of one another, in light of my excellent references.

But now I have a different battle. Someone I love has been snatched away by this obscene disease. Harming only themselves, so they think, I see a different kind of alcoholic. One who was led down the path to the slippery slope of ‘casual-social drinking’; the friendly guy who jokes and laughs easily, the life of the party and the straight up guy everybody wants to be friends with. The ‘sure, I’ll have another one’ drinker who started innocently enough only to be abducted and pushed into the vast pit of ‘I NEED another one…and another one…and a few when I get home from work and a few before I go to bed.  Make that a several, but only after my wife goes to bed.’ Obviously, I sleep too soundly to hear him get up and go to the kitchen cupboard where 2, 3 or sometimes 4 60 ounce bottles of vodka live every week. Yes, every week. I am also too deep in slumber to feel the mattress sag as he gets back into bed an hour or two later, kisses me on the cheek with a mouth tasting of vodka and whispers, “I love you” before burrowing into the blankets for the night, safe in the knowledge that I am seemingly oblivious to the dangerous game being played out in my own home – one I swore I would never have to face because I thought I had a choice. Because I thought I had closed up all the scars of my past and left them all behind in my bad memories and sometimes nightmares.

How wrong I was. That “elephant in the room” is now firmly lodged in my house. In my bed. In my life. For whatever reason God has chosen to place this affliction in my life once again, at least I know what I am facing. I can look deep inside its ugly heart and face it head on. Because this is one family member it’s not going to get. I know its tricks, its false promises, its weaknesses. It’s going to be a long, hard fight. I might not win every battle, but at least I know my enemy.

Because my name is Kathy and I am the wife of an alcoholic. And this is the beginning of my story.