My Sad Dad
“Children almost always hang onto things tighter than their parents think they will.” –E. B. White, Charlotte's Web
One New Years Eve my parents left the house looking beautiful, mom with her chestnut hair swept into a French twist, a glamorous dress, her long legs encased in black stockings, daddy in a suit. They gleamed and I ached with love for them. My two sisters were in charge, I was probably seven or so, Catherine was thirteen and very bossy. We watched a movie called Come Back, Little Sheba and everything I most feared in the world, my father’s drinking, loss, the sadness of grown-ups was suddenly revealed. I became hysterical, overwhelmed by the idea that my father would die, the loneliness of alcoholism and the vision of life as a dark dream.
The Moynahan family, left to right: Catherine, Brigid, Molly, Julian, and Elizabeth
I don’t know how this was resolved. Possibly my sisters changed the channel, and we watched something else, but I remember when my mother found out what had happened, she said something like, “How mean to play that movie on New Years Eve when children are at home and parents are at parties.” There was no discussion of why I had such a violent reaction, nor was there any awareness, at least from my current perspective, that I was carrying the great weight of our family’s terrible secret, my father’s drinking, his sadness, and my parents’ violent marriage. She pointed out the cliché of Sheba, the lost dog and, I’m sure, pulled me into a cuddle.
At that stage of my life, I had witnessed my father hurting my mother on numerous occasions, always drunk, probably in a blackout, a monster man who stole away the best daddy in the world. Come Back, Little Sheba is a movie about alcoholism, a middle-aged couple’s fading marriage and the dog, Sheba, that represented their lost baby. Handsome Burt Lancaster plays the main character with a single year of sobriety, 1950’s Alcoholics Anonymous portrayed with sincere looking people drinking coffee, under his belt. What the film made clear to me was that my father was sad and if I tried very hard, I could possibly save him from dying. He had a terrible childhood that I would not fully understand until I read his brilliant first novel, Sisters and Brothers, all of which was obscured by his brilliant success as a Harvard PhD, renowned literary critic and a personal charm combined with such handsomeness he seemed magical. I adored him. I feared him. I wondered why my mother seemed to encourage him to drink despite the usual disasters that ensued. Once I had screamed that I hated him after I had found my mother in bed with a broken nose, a trail of blood down the hallway. I told him I would kill him. I was six. He left, still drunk and I believed he would crash into something and die.
So, it was all my fault.
In the early eighties I was bottoming out on drugs and alcohol. My drinking had been the shameful habit I had carried from the age of fifteen, a straight A student with many achievements, I was a teenage alcoholic and knew I was exactly like my father. He was who I called to ask for help. I told him if he allowed my mother to come forward with her incredible denial, you are perfect, you are wonderful, stop drinking, I would kill myself. He met me at the airport, and we drove home in the silence of understanding. We are the same. Later, instead of becoming violent I allowed someone to hurt me until it became clear I would have to get help or die. Again, my father stepped forward, this time with a broken heart as my eldest sister Catherine, had been killed by a drunk driver several months before. This time it worked. On December 22, 1984, I stopped drinking and stayed sober. This year it will be thirty-eight years of continuous sobriety.
Like my father, I am a writer and he helped me quietly, encouraging various drafts of novels and when I had an impressive publishing triumph in 2004, he introduced me to the audience as his daughter. Earlier we had sat together in the car outside of the apartment in Princeton, New Jersey, where he had taught at the university, and I had been born. I knew he was struggling with deep depression, a darkness that would eventually kill him. In his final years I lost him to my mother’s denial of the severity of his pain, but I also felt his enduring love and support even in that prolonged silence. I miss him. His wit, his brilliance, his understanding of my own illness, the part of us that connects to the silence and the despair of alcoholism. Sobriety changed my entire world to something bright and beautiful and he is a part of that. My father saved my life.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach