Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This: Part II
“I just don’t understand…” she desperately wailed, “why can’t I stop?”
Alcoholic hearts sunk all over the world when she issued that ominous question. Anyone who struggles with addiction has asked themselves that same question over and over again, never with nonchalance, always with despondence. The question often goes incognito- sometimes showing up as “what the Hell is wrong with me?” Or, “God, can you please make it stop?”
There is no clear-cut answer to her question, and there are strict rules against engaging in crosstalk, so we all just sat there silently in our screen squares and watched her cry. It seems cruel, but it was a lot more tactful than banging our fists and chanting “one of us! One of us!”
The tears of a mother struggling with alcoholism could dissolve titanium. They are so authentic, and so potent. There is no love in this world as strong as the love a mother has for her children. It is soul-ravaging to see a mother come to terms with the fact that the immense amount of love she carries in her heart is not enough to beat her addiction.
This is important, so pay attention. Really sink your teeth into this- especially if you are a non-addict, because this is quintessential to bridging the canyon between addicts and their loved ones… Love is not a cure for addiction. Addiction is not a deficit of love. Using love as a weapon against addiction is like trying to put out a grease fire with water. Addiction and love are of different elements. They comingle, they weave in and out of each other, they run parallel on occasion, but love cannot snuff out addiction. This is bold, and these are fightin’ words, but I’m going there—Saying, or even thinking “if they really loved me, they’d stop drinking,” is an incredibly ignorant, and frankly, very selfish thought.
Now, I’m going to put the kibosh on another non-addict excuse: “I did everything to help them, but you can’t help an addict unless they want to help themselves.” Of course we want help. We are pleading for help. We are desperate for help. The problem with addiction is that NO ONE KNOWS HOW TO HELP. Not even the people who claim to know how to help. Take it from me, in rehab, twice- TWO TIMES. Neither stint fixed what was really ailing me. Addicts aren’t that selfish, addiction is just that complicated.
Before she threw out the proverbial “why can’t I stop?”, the woman told us that she decided to come to the meeting because her husband used the phrase, “you were such a good mom.” Were. WERE. Watching her repeat that sentence in her own words was like watching someone take a bullet. Were. “You were a great mom.” Stereotype confirmed. Addiction achieved= person cancelled. And I fucking despise that way of thinking. I’m not bias because I’m an alcoholic myself. I’m bias because I am the daughter of an alcoholic parent. That thought process- that bitterness, that grudge-cuddling, that level of complete and utter ignorance cost me the most important 7 years of my life.
My father was a great man. He also happened to be an alcoholic. Two things can be true, no? He got sober 7 years before he died. Did I embrace those years? No. Did I delight in having my father back in his most genuine form? No. Was I a little brat, determined to treat him like shit as a punishment for the years when we all struggled because of his addiction? Damn right, I was. He tried so hard to explain the treachery of addiction to me. When he would say things like, “it’s a disease,” I scoffed, thinking that he was making excuses. What he was actually trying to convey was that “not loving you, or your sister, or your mother was never the issue.” When he would drag us to AA meetings, I thought he was just doing some blatant agenda-pushing. Actually, he was hoping that if he couldn’t effectively explain what addiction was, maybe someone else in the room could.
My father is dead now, by the way. Gone. He, and the 7 years I squandered, are lost to the abyss. He no longer “is” he “was.” So, if you are a man who throws words like “were” at the living, breathing, sobbing, struggling (but fighting) mother of your children—I’m coming for you. You should be scared. I’m a lot less feisty since I quit drinking, but my aim has massively improved…
As I said, I have been the person who loves an addict. It’s easily the most frustrating situation a person has to be in. It breeds anger. It breeds disgust. It breeds drastic action. Mostly, it breeds utter and complete confusion. One of the things I am most determined to highlight on this platform is that, when it comes to addiction, no one knows what to do. What I don’t understand is why so many people use that fact as an excuse to give up instead of a reason to try harder. I assume its because of two very prominent factors.
Factor #1: substance use turns the user into an ASSHOLE. Yes. Take a Stepford wife, apply three coats of Tanqueray lacquer and boom- she’s ready to fight. Drunk people yell. Drunk people blame. Drunk people throw hands. When we are drunk all, or most, of the time, it starts to seem like that’s just who we are now- a screaming, whining, raving, punching lunatic. To be fair, when we are drinking, we are those things. The misunderstanding occurs when people take our drunken outbursts as God’s law.
Alcohol is not truth serum, people. It’s not a magic potion that reveals our darkest secrets and desires. Its fucking crazy juice. Especially in excess. It is a mind-altering substance that does exactly what it is designed to do: alter the mind. Alcohol is especially devious because, somehow, it makes it so that we don’t know how to work a microwave or stand-up straight, but we know exactly what to say to push someone’s buttons and salt their deepest wounds. Its horrifying. There is usually a whisper of truth in the terrible things we say- enough to make the entire statement seem like a prophecy that we’ve been holding in. But it isn’t. It is pure, rotten, fermented, vile, alcohol induced nonsense and it has nothing to do with how we actually feel about you, and it has no place in our genuine, sober thoughts and feelings.
Ok. So, if we know that alcohol turns us into a total monster, then why do we keep drinking? Why do we do this every day? Why do we purposefully consume alcohol when it always ends in the same disaster night after night after night?
Factor #2: We are the only one going through the physical motions of drinking alcohol, but everyone else in the house is paying the price. That is absolutely true. Why do you have to be a parasite slowly eating away at our (formerly) happy home? Especially when a murder-suicide would be so much easier and cleaner? Why do you have to torture us? Why should I have to stick around in this minefield of a marriage when you are the one purposefully making me miserable? Why do you keep drinking when you know how terrible it is making both of our lives? Why won’t you just stop? Why can’t you just stop? Just stop. JUST STOP!
“I just don’t understand…” she desperately wailed, “why can’t I stop?”
Why can’t she stop? Why couldn’t I stop?
Alcohol doesn’t just cause us to say terrible things to the people we love. Alcohol says terrible things to us, too. Addiction tells us that we are not enough. Addiction tells us that we are bad. Addiction says, “you’re weak, you’re garbage, you’re a failure.” It repeats these offenses over and over and over again, like a car alarm going off at midnight, until we take a drink. And then… a warm, soft silence falls over our world.
I had a brief, and honest conversation with my sister last week about the slew of medications that I take to battle anxiety, mania, depression, panic, and ADHD. It’s a trial-and-error process that my psychiatrist and I still have not gotten right over the past 10 months (and previous 8 years).
“That’s why it was so hard to give up drinking,” I boldly stated. “Alcohol was the perfect anesthetic for everything that was wrong with me.”
I think a lot of alcoholics have an ingrained fear of admitting that fact. Its also a bit irresponsible of me to phrase it that way, in case someone reading this is teetering on the edge of sobriety and uses that description as a reason to drink… but let’s be honest, if a blog about addiction and the necessity of sobriety makes you go drink, you weren’t done drinking anyway (sorry bout it). I really mean it when I say, “the perfect medication.” To non-addicts, alcohol is just a mild sedative. To an alcoholic, it is everything that we need to feel human. Not “super-human,” not special, not superior- we drink to feel normal. We drink to feel like we belong.
So, when does “I just want to feel better” become “I can’t stop?” When you realize that, when you are sober, you hate yourself. This isn’t a selfish thing. This is not about choosing to drink and make everyone else uncomfortable so that we, solely, can feel better. This is about the potent, but false, sense of security that drinking gives us. We want to be our best self and give our loved ones the best version of ourselves. We only feel like our best when we are drinking. Remember “fun mommy, amorous wife” from part one? Alcohol did that! Alcohol can do that again, right?! Not last night, it just made me pass out at dinner. Not the night before either, I busted my lip on the toilet seat. But tonight- tonight alcohol is going to make me a great mom and wife again. You’ll see.
That thought process is not an excuse to drink. It is a deep, powerful delusion that we truly believe. We are not a slave to alcohol. We are a slave to our insecurities. Alcohol is just the best/worst coping mechanism that we have available. Our perception of the good vs. the bad is horribly skewed. Bad for us are the hours when we aren’t drinking. Bad for everyone else are the hours when we are. We’re blacked out for those hours, so we don’t see the problem. We know that you’re mad in the morning. We know that you are annoyed with the whole situation. We know that you think you’re right and that we’re wrong. But you don’t live in our world. You don’t realize that we are doing you a favor. You claim that it’s a bad thing that we are drunk every night, but we know that its better than us being sober. You would hate us sober. How can we be so sure of that? Because of how much we thoroughly hate ourselves when we are sober.
Hate.
Hate.
Hate. Ourselves.
HATE.
This is real life. These are real people. This is a repetitive story. This isn’t an excuse, this is an emergency. This is falling asleep in your own puke. This is slitting your wrists because you don’t feel that you deserve to breathe. These are a million missteps to say, “Goddamn it, I need help!”
You are barely hanging on to the smallest sense of yourself, caught in a cycle of addiction, desperate for answers, inches from the ledge… instead of hearing, “its ok, we’ll get through this together. Whatever it takes.” You get, “well, you were a good mom.”
Yeah. That’s how you get your wife back. Good work.
You are a good mom. If you were ever a good mom, I guarantee you are still a good mom. Once you beat addiction, you’ll be great mom. No one has more patience, more grace, or more understanding than someone who fought the battle for their life, while everyone they loved stood back and said, “yup, she’s a goner.”
Look, it’s been a rough year: for moms, for dads, for human people in general. For some women, drinking was a great way to deal with added stress, until it wasn’t anymore. Being an addict is hard. Loving an addict is, in many ways, harder. I’ve done both. No good comes from simply rejecting what you don’t understand. I rejected the complexities of alcoholism and *poof* I became an alcoholic. I’m deeply hurt, but not surprised that some people chose to go a separate way once they saw me struggling with something that they didn’t like or accept. That’s completely understandable and 100% their prerogative.
Please, I’m begging you, don’t do that to a mother. Even when it looks like she’s not, she’s trying so hard. Give her time, give her space, give her encouragement- Hell, give her the boot, if you need to (we are still talking about an addict here). But when its all over, give her respect. Give her credit. An addict in recovery is the same person that they were before their addiction, if not better. Take it from someone who knows both sides of the story. I lost my dad a long time before he died. It wasn’t because of his behavior, it wasn’t because he didn’t do everything to make it right with me (he did), it was because of my shitty, stubborn attitude. I’ll regret that until the day that I die, as well. Don’t make the situation into a dirtier war than it needs to be. Sure, you can go the age-old “you vs. addict” route. Or you can man-up and say “hey, its me and you vs. addiction.”
To all the moms out there who are losing their credibility with every sip of chardonnay… I see you. I hear you. I feel for you. I don’t want this life for you, either. But please, please don’t give up. Come to meetings. Cry in your square as much as you need to. I’m here for you. I’ll be here until you are done crying. I’ll be here when you are ready to armor-up and fight this thing. I’ll be here when you are finally getting your footing and your husband says, “ugh. Well. I can’t trust you. You can always just start drinking again.” Yeah, we’ll get through that. I’ll be here when you are finally secure and know that you can fight this, successfully, for the rest of your life. I’ll be applauding when you can finally say with confidence that you are a great mom. You were an alcoholic.
