My dad is an alcoholic
We all know that love is magical, but is it enough to pull someone off the path of self-destruction? Here’s how a Hollywood superstar and I learned a lesson the hard way.
“Everybody has a daddy poem.”
She threw it out there, casually, as if it weren’t an incredibly profound statement.
I was sitting in the living room of a lovely couple for a casual get together and sharing of art. It was me, three poets, a teacher, a rapper, an artist, a model, a juggler, a mother with a cherubic baby who punctuated performances with appreciative and encouraging coos, and one very kind girl.
One of the poets had just finished reading a piece about his father, when the teacher made her wise declaration. And it was true. Everybody DOES have a daddy poem.
— ∮∮∮ —
My dad is an alcoholic.
While he has been in recovery for more than twenty years and hasn’t had a drink since, I grew up with an addict for a father.
I remember him always being the good-time guy. Everyone he met loved him and they still do. He is charismatic. He is hilarious. He is your best friend from the minute he meets you and that friendship is true blue and lasts for life–even if you don’t see each other for years at a time. Even if you don’t see each other ever again.
But I spent my childhood riddled with worry. I knew what the thousands of lifetime best friends didn’t. That he drank too much. That he was depressed. That the hilarity turned to anger very quickly. Light to dark took seconds, literally, and you could see it, as if somebody had come in and flipped a switch on his face, the clouds rolled into his eyes and his relaxed expression became very tense. And you could feel it, as if the air had been suddenly sucked from the room.
When the darkness took over, he’d often leave the house for hours. I’d sit in my bedroom biting my nails, not making a sound so my mother would think I was asleep But, I wouldn’t be able to rest until I heard him come in the door, which would sometimes be two, three, four in the morning. I had dark circles and a tendency to be punished for daydreaming in school, but it was really my best time to rest. Dad was safe at work, the classroom was so warm, and the teacher’s voice was like a lullaby. I’d zone out, eyes open, finally feeling safe to relax.
I agonized while he was gone, fearful that something would happen to him. My mind played out hypothetical scenarios of misfortune that could befall him. What if he befriended the wrong person who then took advantage of his intoxicated state? What if he passed out somewhere, hit his head, lost his memory, and wasn’t able to find his way home? What if he drove impaired, zig-zagging all over the road as I’d seem him do a hundred times before, nodding in and out of consciousness, and I wasn’t there to rouse him?
But all of my tiny, childhood worry couldn’t prevent tragedy. One night, my dad didn’t come home.
He was in a very serious car accident. One that had left him clinging to life.
And I felt guilty, as if I had let it happen. I hadn’t watched him closely enough.
Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith have been married for fifteen years, each one of those spent in a threesome — him, her, and the addiction. You see, Melanie battles drug and alcohol addiction, and has just finished her third stint in rehab. In the November edition of AARP The Magazine, Antonio claims that he has been supportive through her struggles, saying “We did all the therapies together.” Melanie, however, tells a different story.
“Antonio was supportive to the extent that he can be, but if you’re not an alcoholic or drug addict, and you find out that your wife is a bad one, it’s hard to deal with…I wish he would go to a meeting with me or to Al-Anon, but it’s very foreign to him. Addiction runs in my family but not in his.
I don’t mean that against him. I would like him to do more, but it’s a difficult thing to have happen in any family, and in that way he has been totally by my side. He really is the greatest guy.”
I felt myself getting angry while reading this. How dare Melanie qualify Antonio’s support, using phrases like “to the extent that he can be,” and disqualify his ability to handle her addictions by saying he can’t understand it because it doesn’t run in his family. Outwardly, perhaps these things are true. Inwardly, perhaps he is worrying every minute of every day, not only about the wife he loves, but how her behavior is effecting their three children (one daughter together, Stella, 15, and Melanie’s two children from previous relationships, Alexander, 26, and Dakota, 21) and the emotional toll it would take on those children were something to happen to her.
The thing is, my father couldn’t see me agonizing, because he was agonizing, himself. Melanie Griffith might be wearing the same set of emotional blinders. When you are the center of your own universe and too inebriated to see the next closest planet, you shouldn’t comment on its life forms.
