Finding Balance: Life in All its Beauty
“Your best days are ahead of you. The movie starts when the guy gets sober and puts his life back together; it doesn’t end there.” – Bucky Sinister
There is more. There is always more, but I wanted to pause to be present in my current existence, happily married, sober forty years this December (higher power willing), living in northern Michigan and aging, not something I expected when I was so lost in addiction, regret, despair, and grief. Nothing has come easily including a happy marriage, losing my parents, finally reconciling with and loving my surviving older sister. My son went through a terrible self-destructive phase in high school and early college when I decided he was following in my footsteps, but with the irony that I had been a perfect mother and I was sober. Well, I wasn’t a perfect mother and my sobriety had little to do with the choices he made. When it was time to talk, to forgive, to accept, and to listen, I was there. He is safe, he is happy, he loves someone, and is loved in return.
photo by Unseen Studio
I loved my parents, maybe more than was wise. They were both so wise, witty and funny. They were also beautiful and when they paid attention to you, it felt like being bathed in a golden light. They rarely paid attention. Their interests were beyond their children and since we were mere children, it was hard not to feel like you were never enough. I was never enough. I went inside, read everything in the house, and with two Harvard-educated parents, one a novelist, literary critic, and English professor, that was a lot of books. I went outside and roamed the brambly, overgrown farm we lived on, climbed the beams in the barn and daydreamed about getting out. Despite my passionate love for my parents, I knew I needed to get away. Also, part of being an alcoholic is the core loneliness and separation from others that persists despite your surroundings. Like my father, who never stopped drinking, I found myself wandering off as much as possible.
I stopped drinking on December 22, 1984. My eldest sister was killed by a drunk driver on February 29, 1984, a Leap Year, so that date did not exist for another four years. Her death was a watershed for me. I had been teetering on the edge of fatal self-destruction, and when she died, I allowed myself to fall over that cliff, to spend months in a state of manic misery until I finally hit bottom and went back to AA. I had a very deep desire for suicide, I was exhausted, filled with rage and despair, sure that my life not only lacked value but that it caused pain to others and, most of all, to myself. My plan was to get sober, put my affairs in order and write a note to my parents of such profundity they would accept the death of a second child. Thank god for my shrink! Hazel was a witness to the grief, a horrific series of events that took away my best friend, followed several years later by my sister. She did not look away. In that Upper East Side office, afraid to really look at her because I believed everyone I loved would die, I told the truth. And she told me I was brave and good and deserved to live. She also helped me see, in her own words, that my parents were “beautiful, terrible monsters.” When I expressed the desire to kill them, she told me I would immediately find another set of parents if I didn’t deal with my own depression. And what a depression it was!
During this time, I worked in publishing, and when I lost my job, I finally wrote my first novel, Parting Is All We Know of Heaven, standing at the waitress station at whatever bar I was working in, writing in longhand what would later be typed, page after page of a fictional account of the madness of my twenties. I had no intention of trying to get published, but an agent I knew read it and sold it before we had any firm partnership. It was a book about the murder of the oldest daughter in a family, told through the eyes of the youngest. I literally howled into the night writing that novel, unable to separate the grief and rage of the main character from my own. I don’t recommend this. It came close to killing me.
Stopping drinking did not remove the things that were hard and my own neurosis, which was, in sobriety, extreme. This is what the next part of my memoir will be about, and never fear, even sober, sane (?), and working the twelve steps of AA, my life continued and continues to be almost ridiculously dramatic. I have been given a seven-week writing residency in Woodstock, New York, this August through October and plan to write the next part as well as a novel that, in all likelihood, will not find me either an agent or a publisher. But that’s what I do. I write, I swim, I live.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach