Addicted Like Me (4 page)

For years I had not known how to reach the part of myself that would allow me to express the fact that my relationships with men had been chaotic and led to disappointing things. I had been subjected all my life to the raging tirades of an addicted, drunken man. He had died from alcoholism, my husband was an alcoholic, and then my son had died from an alcohol-related accident. Despite any lie I told myself, I was living the legacy of addiction without even knowing it was affecting me until Jason's death. I still didn't see my own addiction, but I definitely knew that Rick's was affecting me in ways I could no longer deny. Living with addiction, up to that point, had actually seemed normal to me because that is all I'd ever known.

THE LEGACY OF ADDICTION for Lauren and me began because I was born the daughter of an alcoholic father and she was born the daughter of an alcoholic mom and dad. My father was orphaned as a child and never talked about his past to me. I was told only that things were bad for him. I later found out that his father was also an alcoholic and a very abusive man who abandoned my dad and his siblings, which makes four generations at least of a family nightmare Lauren and I would have to struggle against.

I know little about my grandfather, the person with whom our family legacy of addiction seems to begin, but I do know that he was an only child. His father died when my grandfather was just a
baby. As a grown man, he eventually settled in the city of Boston and was heavily involved in bootlegging and prostitution. At some point, that's where he met my grandmother, started a family, and then abandoned them. My grandfather left his wife and all six of his young children to make it on their own, but my grandmother couldn't handle raising this bunch, so she left also. The children were afraid and wanted to stay together after both parents left. They kept their abandonment a secret. My aunt was the oldest of the kids, the rest of whom were boys. She was probably eleven years old when she took on this role; my father was around nine. The youngest child was still just a baby.

My father worked as soon as he was able, taking his red wagon door to door collecting laundry to wash so that he and his siblings had money to buy food. I can't even imagine the fear and frustration a group of abandoned children like that must have felt trying to care for each other at such young ages. It was only discovered that my father and his siblings were living alone when my grandfather's mother went to their home and found the children by themselves. She contacted social services, and the children were taken out of the home. My aunt, my father, and the other kids were placed in an orphanage, The Home for Little Wanderers, which still exists in the city of Boston today.

At the orphanage, all of the kids would be taken to a different church every Sunday, lined up in the back of the church, and made to wait to see if any family in the congregation had an interest in taking one of the children. My uncle tells this story and says the rejection was devastating when they weren't selected. Still,
sometimes a family took one of the children in. My father was in and out of multiple foster homes, which leads me to believe that there may have been behavior problems with him. I have heard from family members that he started drinking at a young age. Over the years, he located and reunited with his sister and some of his brothers, and he did eventually find and develop a relationship with both his parents. That's how I know my grandfather died an obese man in a bathtub with a bottle of liquor and a sandwich. I have heard he weighed eight hundred pounds and that it took four policemen to carry his body out of the house after his death.

My father and mother met when he was twenty-three and she was nineteen years old. My mom's father disapproved of my dad. Her father was concerned that his daughter was going to marry a man they knew so little about. My aunt tells me that he asked my father, “Who are your parents? You get your family together and then you can marry my daughter!” That was the catalyst that motivated my father to locate his parents and siblings. After he did, my mother and father were married in a big church ceremony. My dad's parents were able to attend the wedding, because they had been tracked down and reintroduced into his life, but when they entered back into the picture they brought the family addictions with them. My bootlegging grandfather left his bottle of whiskey under the bed when he stayed for the wedding at my mom's house, where her father found the bottle.

The United States had just entered World War II when my parents were married. They dated only a few months because of the war. My father was due to be sent overseas. Their newlywed months
were spent at an army base in Alabama, where my dad was preparing to be shipped out. I have letters that my mother wrote to her sister during this time about the pending deployment, saying to her that his “orders were coming through, and they weren't so awfully good.” My mom went back home to Connecticut to be with her family once my dad left for the war. She was pregnant with their first child, my older sister. She was born during the war, and my father did not see her until she was six months old because he had been stationed in Europe and couldn't return home.

My brother followed along three years later, after my father had returned home from the war. I was born seven years after that, and as the youngest of the three, I was the one who was most spoiled. Our family lived on the same street as my mother's relatives, which included my aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandmother. It was great having family so close, and I was a very happy child with the exception of my father's temper, drunken nights, and slurring words. It seemed that he was always giving my brother and sister a hard time, but it didn't really affect me. I have heard that my father was physically violent toward my sister and brother when they were young, but that stopped before I was born. He hit me the one time only when I was in high school and got caught drinking, but my sister remembers a time he hit her when she was ten years old. He took a belt to her and beat her severely. The next day she planned to tell her teacher at school but got scared and decided not to, because she was afraid that not only would my father be in trouble but that it might also affect my mother.

I don't remember my dad being home a lot. I think there were
many nights he stopped off at the bar for a quick drink and never quite made it out the door, back to us. He was a sporting goods salesman and worked for my uncle, traveling to colleges throughout Connecticut and Massachusetts. He was very good at this work. He used Saturday mornings to do his paperwork, and many Saturday afternoons were then freed up for him to spend drinking and gambling. My father was a high-energy guy who was not only a big drinker but also a high roller who liked to play craps for the chance of making money on the rolls of the dice.

