Dealing with Family Alcoholism

It's 8:32 pm on a December day and the doorbell is ringing and someone is hammering on the door. I open the door, but discover only darkness and the swishing sound of California rain. Peering about to see if a granddaughter is hiding, I discover instead a package laid next to the step. The UPS truck is already roaring away. I take the compact package from Amazon.com and lay it on the piano. When I do get around to opening the package, I find a Christmas gift for my granddaughter who likes to read, two paperbacks: Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder and A Horse and His Boy by C. S Lewis. On the cover of Little House I notice once again that the brown-haired protagonist Laura cradles her rag doll in her arms. In the background sits her father, Pa; his gentle eyes seem to focus on Laura.The blonde sister Mary is draped on Pa's back affectionately. Ma proudly holds up the baby, Carrie. Their home is a neat little log cabin and all of the children are smiling.

The Little House story is one that I loved as a little girl in Massachusetts, the story of a different little girl named Laura who lived life as a pioneer in the 1800s in the Big Woods of Wisconsin. A little girl who, despite living among screaming panthers and bears had a bearded father who played the fiddle and his fiddle "sang." The family survived under difficult conditions, in fact, survived with a well-stocked cabin and rag dolls and quilts on the beds. Later, facing starvation during a massive blizzard in the Dakota territories, they even ground wheat in a coffee grinder to make flour for bread.

My grandfather gave me one Little House book each year at Christmas and inscribed the front of the book with the date and a warm dedication. Grandpa grew up in Boston, the oldest son of a single mother. As a little boy, he pulled a sled full of meat through the snow to make money for his family. He left school after 8th grade and, self-educated, he became an architecture student and finally attained a respected position as a commissioner in Massachusetts state government. Perhaps because he never finished school, he valued books and bought books for me for birthdays and Christmas. There were the Little House series, Bedknob and Broomstick, A Wrinkle in Time, as well as enormous volumes of fairy tales and myths. As a girl, I immersed myself in books and their escape; sometimes I would have to tear myself from a book to eat dinner.

Every Christmas day my parents, sister and I would arrive at Grandma and Grandpa's house. My sister and I would be wearing shirred dresses, winter coats, woolen hats tied under our chins and patent leather shoes. In Grandma and Grandpa's house, the Chinese statue always stood on a table near the window, the couches had lacy doilies on the arms and presents were set in front of the unlit fireplace on the hearth. Grandma would serve a huge dinner (she seemed to rarely sit down) around a round table, complete with a browned turkey and homemade yeast rolls. At the end of the meal, we ate mince pudding with hard sauce.

Dad would drive the family away from the grandparents' house in the green Plymouth with fins, away from this orderly world with the lovingly given books, back down Route 128, back to our own town, to our own little house. A house wherein something unspoken was wrong. Sounds only there were, sounds of Dad in the kitchen opening a cabinet, unscrewing a cap, the sound of liquid pouring into glass. Ice cubes clinked. Martini glasses chilled in the freezer. We always had olives.

My father was an engineer, trained at MIT during World War II. He worked for various high-tech firms of the 50s like Sylvania and Raytheon. Dad had started smoking in high school, another addiction which eventually ended his life at 58. As I look back, I see that he already had a problem with drinking in his teens. Mom kept a wooden box in the closet with newspaper clippings and mementos; one of the items in the box was a clipping about a car accident my parents were involved in when they first met. This clipping seemed to foreshadow his later difficulties with alcohol. He was his class valedictorian, and a handsome man, but troubled, by what demons I'll never know. Perhaps it was his mother's death during his teens; there are also hints that during his childhood he may have experienced harsh treatment by his family. With most relatives long dead and the reticence of New Englanders, I can't be sure what happened to him. He was a shy man who could only talk and have fun when drinking; when required to be sober, he was painfully silent.

When I was very little child, objects and events had a capricious quality, as if they were imagined by a god who wanted to puzzle children. Orange juice had seeds, but cars had seats. Boys got run over by trucks while the bottom fell out of my ice cream cone. The neighbor who was so attentive when she bought me the ice cream would be looking anxiously across the street as I tugged at her sleeve. Christmas turned be one of the worst random events in my child world; eventually it became obvious that it would replay once a year. After Dad returned from an office party, thuds and shouts emanated from my parents' bedroom. What's happening to Mom? I wondered, as I decided to just sit in the big chair in front of the tree, the pretty tree with colored lights. The sounds encoded into my being would echo down the years. I did not understand that the glass bottle of amber liquid with the cap that Dad unscrewed could wash the pretty tree with my tears.

When I was perhaps three, I had a book with a cover picture of a friendly-looking bear sitting down reading a book. On the cover of that bear's book was the same little bear reading the same book. Repeated endlessly. Like the bear holding the book, my life story seemed to be endlessly fated to repeat the scene of a girl crying in front of a Christmas tree, with the smaller bears being my children and grandchildren. But during my lifetime, the pattern of alcoholism and acceptance that was passed down to me through my childhood has been broken; the bear reads a different book.

