Tales from the Lost Years (my story continued)

This is a historical representation of a pond near where I grew up. Earlier times would find me ice skating on this and other ponds (and I shudder to consider the danger of that – I would never let my kids do something like that!). However on the night of the story I’m relaying, after I had drunkenly tried to drive home in a snow storm, stopped to call my sponsor (not Elli), and gone back to my car and passed out, someone from the program found me and took my to my sponsor’s home. She rented part of one of the houses represented here, and it bordered this pond.

It was a major, local character of the program who found me. Let’s call the sponsor I had at that time, who was not the same as my two previous sponsors I had had during my period of sobriety – let’s call this new one Marva. Marva was only five months ahead of my in sobriety. She was an ex model, and a nurse (so she said and we believed), and not the best sponsor material. But to be fair, I was not an easy, nice or ideal sponsee. For one thing, I kept drinking.

Marva lived with a guy, we’ll call him Ross. He was heir to a fortune, but he had been disowned by his family when the mother of his baby girl died from a heroine overdose that Ross had administered to her. He was clean and sober in AA as was Marva. He started a business, I forget if or where Marva worked, and they rented this house on the pond.

The local character (and isn’t AA full of them?) we’ll call Filippo. He was a Vietnam vet, and looking back, I don’t know if it was Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, or schizophrenia, or a combination of those, but he was nuts. He talked of UFOs at times, or miracles, or being influenced by astrology, but nothing dangerous. He trolled local bars for AA prospects, just like in the olden days, and he bought people who would listen to him drinks. He worked for Ross at the time all this took place.

Filippo took the company van and found me passed out in my snowy car in the alley between the gas station and a dry cleaners. I honestly think this is one of the times that I likely could have died from drinking, and that only luck saw me through. I could have crashed my car and taken others with me that day. Or I could have frozen to death there in that snow covered car. It happens.

But he found me and roused me and I have brief memories of being way high up in that van, driving through the snow to Marva’s house on the pond.

The rest of that night comes in flashes of memory. Among the things I remember is that many of the good folks of AA assembled there to babysit me. I can individually remember at least five other people, and there may have been more. I remember grabbing one of them to accompany me to the bathroom, figuring they wouldn’t let me go on my own. I remember one of the guys going through my purse, finding my lotion bottle full of alcohol, and remarking that this was an ingenious idea!

I looked for a picture of the pond because I also remember sitting there. At times, when I thought no one was paying any attention to me, I made dashes for the pond. There were sliding glass doors in the room where I was, and the pond beyond them. I was trying to kill myself by drowning myself in the pond. It was the only way I could think of to do it right then. Right then, living longer did not seem like something I could handle.

Mothers, Children, Sobriety and lack thereof

It’s Mother’s Day, and my mother and daughter are here.  My daughter graduated from college yesterday, which is why my mother is here.  My daughter hasn’t looked for nor found a job yet, which is why she is here.  We’re going to Disney as a graduation present for my daughter at the end of the month.  She’s worked at one or more jobs since she was about 15, sometimes against my will, so I’m not terribly worried about her not looking for work yet.  She also had the option of going straight to grad school, which she decided not to do.  I’ll guess we’ll see.  This isn’t much of a problem except for the blasted American dilemma of health insurance.  As of June 1, she’ll be on Cobra.  I’m grateful it’s an option and one we can afford for now.  I’m anxious that there’s nothing more permanent or doable for the long term in place.  And my son will hopefully be in the same boat two years from now, so the Cobra funds may be needed then.  Yuck.

Anyway, after graduation my wife and I were able to make it to our home group AA meeting.  The topic was anger, and at first I thought I’m really not very angry, rather I’m on a bit of a pink cloud from the graduation.  As I thought about it though, I realized that I had had two flare ups of anger over the past two days.  One involved my wife, and one my wife and mother.  They were quick, insignificant flare ups, and they were brought on by the stress of the situation – trying to balance the wants and needs of all the people involved in the graduation.  Lots of the group looked to me to ultimately make decisions about where we went and when and how.  I was already stressed by leaving my dog (long story) and my utter hatred of spontaneity.  Things went better when I told them to tell me where to be when, and to do their best to take care of the dog.  My daughter ultimately decided what to do after the ceremony (there’s a concept, having the graduate decide) and I was able to go along and be pleasant and try to push my dog anxiety away.

So at the meeting I was able to say that although these anger issues were there that day, they weren’t serious.  They didn’t threaten the relationships and all the relationships are pretty good.

At the diner after the meeting, to which my wife and son went with some people from the meeting, my wife told us how my mother had put me down during their car ride home from the ceremony.  This isn’t surprising or new.  I’m an only child.  I’m not the most stellar specimen you’ve ever seen.  I make plenty of mistakes, I’m average or below average in most ways.  My mother has always put me down.  Often, to others, she’ll talk me up.  But not to me or the people close to me.  She’s always liked my friends better than she’s liked me.  She likes my wife better than she likes me.  She likes my kids better.

What she told my wife about my faults was fundamental and cutting.  She criticized the way I have mothered my daughter, and she blamed my daughter’s mental health issues on me.

Without getting into it too much, through the years of my daughter’s struggles I have taken her to doctors and therapists a-plenty.  I have always asked them to please let me know if there was anything I could do better, do differently, stop doing or start doing.  I am not mother of the year.  I have never been. But …….. I really feel I’ve done a much better job than my mother.  She has always criticized me.  In all these years I have not answered her with a recitation of her own sins and lacks.  I haven’t yet.

So often I hear people say that their parents did the best they could with what they knew or had at the time.  I don’t believe it.  I wanted my children and made them number one in my life.  Still I could have done better.  And so often real parents were bad, or wrong, or careless or dangerous.  I don’t know why pop psychology says we must love and forgive.  Resentment against my parents occupies hardly any of my mental energy, but it’s there, and I don’t see how getting over it or denying it would help any.

At the diner, my son said he knows he had never been physically hurt by me, and I’m very grateful that that is his picture.  And not to derail this, the accusations are not that I was ever physically punishing or cruel.  Even the example that my mother has at times shown my children, her grandchildren, has been very bad, and I haven’t said anything.

The AA program only goes so far in helping us parent, I think.  But the legacy of behavior I have shown my children and given my children is so far superior to what I was given.  Because of AA.  My son said moderation would be the best example to give your children regarding alcohol, better than abstinence.  I told him that I cannot show moderation, and my example may actually change his life one day.

As I had this conversation with him and heard what my mother had to say about me, and considered what she has shown me through the years, I am filled with gratitude for the program, for my children, for the power to break away from that diseased and sick example.  My son, at 20, and my daughter, at 22, are so much healthier than I was at their ages.  I was actually getting sober at 22, having spent six years in a drunken hell.  I didn’t graduate on time, due to drinking.  I stopped drinking then and I started having them then and I feel that their health and happiness have been made possible by AA.

The Picture on Top

edited to say I’ve changed the picture, but I’ll leave the story

The picture on the banner is a picture of my windshield. My wife took it randomly a few years ago. I think it’s snow that has frozen to ice and then had more snow fall on top. The ice is cracked, and the windshield is showing through a little bit. I was scrolling through the pictures on my computer to find one to put up there. I never really think of that picture. I don’t know why she took it, and it just got loaded on to the computer with the rest that were on the camera at time. When I saw it, in this context, I knew I wanted to use it. I really like the way the banner cuts it kind of long and narrow.

Anyone who has heard my story has heard one of my more harrowing moments when I drove home from school extremely drunk, in a huge snow storm. I stopped at a gas station, called my sponsor (this was in the 1980s, no cell phones), told her I didn’t know where I was. She asked me what I saw around me, and I described this a little bit. I got quickly tired of that, hung up, went back to my car, and passed out. She sent someone from the program out to find me in the storm, guessing where I was from what I had described. I don’t know, maybe I gave some telling detail, or maybe I didn’t. I know that my car was quickly covered in snow, in an alley, between a gas station and dry cleaner or something, and that I was unconscious. I know that the guy she sent found me, and drove me back through the storm to her house where I kept her and several other AA folks up most of the night trying to escape her house and throw myself in a pond to drown.

Oy.

That is one time that the program and the people in it may quite literally have saved my life. And I have to tell that is not the last time I had a drink. I went to the hospital for the first time (before that, I had not been hospitalized for drinking YET), came out of the hospital and drank again. I also tell it that I remember, years ago, when George McGovern’s daughter Susan fell down drunk in the snow and froze to death. That could have been me.

So I really like that picture, and it seemed to have been taken for this blog. I couldn’t have staged it better. Every time I see it I remember. I think of myself in that car and out of that car and that it was not by my own doing that I made it through.