Addicted Like Me (13 page)

Sometimes when I came to visit her, I would just tell Lauren I loved her, and other times I would drop off a bag of fast food as
an act of kindness. I thought about the types of resolutions that could potentially come to change her situation. The way she had chosen to live wouldn't last forever, but at the time it sure felt like it would. I remembered hearing from my sponsor and other parents in the program that when your kid is not okay, you're not okay. That was certainly true for me. I continued to go to my meetings. I worked on my program to stay positive. I chose to accept the love and support of Bob, and to trust that early addiction holds many challenges. I believed that the faith in personal change Lauren and I embraced in the twelve-step program would see her through. That kept me going more than anything during this dark time.

A couple of months after Lauren's miscarriage, I heard news that a reunion was going to be held to celebrate the first year of the residential house. Teens that had been through that program were invited to attend with their parents. Lauren got word about the reunion, too, and was told she was welcome to come, but she wasn't sure. My hope was high. On the morning of the reunion, I picked her up, and together with Bob we all made the drive to the inpatient program where Lauren had lived. She went directly in the house. Bob and I walked to the back yard to join the festivities. We did not see Lauren for quite some time, but when she finally came out where we were she had swollen, puffy eyes and a renewed look of hope on her face.

To know that early sobriety will lead to recovery, hope is an essential component. “I'm going to the dance at the coffee shop,” Lauren told me that night at the reunion. She had learned that the
beast of addiction is never as strong as any of us are after we decide we are capable of picking ourselves up at any time to try again. This choice would never have occurred to my father or to his dad. Both were too far removed from the challenges of facing real pain. When she was given the chance to try again, Lauren was relieved to say, “I'm also going to go back to the group.” I wanted to jump up and down and scream with delight when I saw this determination after a run of discouragement for her that had been excruciating. I just nodded, like I had always known she could do it. I guess I had. I guess I knew that we had both broken a family legacy handed to us as if we weren't going to have a choice about it. Feelings of relief and gratitude flooded my whole being that night. Lauren and I had made a choice for hope. I smiled and told her, “Lauren, that's great.”

TRUST ME, it was no easy realization to figure out that I was an alcoholic and an addict, and that I had to choose hope and change if I planned to live. Over the course of my using, all my dreams had disappeared one by one. I was left with nothing to believe in but our family legacy of addiction. It was what I had seen around me growing up. Most people can remember and could tell you when and where they had their first beer or alcoholic beverage, but I honestly don't remember the first time that I tried alcohol because it's all a blur still. I can't recall my starting point. All I can remember is that once I started, I didn't stop for years.

I think of my addiction as a beast. My mother has told me that the beast began as a nightmare lived by her grandfather and father. It then came to her and passed on to my brother, Ryan, and me. Just maybe, if we are prone to addictive behaviors, we were born with this beast inside of us, and it lies dormant until we awaken it. Maybe, once the beast is awakened, it just wants to continue to thrive and grow. Mine did. When I experienced my first highs, I fell in love. I wanted to feel that way forever. From that moment on in my life, the beast wanted more and more. The more I fed my addiction, the bigger my beast grew. The more it would take to feed my beast, the less I could manage doing anything else, until feeding it became an endless cycle.

I never planned on becoming an alcoholic and a drug addict, though. I was so against the idea, and as a little girl I even swore to myself that I would never become like my father, Rick, an alcoholic. He put his booze before anyone or anything in his life. My needs as his child were always put on the back burner, and I never got the attention or love from him that I desperately needed. From as far back as I can remember, he loved two things: his alcohol and his women. My childhood perception of him was that he was a bottomless pit when it came to alcohol. He drank until he blacked out. Then he would wake up the next day and do it all over again. I knew I didn't want a life like that.

My father's famous line still rings in my head: “You kids want to go get a Pepsi?” That was the cue for Ryan and I to get ready for a long night at my dad's local dive. It didn't matter if we got there at noon or six in the evening; Ryan and I were stuck there for the
rest of the night. We became pros at keeping entertained to pass the time watching our dad getting wasted. We learned how to play cards. We would get the bartender to give us the keys to the arcade games, so we didn't have to keep putting quarters in them, because heaven forbid we would use up all of dad's drinking money. There was no point in our trying to run through his resources. No matter how long we had been there already, we weren't leaving until he was good and ready.

That I ended up just as committed to my addiction as he was isn't surprising, considering that addiction is an illness that runs in families. Because the lifestyle is so familiar, it finds even the little girls like me who promise to never grow up and be as bad as their dad. My brother and I tried everything in the book to get him to change. We faked sick or told him we were ready for bed, but he still didn't budge from his bar stool. If we got too tired, we would just have to use the bar booths as our bed. When we were hungry, bar food became our dinner. After a while of his dragging us from bar to bar, I guess we just ended up in his way, because then he began to leave us home alone. He soon figured out that if he told us he was running to the store for a pack of cigarettes, we'd assume he was coming back, and we wouldn't try to tag along. Eventually he would call, hours later, letting us know that he had stopped off to get a drink, always assuring us that he was now on his way home, though he never really was.

When I was with my father I was lonely; I felt unwanted and abandoned. There were many nights when I didn't think I was going to live to see the next day. I dreaded the car rides home after
he had spent the day at the bar. I can remember crying and begging my father not to drive. I would tell him that I was scared and that I didn't want to die. It was always my first priority to make sure that Ryan and I had our seat belts on. Then I would grab Ryan's hand and wouldn't let go until we made it home safe. I would silently pray,
“Please, God, help my dad to drive straight.”
It baffles me to this day that we made it home safe, night after night.

What I picked up from my father, besides the habit of addiction, was the idea that an addiction could be the most important thing in life. His lifestyle told me that drinking and women were more important than I was. To realize this left me angry and hurt, with no way of being able to communicate how I felt. I can look back and forgive him now, because I know it was his disease that caused him to make this choice. But to a child's mind, the choice was a complete abandonment by an incompetent father. The first time that I ever tried drugs was in a situation where love was what I wanted. I fell head over heels for a drug called marijuana on a warm summer day in Colorado. It was a huge moment in my life. After I fell in love with drugs, everything changed. I did have thoughts about what I was doing. It was as if my brain would overload with memories about my father and thoughts of what would happen to me if I became a druggie. Would I become dirty, homeless, and lonely like the addicts I'd seen on TV or in the movies? Or would I become like my dad? But I never wanted to get stupid drunk and high like he would get. It bewilders me now to think that he used to take me with him to score dope.

It plays in my head like it was yesterday, as the dealer walks
up to my dad's car window and hands him a bag of weed. My father even kept a scale in his car to make sure he was never ripped off. Upon returning to his apartment I would be told to play outside, while he would sit in the living room rolling joints and getting high. The women in my father's life seemed to come and go through all this. What these women had in common was the fact that they loved alcohol as much as he did. It's easy to meet a guy like Chuck, the person who gave me my first joint, or my dad, if you are interested in being addicted to their drug of choice. My father's second wife, Jen, was the spitting image of my father, as if a female version of him had been made. I think their love for alcohol was the only thing that kept them together for as long as they were.

They were also in the same line of work, construction. I can remember when my dad and Jen would come home smelling the same and looking the same, both soiled and stinky. You'd think the first thing they would want to do would be to take a shower, but that came in as a close second to their after-work beer binge. I was never close to Jen; she kind of scared me. I never felt safe around her. Even though I was young I could still see what was going on between them. They never seemed happy or sober. I'm not sure if they thought that I was too young to know what was going on or if they were too caught up in their own disease to care. Maybe it was a little of both. I dreaded when it was their weekend for my brother and I to visit. I could never be too sure what kind of mood Jen was going to be in.

Jen could be very scary to me when she wanted to be. There were times when she would chase me down the hall to catch and
spank the hell out of me for fighting with my brother or touching something of hers that I was not supposed to be touching. Eventually I got smart, and I would run into my bedroom and get under the bottom bunk, where she couldn't reach me when she tried to get violent. The screaming that she did was horrible. I would lie in dog droppings under the bed to avoid her wrath, but as long as she didn't catch me, I didn't care. I would just lie there until my father came home, knowing that as soon as he arrived, Jen would act different. She never acted that way in front of him. I knew I was safe from her, for a while anyway.

I can faintly remember that they tried to get sober a couple of times together. At the time, I didn't realize what was going on, but later when I got into recovery, I understood exactly what they were doing. Instead of going to the bars, they took us to an old two-story house, where meetings were going on. I can remember playing with other kids outside the house while our parents sat inside drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and talking. I found all this to be quite weird because it was a completely different scene from the bars I had become used to. I finally had something in common with other children, though, which bonded me to them. None of us had been allowed to just be kids because of the addictions in our homes, but when our parents were in those meetings, they were changed for a while. Finally, we could just be kids.

Weekend visits with my father never ended up being consistent. I was just too young to understand it all. Weekend after weekend until he would relapse again, the bars didn't exist to my father. It was only this white, two-story meetinghouse. He
always seemed to land himself in jail after that for drunk driving. I remember letters showing up at the house that were postmarked from county. That was how I would find out where my dad was. The letters would be filled with empty promises of recovery and words of sorrow for missing my birthday again. It became embarrassing and heartbreaking to me, but inside I kept a little belief alive that one day he would fulfill his promises and become the father that I needed. By the time I met Chuck and tried pot, it was too late for any fatherly talk my dad and I might have had. My family never really sat me down and told me about our legacy of addiction.

Truthfully, it's ironic I became an addict. In elementary school I had a counselor who was a very warm man who ran a group I was assigned to for the children of alcoholic parents. This counselor would come and pull me out of class to attend the meetings, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. I felt special and like I belonged to something that not everyone else could belong to. We would get to sit around and talk about our situation and learn how to better cope with the stress of an alcoholic parent. The counselor made us all feel comfortable sharing about our family situations, and the group provided us with a nonjudgmental environment. I felt accepted and no longer like an outcast because of my lack of a cookie cutter mom and dad and perfect home life. I didn't view the counselor as a fill-in daddy by any means; however, he was stepping in as someone who gave me the fatherly advice I never got at home.

By sixth grade I was still involved in these antiaddiction programs. DARE, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, was a place where I became one of the more active kids. Because of
my family situation, I frowned upon drugs and alcohol in a passionate way. I wrote an essay about the various ways DARE had helped me and was asked to read it in front of the whole school. If people at school had seen me five years later, maybe they never would have believed I had become addicted to drugs. I can see now that I was passionate about being appreciated more than I was passionate about the message of DARE. I thrived on being given the opportunity to lead.

During the time I was in DARE, I found out that my dad was getting remarried. His marriage to Jen hadn't lasted. At first his new wife seemed nice, but it didn't take long to find out that she drank just as much as my dad did, if not more. I was twelve years old then. This is when Ryan and I went to stay with my dad and his new wife, Sylvia, for the summer. It only took a few weeks before I got to see her true colors. They were darker even than Jen's. While my dad worked, Sylvia stayed home with Ryan and me, and her anger would become uncontrollable, to the point of abuse. Ryan was joking around with Sylvia one day while my dad was at work, and she went into a rage. I can remember her grabbing my brother by the neck and slamming him up against the hallway wall. When I saw what was happening, I became very frightened and knew that we had to get away from her.