Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul on Tough Stuff (7 page)

One night my dad didn't call. I was worried, but my mom calmed me down. We reasoned that he was probably out too late to call and didn't want to wake me. But when he didn't call the next night either, I was really worried.

The next morning, my mom and I decided that we should look into the situation. She told me she would call his office and tried to reassure me on the way to school. I felt strange that day laughing with my friends, like I shouldn't be so happy. I had this weird feeling that something bad had happened.

When I got home, I immediately asked her what his office had told her. As it turned out, they, too, had not heard from him. They got suspicious and went to his apartment to see what was going on. My father never answered the door, so they got someone to break in. They found my dad lying on the bathroom floor in a pool of blood. The police later said that he had died two days before he was found.

After hearing the news, I was in bad shape. I felt like there was no point to life. I took a few days off school and spent them looking at photo albums and going through my dad's old stuff. My father was not a perfect man— sometimes he was insensitive, sometimes unfair, sometimes unforgiving or hurtful or unreliable. My father disappointed me a lot. But when I look back at the man my father was, I am not disappointed. My father was only human. He did teach me how to throw a ball, to wash a car, to appreciate music, to play golf, to love to read, to argue intelligently, to do crossword puzzles, to play the guitar and to be proud of myself. Some children never even get to meet their fathers; I was fortunate enough to know mine for fourteen years.

My father's death is now a part of me, embedded deep within me. I am growing stronger every day. My mother has taught me, rather than forget about my father's problems and struggles, to learn from them. My mother is there whenever I need her; her support has been the anchor that has kept me from drifting away.

As I place the flowers next to my father's ashes, I say a silent prayer and wait there for just a moment. I recall everything about my dad—the good and the bad alike— and I remember the man my father was.

Kristine Flaherty

A Sobering Place

L
earn from the mistakes of others—you
can never live long enough to make them all
yourself.

John Luther

“What will you have?” the waiter asks.

“A Shirley Temple,” I shoot back. When I go out I always order the same drink. The sparkling Sprite with grenadine and a maraschino cherry allows me to pretend, to fit in with my friends somehow, to cast aside the hurt of my childhood.

I don't drink and I've never been drunk, but now and then I do wonder what it would feel like. I'm afraid, though, that one sip might lead to many more, and that one day I might become an alcoholic.

That's what my mother is.

The sweet Shirley Temple hides a bitter past and a picture etched in my memory: Mom is sitting on the couch, legs crossed, drinking malt liquor. I tend to forget that I was the one who grabbed it from the refrigerator for her. I tapped the top, even tilted it to the glass and poured it for her. At five years old, I was my mother's bartender.

When I was a little girl, I had long hair, and I thought that made me pretty.

“More hair,” Mom would say, as she braided the last of four ponytails.

“Grow longer,” I'd answer, while she wrapped yellow ribbons around my braids.

But we didn't have our little ritual on weekends. On weekends Mom got drunk. She was a mean drunk and didn't clean the house or comb my hair. She broke lamps, cursed Dad and even threw things at him. The arguments always ended the same way: She'd leave, dressed to the nines in high heels and a sleek dress that showed off her long legs. I cried when she left. She would be gone for one, sometimes two days at a time, partying. I would wonder if she was ever coming back.

She always did. Groggy, tired. I didn't care. I was just glad Mom was back. I hated her drinking, but I didn't hate her. I loved her then, and I love her now. I separated my mom from the alcohol, decided the liquor was the monster.

When I grow up,
I vowed to myself,
I won't curse out my
husband or act mean with my children. I won't drink.

The message never rang so loud in my head as it did when I was sixteen. When most kids were circling the local McDonald's on Friday and Saturday nights, I was out cruising the city streets with my dad, looking for Mom's car. Dad, a career military man, searched for hours, fearful she would drive home drunk, get a DUI or have an accident. But when he found her in a club, she would refuse to leave. So I'd slide over into his seat and put the car in gear. He'd slip into the parking lot and drive out in her car. I would follow him home, pull into the driveway behind him and slam the door, thinking about Mom out there stranded in some nightclub. It didn't make sense: Mom would get drunk; Dad and I would leave her. I didn't think that either of them was right.

My mother had been raised poor in the Deep South. She had been shuttled from house to house until she was a teenager, and she had no idea who her father was— these were her demons, and she was unable to drink them away. So she tried again and again to rehabilitate herself. Once I even spent a week with her in rehab, telling my side of the story, trying to help. The scene always played out the same way: She would enter an angry woman and leave as my mother, the woman who had tied yellow ribbons in my hair. But soon the demons would find a home in her again, pushing her down those twelve steps she had so painstakingly climbed.

They say alcoholics have to hit rock bottom before they can change. Mom didn't land there until after she divorced my father. My father left, taking my little brother and me with him to South Carolina. Alcohol had won, and she had lost everything—her marriage, her children, her home. My brother and I had never truly bonded with our father, whose work took him to Korea and later to Operation Desert Storm in the Middle East, but we decided to live with him anyway.

After losing her marriage and her children, my mother continued to drink for another seven years. Mom doesn't drink anymore. “I just got tired, Boo,” she said recently. “Getting up drunk, going to bed drunk, I got tired of living that life.”

Nearly three decades after she sipped her first rum and Coke at a military dance, she stopped. No more malt liquor, no more brandy, no more whiskey sours. She's a devoted participant in a Twelve-Step program and hasn't had a drink in nearly five years.

