Memoir: A Drunk's Love Story

Memoir:       A Drunk’s Love Story: The Ultimate Betrayal
                                      CHAPTER 1

Insanity.  Repeating the same behavior.  Expecting different results.

 Obsessions of the mind are greater than willpower.

It took thirty eight years for a woman like me to learn such a lesson. 

Most women grow up to talk about their first love and their first kiss.  The story is quite different for an alcoholic like me.  I don’t remember my first kiss.  Sadder yet, I can’t tell you anything about the first boy I had a relationship with.  What I can recall is every detail about the first time my lips touched a bottle of alcohol.

An extraordinary moment occurred in my young life that would characterize who I would become.  I was twelve years old.  I experienced my first drink, my first drunk, and my first blackout.  The sun was warm in the early month of October 1987.  It was a Saturday.  Anne, Kimmy and I had already planned in school the day before about how we were going to hang out and drink together.  There was no question about the where and how.  That was easy.  My father had been recently released from prison and the first thing he did was restock the liquor cabinet.  My mother was a daily drinker so no one would suspect me if a bottle was missing. Everything was at our fingertips.  We just needed to make the conscious decision to go through with it.  

Saturday afternoon Anne and Kimmy showed up together at my home.  Before we stole some Canadian Whiskey from my father’s bar, the three of us primped ourselves in front of the mirror in my bedroom.  Thirty minutes quickly moved in time and we finally decided which lipstick looked best on whom.  Kimmy chose black lipstick that complimented her Guns and Roses t-shirt and spandex pants and also brought out the freckles in her face.  Anne chose red which made her pale skin look even paler to me but did bring out the strawberry highlights in her long, straight hair.  I chose pink because it matched the pink and black polka dot nail polish I had painted on my nails in the girl’s room at school on Friday.  As I reached for the Aqua net hairspray to stiffen the Billy Idol hair style I had given myself, Anne put on her stonewashed jean jacket that matched her jean pants and I saw Kimmy in the mirror as her black lips tattooed My Guns and Roses poster that was on the wall next to my bed.  After my room had been perfumed with Marlboro cigarettes and Aqua net hairspray, we were finally ready to kick back like grown-ups. 

The three of us stared at my father’s liquor cabinet as we debated about what pretty bottle to choose and what color to drink.  All three of us were wearing gold earrings and braided gold necklaces so we chose the gold colored booze with a beautiful black label.  I grabbed the bottle of Canadian whiskey and we headed down to the baseball fields at John Fitch Elementary School, just as planned.  I believe I fell in love at first sip.  I remember that first swig, how my jaw tensed, and the burn as it went down my throat culminating with the warm explosion as it landed in my belly.  I couldn’t get enough of it.  The effect was immediate; it made me feel good and quieted my mind.  Nothing else in the world mattered but me, in that moment, and so began the chase of a lifetime.

 I remember being in the dugouts of the softball field I had played at on Wednesday evening.  I vaguely recall throwing-up down Danny’s back as he tried to carry me across centerfield, but I don’t remember him dropping me after I puked all over the back of his legs.  He was six feet tall and me, four feet 10 inches.  It must have been an awkward fall because it left grass stains on my favorite blue and white jeans.  The lush green of the fields and the cloudless blue sky meshed together until they went black.  An anonymous person had called my mother to come pick me up.  The next thing I remember is waking up in my bed with echoes pounding in my head.  My mother was only four years older than I when I was born.  Both of my parents were still young and struggled with their own issues with addiction, which made them incapable of providing any form of discipline or reasoning for the decisions I had made.

            That was the beginning of a destructive vortex that would destroy anything that meant something to me.  I had an obsession of the mind that put me on a twenty six year rollercoaster ride, and I eventually flew off its track from a crash that had the potential to kill.

 Insanity can be defined as the act of repeating the same destructive behavior and expecting different results.  Obsession of the mind is greater than willpower.

  My father was an abusive and unpredictable man who was almost always chemically altered.  The passion I had for playing ball was an avenue to forget about what was waiting for me at home.  Every time I came home I felt like I lost a little more of myself until one day, I couldn’t face it anymore.  I was thirteen years old when I swallowed a bottle of Bayer aspirin.  The next thing I remember is lying in Lower Bucks Hospital Emergency Department with a tube down my throat.  I refer to myself as a garbage pail because I would consume anything, even without knowing what it was, to have that warm, fuzzy, calm feeling I experienced with my first drink.  In 10^th grade, I was expelled from high school for drinking in class.  My license was suspended before I even received it.  Shortly after that event, I found myself on a train running away from home.  I briefly lived on the streets of Philadelphia.  I had seen and done things a fifteen year old girl ought never to do.

 By the time I was seventeen, I was living in Florida, working as a shift manager for Friendly’s restaurant and living with three girlfriends.  Impetuously, I displayed a pattern of self-sabotage behavior that never allowed me to stay in one place long, because somewhere in my sick alcoholic mind, I wasn’t worthy of anything good.  I feared people in my life would eventually see through the façade I falsely portrayed and unveil the past and present despair that I was concealing.  In 1995, the mountainous terrain of Pennsylvania, once again called my name. Today, I find it interesting that it was in the Keystone state that I met a man I thought could save me from myself.  We married one year later.