I know now that I didn’t cause my father’s car accident, from which it took him years to recover and still suffers lasting effects. I know that no amount of worry or mother henning could have prevented what happened that night–no matter how long I fought sleep or how completely I chewed my fingernails. And, no amount of Supermanning from Antonio Banderas can keep Melanie Griffith from her self-destruction if she’s determined to achieve it, no matter what she thinks or what blame she wants to lay at his feet about it.
I still daydream, but now it’s for the right reasons. Nachos, mostly. And I’m happy that my father is alive and still has a universe. There is a lot of work to do to bring our planets closer together, but love makes for a strong gravitational pull.
Photo by: _Fidelio_
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The Checkout Girl
The Checkout Girl is Jennifer Lemons. She’s a storyteller, comedian, and musician. If you don’t see her sitting behind her laptop, check the streets of Richmond for a dark-haired girl with a big smile running very, very slowly.
Notice: Comments that are not conducive to an interesting and thoughtful conversation may be removed at the editor’s discretion.
What a great article! I particularly love this line, “When you are the center of your own universe and too inebriated to see the next closest planet, you shouldn’t comment on its life forms.”
So true. This one hit home.
First off – thank you, Jennifer, for making this gutsy, thoughtful, and warmhearted blog post. Thanks so much for your effort to help people better understand themselves and their loved ones.
I’d like to put forth the idea that the frustration experienced by both sides of relationships with addicts is based upon a lack of understanding of each other’s behavior, due to irreconcilable perceptual differences between addicts and non-addicts.
I say “irreconcilable” because, in some cases, neither party has the truly objective clarity and personal experience with each other’s cognitive state of mind to understand what is motivating one person to say or do things to that are inevitably perceived by the other as uncaring or hurtful.
This perceptual difference is inevitable because it is complicated by emotion and the human tendency to assign blame when an understanding can’t be reached. Blame helps us close the book on bad situations by giving us a quick answer to make sense of a problem when logic and knowledge prevent us from being able to resolve the issue objectively. We are just trying to make sense of things so we can move on. But sometimes it prevents us from seeing situations objectively and thinking them through to achieve real peace of mind.
I think what Melanie Griffith is expressing is frustration at her inability to understand Antonio’s lack of interest or desire to go to the depths of understanding that she wants him to. It sounds like blame, but it’s more a failed attempt to communicate a desire which can’t be met. It’s also completely irrational if you consider the frustration fails to acknowledge Banderas’ lack of the same chemical dependence and incongruent state of mind. Of course he doesn’t understand what the reward of such an effort would be! Of course he doesn’t have the same understanding! He’s not an alcoholic.
By the same token, Griffith is labeled an alcoholic and so must be treated accordingly, which is completely unfair and just as irrational, and isn’t exactly helping her understand herself in a way that empowers her to take executive control over her choices.
Unfortunately, the perceptual deviation is the same for Griffith as it is for Banderas, but the blame game prevents us from seeing this.
It’s a contentious point to make in the format of a comment on a website, but people need to understand that our behavior is a product of our cognitive perceptions–both theirs, AND our own…and other people’s perceptions and behaviors are not necessarily intended to be hurtful (or don’t have to be perceived that way) just because they happen to be different from ours at any given moment. Our egos, perceptions, and identities based on our subjective experiences are always factors, addicts/non-addicts, sober addicts…we all generally want the same things – except in cases where our brains are structurally different, when we have wildly different histories of choices and resultant perceptions of the world, or when our brains are temporarily under the influence of different excitatory/inhibitory chemical processes at different times.
I think when you remove the perception that hurtful behavior is a choice people consciously make at all times, it makes people think through the factors that relate to the other person’s perception and this promotes a better understanding of ourselves and not just others. Perhaps this way of thinking can help us get past the emotional detours we encounter while making the effort to solve relationship problems, so we can mindfully live in the *present*, not the past, nor the future, and see things today as they truly are, so we can take on the challenges one day at a time, and stop forcing square pegs into round holes.
I hope I’ve communicated my thoughts well enough to have helped somebody. Just my 2 cents.
Thanks again, Checkout Girl.
I am the daughter of an alcoholic. My childhood was a series of bad times, dad losing jobs due to his drinking, my mom driving us kids to bars and sending us inside to get him, dad passing out on the couch. He died when I was 25. His death certificate says the cause of death is alcoholism. Nothing stopped him. Only he could have stopped him. So screw you, Melanie Griffith and your willingness to blame someone else. It’s all on you. And your children will suffer for your selfishness forever.