Meanwhile, I kept my promise. I didn't drink, either. I stepped outside my mother's footsteps and walked in another direction. It took me, literally and figuratively, to a sobering place. Occasionally, I get an urge to leave there. When I do, I grab something sweet—a Shirley Temple.

Monique Fields

3
FAMILY
MATTERS

T
he family is one of nature's masterpieces.

George Santayana

What Siblings Know

When I was twelve and my brother David was seventeen, we were home one Halloween night watching a horror movie we'd rented. It was an entertaining but silly movie about a woman who becomes a witch. The woman who played the witch was young and looked like a model. Every time she cast a spell, her long red hair whipped around her face and her eyes got bright green. Once when this happened, my brother said, “Wow, she looks really hot.”

I stared at him. I was astonished at what he'd said. I hadn't noticed it before, but until that night I'd never, ever heard my brother voice an attraction to women, even though he was a teenager and supposedly in the prime of his life.

This is what I remember when people ask me when I first knew my brother was gay. I didn't realize he was different until I heard him saying something that most guys his age would say without a second thought.

My brother tried to like girls. The thought of himtrying— even by saying something as trivial as “She looks hot” about an actress on a television screen—breaks my heart. All that time he was trying, through middle school and high school and into college, he couldn't tell me or my parents how hard it was for him. He was all alone.

When I was twelve, David went out of state for college. He came home for holidays and a few weeks in the summer, and he called every week, but every year he seemed to pull farther away from me and my parents. When he was home, he was quiet and distant, and on the phone he was polite but tense, the way people get when they are hiding really big secrets.

My parents were slow, but they weren't stupid. A couple of years after David left for college, when they still hadn't heard mention of any girlfriends or even dates, they became suspicious. My mother started asking me questions, thinking that I must know something she didn't know, because siblings tell each other things they don't tell their parents. But David hadn't told me anything. He never had, not even before he left for college. I always knew he loved me, but he was more independent than the rest of us, and I never felt he needed me.

The next time David came home, I did a terrible thing. I wanted to borrow his leather backpack and I knew he wouldn't let me if I asked him, so I just took it. But before I filled it with my things, I had to take out his things to make room. There were some schoolbooks and a fancy notebook bound with a rubber band. I was curious. I pulled off the rubber band and started reading.

Immediately, I found myself immersed in a world of suppressed anger, self-loathing and tentative romances. I learned more about my brother in those pages than I ever could from him, at least back then. I learned that he'd known he was gay his entire life, but that not until he escaped to college did he admit it to another human being. That human being was his roommate, Rob. I remembered him mentioning how Rob had transferred dorm rooms in the middle of the semester, and when I read my brother's journal I learned that Rob changed rooms because he didn't want to live with someone who was gay.

It was a little while—a few pages into the journal— before my brother told anyone else. He joined a campus group and made some gay friends, and slowly his life forked into two lives. There was the life my parents and I saw—a life with lies and friends who didn't know him, and no one to love—and there was a second life, a life with friends and crushes and dates. A life where he was happy.

I put the backpack—and the little notebook—back in my brother's room, and I never told him what I'd learned. But my parents continued to badger me about David and his lack of love life—they knew he was gay, I'm sure, but denied it even to themselves—and eventually I called him up. “David,” I said, “you have to tell them.”

He didn't ask me how I knew, and I didn't tell him. But looking back, I understand that reading my brother's journal—a horrible crime I would never commit again— only filled in some of the details. Somehow, I already knew the story. Maybe it is true that siblings know each other better than their parents know them. I like to think so.

The next Thanksgiving, after a pretty typical family meal, my brother suggested we all take a walk. We walked past the end of our street and onto the grounds of the high school, then onto the track. Then my brother stopped. “I have something to tell you,” he said. I felt my parents' hearts skip a beat—they wanted so badly, back then, for it not to be true. “I wanted to tell you that I'm gay.”

My parents were pretty rational, considering. They told David that he was just experimenting, that eventually he'd find a woman he wanted to marry. He listened to them, then politely but firmly said that this was something that wasn't going to change. They argued but never raised their voices, and eventually we went home and took naps in separate rooms. The following days were very quiet. Then David went back to school, to his happy life.

It was five years before my parents came to truly accept my brother. My brother was fortunate to be out of the house during that time, but I was not so lucky. My parents fought more than ever, my father drank a lot, and I spent time out of the house. But slowly—
very
slowly—my parents got used to the idea. After a year, my mother told one of her friends about David, then my father told one of his. They received love and support—David was a great kid, said my parents' friends. That hadn't changed. Secretly, I'm sure they were relieved that it wasn't their kid who was gay. After my parents learned not to hide it, there was still the matter of being proud of David, of not only tolerating hearing about his romantic life, but wanting to hear about it.

About a week before Christmas one year, my brother called home to ask my parents if he could bring a friend home for the holiday. A boyfriend. My parents told David they'd think about it, then called him back and said absolutely not. My brother felt hurt and rejected, and when he came home, relations between him and my parents were strained. Then he and my father got into a fight on Christmas Eve, and David took an early flight back to school. Christmas Day was sadder and lonelier than it had ever been.

I called David a few days later. “You can't rush them,” I said, feeling guilty for defending them.

“It's been three years,” said David. He was frustrated, which I understood. So was I. I didn't understand why my parents couldn't just get over it. It seemed simple. Every time my mother asked me how a date had gone or said she liked a boy I'd introduced to her, I thought,
What's so different between me and David? Don't you want him
to be happy, too?