In one of the genealogy searches I have done on my family, I located a newspaper article from 1953 in which the details of a car chase were recounted, describing the way my dad and his friend chased down a man at high speed after he lifted nine hundred dollars off them in a game of craps. My father had been cheated out of his lucky chances because the man was throwing with loaded dice. I was stunned by the amount of money that had been lost, because nine hundred dollars was a small fortune in those days. We were a middle class family and had nice things, but we were not well off enough for my father to be risking that kind of money. He was just that kind of man, though, a big presence. He was an outgoing individual who was the president of several local organizations. When my dad walked into the bar, everyone knew he was there. He was very charming and had a way with people. My father never entered a room; he owned it. His drink was whiskey. He would order a shot and a beer each time he pulled up to the local bar for his almost daily fix. He would down the shot in one gulp and chase it with the glass of beer. It's called a boilermaker, to drink the two like this.

My mother was a sweet, personable woman who was loved by everyone, too. She was quite beautiful and had her share of suitors when she was young, but when she met my dad she was swept off her feet. She was always willing to lend a helping hand to anyone who needed help, like the time when we were driving home and my mother saw a very pregnant neighbor woman hanging clothes out to dry. We stopped our car, and my mother got out and finished the job for our neighbor. People never forgot the little things like this that my mom did for them that they found so meaningful.

The house we lived in was a two-story home that was owned by my mother's older brother. He lived upstairs with my aunt and three older cousins. I have heard he wanted to keep my mother close, to keep an eye on things. I just knew it felt ideal to grow up surrounded by family. Our home was well-decorated, very cozy, and always spotlessly clean. As children, we were all very well-groomed and received the best education possible. From the outside, everything looked good. We never talked about the problems that happened in our home, not even with each other. I learned early on how to act normal even when crazy things were happening.

My mother was the rock in our household. She provided my sense of security. She was very close to her family, and they were often not very pleased with the way my father acted, and how his behavior affected us. When he wasn't home, life was great, and it almost seemed as if we had a normal family. My brother remembers hearing the car pull into the driveway in the evenings, when my father would return, and thinking, “Oh, no!” He says he felt a knot
in his stomach, never knowing what frame of mind our father would be in as he walked through our door.

Dinnertime could be very contentious if he was in a bad mood. I ate as fast as I could so that I could get out to play with cousins and neighborhood friends. I became quite the little escape artist. I felt as if I danced around the fringes of my family when my dad was around, and it worked well for me. I once had to sit with my father when my mother went to visit a friend who had taken ill. He drove my mother and me over to her friend's house. When we arrived in their driveway, she started to get out of the car and told me to stay with my father. I panicked. I begged her to let me go with her. She firmly said no and left, and I tried to hold back the tears, but I couldn't stop them from coming. I was terrified to be alone with my father. He told me to stop crying, but the more he yelled, the harder I cried. I was hysterical by the time my mom returned to the car. Little did I know at the time that this was just a glimpse of how my future would play out after she died and my father and I were the only two left in the house.

The stress of dealing with my father also drained my mom. One night, when I was eight years old, my mother had to put out a fire he had caused in their room after coming home drunk and smoking in bed. The mattress caught fire. I woke up, hearing my mother's screams. I smelled smoke and ran out the front door bare-foot in my pajamas. A neighbor couple was out for a late night stroll and I told them that our house was on fire. The next thing I knew, there were sirens and fire trucks roaring down our street. My mother doused the fire with water and was able to put it out, but my father
had climbed back into the bed in his drunken state, even though it was still in flames. When my uncle came downstairs to help, my mother was sitting at the kitchen table with tears streaming down her face. She said, “I can't take any more; I have got to leave!”

My sister has shared with me that when she was five years old, my mother made a suicide attempt. She had been taking diet pills, and it all ended up with my mother sticking her head inside the oven and turning on the gas. She had to go away to a hospital for several weeks of treatment after the attempt.

It is obvious to me as I look back that the main way my mother tried to help our household cope with the effects of my father's alcoholism was through food. She was a wonderful cook, and the aroma of foods cooking and baking always filled the house. We had three healthy meals a day, but that was not the issue. We engaged in a free-for-all with the food each day by midafternoon. My mother encouraged and subsidized trips to the corner store for candy and other treats. In the evenings, we snacked and watched television. I think it is interesting that the eating started in the afternoon, shortly before my father was due home from work, and continued on through the evening after he arrived home.

My life seemed normal and comfortable in its own strange way, despite all of this. There were a few awful fights I remember my parents having, and I knew that my mom was sad sometimes due to the chaos my father would cause when he was drunk. He didn't come home for dinner many nights, and when he did, he would sometimes get mad at my brother or sister for something they had done. I remember my sister as being a good girl who rarely did
anything wrong, yet she claims my father made up things she was guilty of just so he could rage at her. My brother was also a good kid. He got into some trouble here and there but nothing that deserved the tirades of my father. I had come to accept that his chaos was a normal state of living. It was all I had ever known.

There was a heavy air of impending doom that started hanging around our home after I heard the words “breast cancer,” “double mastectomy,” “chemotherapy,” “radiation treatments,” and “brain tumor.” No one talked to me about what was going on with my mother after it was discovered she had cancer, and I was too afraid to ask. My sister tells of a really bad fight that happened prior to my mom getting sick, during which my dad shoved my mother hard and she fell and hit her breast. She had been hurt very badly and was black and blue for a long time afterward. Several family members blamed my father for her cancer because that was the breast that the first tumor developed in. My sister got married and moved away and my brother went into the Air Force during the time my mother's cancer progressed. I remember the day that things took a bad turn. That was the day the ambulance came for my mom.