In 1974, after several relationships dissolved, I met John. He was the antithesis of my martini drinking father, or so it seemed, a tall hip Grateful Dead fanatic. He was going to school and would sit for hours on a backless stool in his apartment bent over a Chemistry book. When we went out for Chinese in the little inexpensive restaurant with the wooden booths, he brought his glass pipe to smoke. When we got back to his apartment, he'd stand in the dark, lean and handsome in boxers playing the guitar with a joint hanging from his mouth. We had a baby, then another, later got married.

Jobs were needed; bills had to be paid. John's hippy veneer slowly peeled off over the years to reveal a football-watching, hard-drinking man. He was a good father who carried our baby daughter in a baby backpack which he'd cleverly rigged onto a camping backpack frame. The baby carrier had a bottle and a toy tied to it on strings. He was the tall guy with curly hair who danced with the curly-haired baby on his back at the Haight Street fair. He took her on hikes, to the zoo, on trips with his parents, and to the dealer. His drug use eroded the trust between us and I found innovative hiding places for my ATM card. A tampax box and a container of flour were among my more clever locations. I worked at clerical jobs in downtown San Francisco, dragging home from the bus stop with a bag of groceries in my arms. While John was in rehab, my daughter and I visited him; she was just getting over chicken pox and still had the scabs on her face...he'd missed the worst of it. When he got out, he continued as a drug user and I was deeply disappointed. My great hope, unarticulated and unacted upon, was that I would live part of my life in a sober household.

It was Superbowl, 1989 and the Forty-Niners were playing the Cincinnati Bengals. We'd bought a house in the suburbs with a big tree in the front yard, and I was still working those office jobs in the downtown caverns. Including a stepchild, we had 3 kids of wildly different ages at home at that time; all seemed to be going through difficult phases. The dining room table could barely hold all of us and it seemed an effort to fry pork chops in a pan after my office job. The fifteen year old had taken up smoking and Satanism, the twelve year old had found a wild best friend, and the three year old seemed headed for expulsion from preschool. John's drinking had continued, though his other drug use had finally ended.

A fateful combination of prescription valium and drinking during the Superbowl game created a state of intoxication so extreme that John ended up lying on the sidewalk in the front yard shouting his enthusiasm for his favorite football team. When he came back into the house, I began, in a rather confrontational manner, to pack a suitcase in preparation to leaving. I had no plan to what I was doing, I had never had, but I did have a great deal of irrational adrenalin flowing through my veins. I made it clear that I was "leaving." He shoved me backwards by the shoulder and snatched my keys away. I dialed 911.

I dialed 911, not knowing that you couldn't say "I take it back. Sorry, I can live with this drunk one more day." The wheels were set in motion. Four police officers arrived at the house (one was a woman) and stood at the four corners of the bed questioning John, who was at that point laying there passively. The officers told me that I had to leave the house with the children until the next day and asked if I had a "friend or relative I could go to." They pressed pamphlets into my hands, pamphlets about meetings and organizations. I was asked if I wanted to press charges. I didn't. The fifteen year old fled into the night. The three year old insisted on taking a giant stuffed bear, but cried because the hat was missing. Accompanied by the police, I got into the car with the two kids and headed to my friend's house in San Francisco to sit at the battered dining room table and be served dinner from a giant pot of chili. When I determined that John was asleep, the kids and I snuck into the house and crawled into bed.

No bravado, no "I'm going to leave him," no courageous breakaway marked my behavior at this moment when our family hit bottom. I never said to myself, "I've got to get my kids out of this mess," though intellectually I knew we had problems. I could read about it and recognize it, I could cry through TV dramas which showed abuse and feel a feeling of kinship with the actors, but my fear of going it alone and my denial were much too deep to allow me to act on what I knew at heart. Only the fact that the 911 operators would not let me off the line, that they insisted on sending the police, led me to face the truth.

Our family became attenders of meetings: AA, Al-Anon, Ala-teen. The meetings helped John to stay sober, as did a new devotion to a small church nearby in a woodsy area with a warm congregation and a tall airy window. When you sit in the pews, you can see the field behind, as if you're looking at a painting. At Al-Anon meetings, I learned that others had the same problems as I did and I learned how they dealt with those problems. That it was no shame. That the problems and patterns of alcoholism and addiction repeat and pass down through the generations. That I never drank and I could never let go over control because of my lifetime pattern I learned as a "codependent," starting with those childhood years when I sat in front of the Christmas tree and later wrapped the presents for my brother and sister.

Nineteen years have gone by since that Superbowl Sunday. Nowadays we no longer attend meetings, though my husband still takes sustenance in that little church. I think of the times before Superbowl 1989 as the before and after pictures for our family. My son, who was three, at that time didn't ever know us as a family with addiction problems, and, during a freshman year foray into drugs and alcohol, we realized that we'd assumed all along that the family story had been explained to him. We had to tell him, as if we were telling someone else's story, what had happened in the family, and how he also could be at risk for addictive behavior. I can now say that I have lived part of my life in a sober household.

My granddaughter loves to read and to write stories. She may read her Little House book, but she does not have to hide in her book. Her own home, a simple townhouse with bright wood floors, baby sister and loving parents, does not harbor fearful events which began in a bottle. The bear lives on, but she reads a different book. And both of the children are smiling.