Sober 38
“When there’s a history of alcoholism in families there’s automatically rules set up, and those rules are don’t talk, don’t trust and don’t feel.” –Donlon Wade
I’ve had thirty-eight sober Christmases, this Christmas, goddess willing, will mark thirty-nine. Alcohol has been an element in my life that defined me both in its presence and its absence. My father was a terrible drinker, a black-out, violent drunk who physically abused my mother, and scared me senseless. He was also a periodic so on many occasions a few glasses of wine resulted in normal behavior. But when the bottles mounted and especially when something harder was introduced, there was an atmosphere so toxic in my childhood it’s a miracle I survived. I almost didn’t. And, ironically, my father was one of the most wonderful humans in the world except when he was drunk. And then he was the monster of my nightmares. I would lie awake listening to the shouting and things breaking and my mother screaming and thought he would kill her. I had a recurring nightmare that my mother was dead, in a coffin, and I was being pushed through a crowd of people to tell her “goodbye.” I told them about the dream but they were uninterested.
photo by Acton Crawford
Almost as poisonous was the denial. My mother behaved as if nothing had happened, sometimes with visible bruises, broken furniture, shattered glass, she’d punish my father with silent scorn and my father would shrink into a person who had no right to exist. Sometimes I went with him to buy her a present to seek forgiveness. I always forgave him and then hated my mother, whom I adored, for her coldness. It was a poor example of a healthy marriage, but it was, above all, their marriage. The word “alcoholic” was never uttered. Except for other people, other families, families with dark houses, without lively, beautiful parents, without wonderful meals, years spent in Europe, fabulous friends. Our family had a secret which was not shared and if you asked you were told that daddy’s father “died in an alleyway.” That was alcoholism. So gaslighting was alive and well in our house. I was the youngest of three girls. I adored my parents, and I hated them.
At fifteen, I started to drink. Slowly at first and then, after I was raped by my first date, fast whenever possible. I stole alcohol, I craved oblivion, I watched my father’s face change and one day my face changed the same way. I was a blackout drinker, a straight A student through college. I lived a double life, but every relationship ended with some variation of: “I don’t want to watch you die.” I controlled my drinking by binging on weekends but after a two-year stint as a line foreman for New Jersey Bell (another story) during which I rose at five o’clock in the morning, ran eight miles, got dressed and went to a job for which I was severely unqualified, managing a group of ten men in a garage of seventy-five, all with a hangover. I let go.
I broke up with my current boyfriend and lit out for California where my friends from my college year in Ireland were living. I had no plan. Weeks turned into months, the Irish friends left for home, I spent Christmas Eve getting an abortion, alone, fully aware my life was spiraling towards what I observed in the movie, Leaving Los Vegas, a sort of blissful awareness that what I wanted, really wanted was to drink myself to death. But something, some part of me, the child who hoped things would be better, the young woman who refused to view love as an excuse for abuse, who despite everything loved her parents and life, who wanted a child and to write books, won. I drove home. I was twenty-four.
It didn’t happen immediately. I wasn’t ready to feel what had been numbed and silenced by alcohol. I compartmentalized the addiction, found new work, a place to live, lured a few more men into my tragic web but then, after several trips back to California and being forced to attend a meeting by my alcoholic, teenaged boyfriend, I finally surrendered and attended meetings where I flirted with men newly sprung from jail and avoided the women.
The sobriety I held was a fragile, elusive thing. I had lost my best friend at twenty and often compared her goodness to my own black soul. And then, one night my phone rang, and a shaking voice told me to go to the hospital, my eldest sister, my role model and supporter, a survivor and a genius was badly hurt. A speeding driver had struck her, a drunk, as she crossed the street. She was on life support, she was dying. She died.
I tried to stay sober as my family cracked open, her little boy who waited for his mother to come home, my parents who were lost in pain I could not imagine, her husband, my other sister, we wandered around making arrangements and then after the memorial service we scattered, and I was alone. Alone in such self-hatred I could taste it, alone in an anger and grief so deep I could not eat or sleep or imagine life without her. I met someone, picked up a drink, married him and in a matter of months was being physically abused which I welcomed as it meant I could keep drinking.
One night, she, my sister appeared, my best friend behind her, they looked at me with love and said, you must stop. I argued that it was their fault for leaving me, for loving me and then going away but they were not persuaded, I must stop. No, I couldn’t kill myself. I had been given a life and needed to remain alive. There is no arguing with your oldest sister or your best friend especially when they are dead.
I stopped. December 22, 1984.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach