Crack open the $12 can of reishi-infused adaptogenic sparkling aperitif, y’all— It’s National Recovery Month!
This October, it will be three years since I have had any ‘adult’ beverage and until you don’t use alcohol to unwind, celebrate, or fit in at the family gathering— you have no idea what a revolution it is to drink so much water.
While my youth is full of fuzzy, swaying, yuge blunders under the influence of myriad things, I did not quit drinking three years ago because I was powerless over it nor had my life become unmanageable. There is no lead story here— I just outgrew it. I didn't feel good anymore after drinking and so, that was that.
As the daughter of a man who died from complications of a life soaked in 100-proof, I recognize that it is a privilege to be able to let go of vice without any weeping or gnashing of teeth (or dying first). Oddly, I have always been able to quit what I needed to quit when I knew I needed to quit it— cigarettes, marriage, and exploitative bosses included. I don't know if that is some DNA lottery win or the result of solid gold stubbornness but, either way, I'm good at being done.
But just because it is ‘easy’ for me in comparison to those still growling in the snare, it doesn’t mean that I am not vigilant about getting trapped again. I require the serenity prayer just as often as anyone else who woke up today and realized that they aren't omniscient God. I still catch myself wondering if there is a pill to help me sleep, ease my neck tension, or make me more fun to be around. Maybe if I just had a drink, I'd feel better. Maybe I need help to relax.
I am one of the millions of Americans living in the nuclear fallout from substance abuse and misuse and dependency. No matter where you live from the epicenter of American addiction, we're all covered in various layers of toxic sludge. Everyone of us is only one prescription or one more drink or [God forbid] one late-night call away from total devastation.
Every cell of my body was oriented toward recklessness and self-medication at birth on account of two rebel, hippie parents from the Me Generation, who were raised by generations of folks who stirred trauma and emotional impulses into highball glasses, sentimentally referring to their dysfunction as Card Night or Deer Camp.
I really loved my dad, who was by all accounts a funny, handsome, and talented man. I knew him, mostly, through old photos. He hadn’t really been able to be a dad to me in my childhood, but he came to life when I could drive myself to his house and drink around a bonfire. That was how he related to those he loved as modeled by those whom he had loved— and heck if we didn't have some good times before his early departure.
As fate would have it, I came up a grungy Gen-Xer. If you were there with your fake ID in our pre-cell-phone-sans-dome-camera wilding-out, you already know. River Phoenix. Kurt Cobain. Real underground raves. Everclear. Mescaline. Clove cigarettes.
By 19, I had done all the drugs available and had a two-pack a day Marlboro Reds habit to boot. I followed The Grateful Dead. I lived with a heroin addict. I even had a boyfriend from high school go to prison once, and I only remembered that recently when I drove to visit my son who was housed in a facility across the street from one that I visited in 1996. My next boyfriend was in Gregg Allman’s son’s band, and I spent a year driving all over the eastern United States to be at their late-night shows and after-parties and weird apartments.
I eventually chilled out enough to marry someone who was gainfully employed and became a mom who dialed it all the way down to church attendance and classroom volunteerism. Motherhood demanded sobriety of me, and I obliged. We raised three beautiful children who all have (or don’t have) their own adult relationships with substances now— which is none of my business. Except when they go to jail or prison for it and then, well, it sorta becomes a little bit of my business.
One could argue that my entire existence has been woven together from the beautiful strands of lots of different people’s addictions and that this blog exists because, well, addiction.
Since it is Recovery Awareness Month and we just passed International Overdose Day (August 31), we are smack in the middle of #epidemic #addiction #statistic season. Suicide Awareness Day is coming (Sept 10) and brace yourself to scroll past the death toll graphics on Opioid Awareness Day (Sept 21).
While I am a nerdy statistics girl at heart, I don’t think the numbers matter anymore.
We aren’t even surprised that over 100,000 people die from overdose every year here in the Land of the Free, except when we place that number next to annual death tolls from guns (48,000) or car accidents (46,000). We banter about ‘choices' and still judge the annoying addicts for moral sins— staring aghast at the public fentanyl folds all over our Reels (the modern day sideshows).
Our numbers and figures are just nouns and adjectives that we pile up to fill in gaps— gaps left by actual runaway kids and buried fathers and imprisoned sons.
Part of my recovery journey has been owning my role in how we got here. I have a son in prison— and he didn’t get there on his own.
In a recent note from author Troy Chapman, with whom I have just begun corresponding, he gave me a phrase I won’t ever forget. People who do horrible things, he said (even murderers on the 6 o’clock news) are not just some ‘son of a bitch.’ They are a Son of a Mom. Moms who, as Troy put it, 'tried her best without much knowledge of how to do this hard thing we call being human.’
I have a son of a mom.
As a young parent, trying her best, I was wishy-washy and contradictory and inconsistent. I moved from intolerant to enabling— sometimes leaping between the two in the same day. I blamed him for everything, and then I blamed him for nothing. I tried to control outcomes instead of the controllables (my attitude, my mouth, my reactions). I took responsibility for things that were not mine to take, stealing the opportunity from others the blessed gift of holding their own pile of steaming shit.
I have a son in his 4th year of a prison sentence, and as a mom, that feels like a personal failure. It has become reflex to get up every day, pick up the ball, and keep going as though it is mine to carry. We are in prison. We have addiction. We are hopeful for parole.
I have gotten out of bed every day for more than a decade and a half to navigate some kind of addiction counseling or rehab paperwork, a county jail call or another relapse. When it is none of those, it is the echoes of regret that play on loop. Every time I hear, ‘This is a pre-paid call from a correctional facility…’ I'll be damned if I don't feel the pin-prick of responsibility.
But, God bless Melody Beattie for bringing codependency into the mainstream during my lifetime.
I am powerless over anything but my reactions, especially the reactions to my own bs. I can't make my son sober. I can't save him. I can't control parole boards and DOC employees. Though I try, I can't influence how my son uses his time in there and I can't make any of this go away. We have years of one-day-at-a-time ahead, and his one day is different than my one day.
While I want people to understand more about addiction and recovery, it will not come through the lens of psycho-education nor statistics nor Awareness Days. It will come from my own bumbling recovery attempts to find the line between acceptance and change while allowing others the freedom to find their own lines and then accept or change as needed. And— let them deal with their own pile of doo-doo.
The truth is, we're all recovering from something and we all think we're in control of uncontrollable things until we're not— the weekend drinks, our spouse, the way our kids will turn out. Here is my loving reminder to us that we exist only in this moment. Right here is where the magic can happen, and that is true Recovery— at least, it is for me.
Just for today.
Bridgit We are all human so we will make mistakes. I know I had realized just lately what I had neglected to do while I was raising my boys. Also we are victims of our upbringing as you had stated earlier. Please dont blame yourself entirely
Brava. “I did not quit drinking three years ago because I was powerless over it nor had my life become unmanageable.” In the rooms that’s known as a “problem drinker” who has not crossed the line into powerlessness and unmanageability. I hope you never do. I love every word of this essay.
What you describe is actually the category recovery culture tends to overlook: the person who recognizes the trajectory before it crosses into powerlessness or unmanageability. That’s as valid a form of recovery as any other—maybe even more radical.