A post script to the story:
I read this column to my 16-year-old daughter, not a common occurrence, and she cried, saying “I didn’t know.”
When I told THAT story to my coworker, she shared her own, including her father’s alcoholism, what it was like to be a child with zero stability in the home, and how, eventually, she was the one to find him dead from his addiction. She hadn’t talked about it in the twelve years since it happened.
Stories are the great healer, people.
Powerful words.
I think it is important though, to distinguish that the relationship between a parent and a child is different than between spouses. When I read it, I saw a wife wishing her husband would come to a meeting with her, to be an active part of her recovery. Whether that is right or fair, it is a totally different thing than a child at home worrying about a parent. Banderas isn’t a child dependent on her for food, shelter, well-being.
Our friend Mariane Matera wrote this, from the spouse’s point of view. It’s one of the most striking things I’ve read.
http://urban-pigeon.blogspot.com/2010/12/living-with-alcoholism.html
I’m living a story…and it’s hard to be the sober spouse, especially when kids are involved. I am always so in control, the only one in all the family maintaining connections, understanding everyone, keeping it all together. I don’t know what to do, say, or think anymore…well…haven’t for a long time. I just keep going day to day and trying to hear my heart. So far I’m hearing “don’t give up on him, not yet.” So here we are.
My husband was adopted. Which shouldn’t be a big deal, his adopted family are good people…but between that and his adopted father’s perceived rejection of him in favor of his biological son, somehow my husband got it in his head that he was worthless, expendable, born with less value than others inherently possess. Everything is tarnished with it, he’s convinced that to hope for anything or cherish anything is to invite disappointment, betrayal, or loss. For the first decade of our marriage, he was a pot smoker. This was because I hate alcohol…the smell, taste, being around drunk people…I just loathe it on so many levels. I was OK with the weed. And he acted so “normal” while on it. But when he “ran out”…he fell apart. It became a daily self-medication. I could/can/have never been able to comprehend how he could not appreciate any of the many good things in our lives. He’s always got to find something purely negative and then orbit around that in misery, use it as a reason to “need” daily escape. Now that he’s in the Army he can’t smoke, so he drinks. I guess he’s a “happy” drunk, he doesn’t drive drunk, he doesn’t yell or carouse, or hit anyone. He just sits around drinking beer and wanting to relive his “glory days” by watching 80’s metal videos and discuss the fights he used to get in when he was 20. I tried, for so long, to drag him up out of his miserable place…it has never worked. He wants to drag me down to where he is instead…so the best I can do is turn away and focus my energy on being the more powerful force in our household. The kids come to me and I’m there for them. Dad is mostly in his bubble, isolated from us in his unhappiness. I know my boys are not completely oblivious to him, but I also know that they have no idea how bad it really is for him. He’s been through therapy, he’s had meds. He’ll just load himself up on Wellbutrin, sleeping pills, and beer…which is also not good. So far never near enough to kill him…but one day, who knows? Meanwhile, the more he drinks, the more I avoid him, and the more I avoid him, the more he drinks, and we’re getting further apart all the time. I’ve had people (female friends mostly) tell me I should just leave him, but our family would be destitute if we did. And while it’s easy to say “I’m not happy”…I can force happiness, or at least fake it strongly enough so that my ability to parent isn’t compromised. I just live for my kids, not for my marriage. We don’t fight. Our home isn’t a miserable place. Just his little bubble in it. So far, it’s not bad enough to plunge my family into poverty to escape. It makes me feel sad and inadequate that I couldn’t help him up out of his bad place. He refuses to believe that any of it is his fault though…and I really think that is the first and biggest problem for so many people. We spend way too much time in our lives trying to appease our self esteem by declaring things “not our fault.” I personally believe that only by accepting responsibility–without beating ourselves up over it–can we have the power to make changes for the better. Life is only as good or bad as one insists upon making it. If you think life sucks, it will suck for you. If you think life is great, you’ll be able to roll with the punches even when bad things happen, and get back up. See it as an adventure, not a catastrophe, as I like to say.
I just wish I could see into our future, I wish I could know the right thing to do about this, and I wish I didn’t feel like a bad person for not loving him enough to save him…like if I leave one day after the kids are grown, to live my own life without the shadow of his unhappiness, and if he falls apart without me, that will be my fault. I will be a bad person for not staying by his side. That’s the part of this I find hard to live with.