  I found my escape from reality through the use of drugs and alcohol as a young girl.  As I grew up my addiction grew deeper.  Over the years, evidence would compile and validate the concerns many had for my well-being.  The one thing I had been searching for I found in a bottle when I was twelve years old.  I remember while I was in school, I was assigned a counselor who used to tell me I had a beautiful smile and she wanted to help me smile again.
When I was in the second grade my little brother and I lost something we never knew we had.  We were given a new identity. The second most vivid memory of my young life was when I was eight years old.  This morning was just like every other day of the school year.  My brother and I woke up and got ready for school.  We ate a bowl of cheerios for breakfast before leaving our three bedroom home located in a small residential community.  School was no different than the day before except for the quiz I had in religion class.  At the end of the school day, our bus dropped us off at the end of our street just where it had picked us up almost seven hours earlier.  We lived halfway up the street.  As my brother and I walked toward our home, adorned in our tacky green private school uniforms, I noticed something out of the ordinary.  I squinted my eyes and saw red and blue flashing lights in front of our home.  There were cars surrounding my house.  I held my brother’s hand and stopped walking.  I saw my Father in handcuffs.  His hair was messy and there was blood dripping from his nose.  A police officer had him by the arm and pushed his head down to assist him into the backseat of a police car.  My father had been arrested for cooking drugs in our home.  I didn’t know when I would see that man again.  Nor did I care.  What I did know, is that word would travel like wild fire and I would have to put on the ‘tough girl’ act to thwart any taunting from my peers.  Life as I knew it would never be the same.  Not only did we lose the man we called our father that day, for however long that was going to be, but our mother left us emotionally stranded.  All we had was each other.

  My love for alcohol was not only my sole purpose in life, it was an instinctive need for my survival; my solution to this thing called life.  My problem was when the worm was gone, insanity took over because I could not live a sober breath.  I developed two main fears that fueled my desirous need to keep drinking.  I feared that the young girl I was before I had my first drink would reappear and I feared the day I may run out of the only thing in this world that made it ok to be me.

Insanity can be defined as the act of repeating the same destructive behavior and expecting different results.  Obsession of the mind is greater than willpower.

My love for alcohol ran much deeper than my devotion to my family.  I was very loyal to it, but it showed no loyalty in return.  I found myself defending it while paying harsh consequences for loving it.  In the end, the one thing that I loved the most left me with nothing except a loneliness like no other.  To sum it up simply, I was a drug-dealing, pill-popping, adrenaline junky alcoholic whose life was spiraling out of control quicker than I could spiral upward.  I was on this insane merry-go-round ride that was spinning faster and faster out of control until I flew off and landed in the lowest place of my life.

From a suicidal teenager, homeless on the streets- to a wife with a secret- a mother who abandoned her child without ever leaving- to relishing a game of Russian roulette with the undertaker, I found myself at the age of thirty-eight struggling to recognize the woman I saw looking at me through my bedroom mirror on a cold, wintry night in January 2014.  There was a woman sitting on a chair before me, on the dresser was an empty cocktail glass and a needle sticking out of her arm.  As I gazed at my reflection that evening, I realized I had become everything I ever hated in life.  I was the drug-dealing father that my father was.  I was the alcoholic mother that my mother was.  I had done things I swore I would never do.  I put things in my body that I swore I never would.  In that moment in time I was stripped of all human dignity.  I was nothing and I had nothing left to give.

 I was surrounded by friends and family who were about to wash their hands of me while I already washed my hands of God.  I made myself a victim not worth saving.  The insanity was I became content with the idea of living that way, even dying that way.  Then something happened that changed it all.  Something miraculous.  Something called Grace.  I have learned that Grace or forgiveness is not far from any of us.  It is when we stop pushing it away that we can become and do great things.

The greatest single moment in my life happened early in 2014 when the bottle stopped loving me back.  My carelessness put my family in danger.  My husband feared for their lives.  I was given a final ultimatum.  Fifteen years early, my husband and I experienced a miracle when the doctor confirmed we were having a baby.  Faced with the fact that I would lose the two people who meant the most to me was the motivating force that shattered my will to fight.  The bottle beat me.  I raised my hands in defeat.  That willingness, as small as it was, sparked a spectacular chain of events  that marked the beginning of the most powerful journey of my life.  I stopped fighting against the laws of neurochemistry but most importantly, myself.  It was as if I put on a pair of prescription glasses and saw the world clearly for the first time.  There were no longer obstacles preventing me from seeing the truth, from feeling the truth and eventually from living the truth.  

For an undisciplined alcoholic like me, I needed every sip of that survival kit that I discovered in the baseball fields in October 1987.  I needed to experience the heartache and moral degradation of my human existence; a painful existence that continued to pull back the layers of my soul, mind, and emotions to the point where I was raw, naked, and vulnerable enough to accept a power that could satisfy what distilled spirits no longer could.

I now believe, a form of insanity is the act of repeating the same behavior and expecting different results.  I now understand that the obsession of the mind is more powerful than will willpower alone.  I now know Grace is the miracle that restores the spirit to a peaceful state of mind.  Without suffering, Grace is hard to see. 

The words of St. Francis of Assisi continuously sound in my ears- Start by doing what is necessary; then do what is possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible-.  The biggest step is having the willingness to try.  

This love story ended in the gutters of humanity, seeping deeper into the earth with the hope to never be resurrected again.  This love story gave birth to a new life-never imagined, a new dream-never dreamed of, a new world-never lived in and a new love that has no ending.

Early on a brisk Tuesday morning, on the nineteenth day, in the year 2014, I was separated from my family and my vices.  I was broken, vulnerable, completely defeated.  My world as I knew it was over.  Little did I know, that was the day my life began.