Family

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    [post_date] => 2020-07-16 17:35:36
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    [post_content] => As a child, I viewed his alcoholism as a personal affront; I didn’t realize he was in a lot of silent pain

For most of my life, I thought my dad was kind of an asshole. He was a very angry guy; and by the time I was in high school, he had also started drinking a lot, which didn’t make his fits of rage any better. I thought he was abusive, and that my mother and I were victims. I changed my mind when something similar happened to me. 

I’ve always had fairly bad anxiety, but, throughout my 20s, I was good at managing it in healthy ways. When I turned 30 last year, however, something broke. I found myself downing a bottle of wine every night even though I didn’t even want it, walking to the deli at 4 a.m. to buy beer even though my mind was screaming at me to turn around. I’ve had a much more privileged life than my father, whose childhood was much more difficult than mine, and I don’t carry quite as much anger around, so the consequences were relatively mild. Most of my drinking binges ended with me just falling asleep; the next morning I went to work as usual, but felt tired and depressed. I also often found myself on the receiving end of that mixture of pity, anger, and disgust that I used to direct at him. 

“What is the matter with you?” concerned friends, asked, clearly frustrated. “Why can’t you just get it together?” I stared blankly at the wall. I did know how to explain it. I just couldn’t. 

If someone tried to take the bottle away, I felt a wave of rage unlike anything I’d ever experienced before, as though they were stealing something precious that was so clearly mine. I’d lash out, verbally, then self-isolate. My roommate said that, in those moments, I acted like a “wounded animal in a cage.”  

It had never occurred to me that my father’s drunk rages were reactive rather than intentional. Now I understand what it feels like to see revulsion in someone's eyes—how it can make you feel even lower when you thought you were already at your lowest. 

As a child, I viewed his alcoholism as a personal affront; I didn’t realize he was in a lot of silent pain. One morning when I was 15, I came downstairs to find him sobbing in the living room. Big, heaving sobs. The sight threw me off completely. I had never thought of my father as someone who cried. I sat next to him and asked him what was wrong, thinking someone must have died.

In between sobs, he finally managed to get out, "I don't understand why I don't have any friends. I thought money would make it all go away." 

My father was a Soviet Jew, one who grew up in a room in a communal apartment with peeling wallpaper and a mossy bathtub in the hallway meant to serve five families. He had no father and was raised by an alcoholic mother. When he was a little boy, he got caught under a bridge in the Neva river and almost drowned. He thought that his anxiety could be cured with a middle-class income, middle-sized car and a middle-sized house with a middle-sized garage. But it couldn't. 

I interviewed an alcoholic in recovery a few months ago who said, "No one knows how alone an alcoholic truly is." I get that now. When I'm having one of my episodes, I'm not quite sure what to do. I know I'm supposed to ask for help, but I also know I'm liable to get mean-spirited and verbally aggressive. It seems safer for everyone to self-isolate. I lie in bed and think about how I’ve turned into my father, pushing everyone away and then crying about being alone. 

Thanks to a lot of therapy and yoga and self-care last fall, I managed to start the year off strong and get by OK during quarantine. I was mostly mindful about drinking, but I had my dark days. I’m convinced, at this point, that while alcohol isn’t the solution, it also isn’t the problem. My alcoholism is different from my father’s; I go months on end drinking “normally,” and then I’ll have a self-destructive few days where I drink without eating, a condition colloquially called “drunkorexia.” The real problem for me—as far as I can tell— is wanting to hurt myself and believing that I deserve to be hurt. Drinking on an empty stomach and taking pleasure in throwing it all up is just one of the ways to make that happen. 

I've been getting together with my father's AA group a few times a week since we started reopening. They hold nightly Zoom meetings, but I find the small groups that gather at the beach to be the most helpful. I sit there and listen to them try to convince me, successfully, that you can lead a richer life without alcohol. I sit there and let them tell me, over and over again, that asking for help is not a weakness, but a strength. I don’t tell them that I’m a journalist and that I’ve written hundreds of stories on this very topic, because I know that they aren’t telling all of this to me as much as they are to themselves.

I also just really like them. I’ve never met anyone more compassionate and willing to be vulnerable than alcoholics in recovery; it's like they've already lost everything and have nothing left to lose. It's a testament to the power of a strong support system. I also think there’s nothing more inspiring than watching a bunch of burly Russian men, in their Armani jeans and leather jackets and gold chains, start sentences with phrases like, “I think that my anxiety comes from…”

It always pains me a bit to hear my father say, "One of my friends from AA used to be a surgeon." 

"He used to be a surgeon," he repeats, with gusto. When I hear him say this, I realize just how low he considers himself in society because of his drinking problem. I try to explain to him that alcoholism affects people from all walks of life, that the most intense alcoholism that I've ever encountered has been from people "at the top." Fellow journalists. My friends at Oxford. Anyone I've ever dated in finance. He doesn't really get it. To him, alcohol abuse makes you a degenerate, and that's that. 

But I'm really happy that, for once in his life, he feels like he has real friends. And I hope, for once, that I can be one of them. Because I do believe healing and forgiveness are possible, and I do think that compassion is one of the best tools we have as human beings. I think it’s not that difficult to love and accept someone, with all of their flaws, if you get where they’re coming from. All you really need to do is listen and try to understand. 
    [post_title] => My alcoholism taught me to forgive my father for his own drunken rages
    [post_excerpt] => Raised by an alcoholic father prone to drunken rages, the author thought she was nothing like him. But when she turned 30, she suddenly became a binge drinker. The experience of recognizing her alcoholism and learning compassion at her father's AA meetings helped heal their relationship. 
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    [post_date] => 2020-06-18 20:24:45
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    [post_content] => Father's Day elicits painful and happy memories about a now aged father.

The words that best describe my father all start with the letter “r”: rogue, rapscallion, renegade, rascal.

Also: Rage. I have been scorched many times by his verbal outbursts; for years at a time, I’ve just had to keep my distance, emotionally singed by the last blast. I have wished often for a father who was calm and consistent. Someone for whom I could find the right Father’s Day card.

My father has four children by four women. I’m the oldest, the only child of his first marriage to my mother, an American he met in the south of France and married a few months later in her native New York City. He took her to his hometown, Vancouver, where they had a glamorous life: they opened an art gallery, and she modelled part-time. Later, they moved to London.

The second oldest is a half-sister I’ve never met and someone, for decades, he didn’t even know existed; I’ve spoken to her once by phone. The next oldest, who I know, is ten years my junior, a successful entrepreneur. The youngest, a man 23 years my junior, is the only child of his second marriage. None of us ever shared a home and only the two half-brothers have a relationship. The two not raised by my father resent those who were.

I lived with him from the age of 14 to 19. My parents had divorced, and my mother’s mental illness became overwhelming. I moved into his home with his girlfriend; she was too old to be a sister, too young to be a mother, and a tough cookie who, at 28, didn’t really know what to make of an unhappy 15 year old. He was often far away for a month at a time, filming, leaving two ill-suited young women alone to make it work.

When he was home in those years, though, he made up for it, and gave me a lot of time with him, alone. We skied and played squash and went for long walks in the country. When I was bullied at school, he tried his best to help me. Our Christmases were lavish. We played Scrabble for hours in front of the fire, the cat scrambling our letters as we drank tea and ate chocolate cookies.

This was the mid 1970s. Second-wave feminism was blooming and he never once, then or later, pressured me to be conventionally pretty or to follow the traditional path of marriage and motherhood. I’ve always appreciated that. Being smart, talented and competitive mattered most to him. He raised me, basically, as a boy — to be fearless, intellectually confident, eager to explore the wider world.

The summer I was 15 we drove across Canada together, just the two of us. We slept most often in a tent, once awakened by a farmer looking down on us from his tractor.

That road trip is one of my happiest memories. We drew, took photos and played endless games of 20 Questions as we drove across the tedious prairies. We dipped south into the United States and attended a pow-wow in one of the Dakotas, where a bag of sugar and some meat were left at our tent door, a welcome for everyone there. That’s typical of the best of my father — always curious, always seeking the next adventure.

That’s the part of him, still healthy and living alone at 91 in the countryside, that I still like and admire. Through his travels making documentaries, I glimpsed tantalizing bits of a larger world. He brought me home bits of it: badges from the Tokyo 1964 Olympics, a caribou rug and sealskin gloves from the Arctic, a woven Afghan rifle case. Much as it was difficult being left alone with his girlfriend—later his wife—I knew he loved his work and understood that his long absences were the price we paid for that. His pursuit of adventure and career influenced me profoundly in my choice of career; I became a journalist, digging up my own stories to share.

But those loving teenage years came to an abrupt end when, in my sophomore year of university, he abruptly sold the house and told me, without warning, to find a new place to live; he and his girlfriend were going to live on a boat in Europe. I was on my own for good, with some money from a grandmother but not a dime from him for tuition, books, or living expenses. Long before the internet or cellphones, the only way to contact my father was by poste restante.

That year was disastrous. I slept around, starved for male approval and attention. I was attacked in my ground-floor apartment where I lived alone, at the back of an alley in a dicey neighborhood—a place no attentive or protective father would have allowed. My grades, previously straight As, plummeted. I moved again and again until finally, that summer, I found safe shelter on the top floor of a spacious house on a treelined street in a much nicer neighborhood, in a sorority filled with other women, one of them my best friend.  Life calmed down and took a turn for the better.

That was the summer I started writing for national magazines, which was exciting but also a source of tremendous pressure.

I was running on fumes when my father sent me a ticket to join them on their small boat in France and I mailed a long letter explaining how fragile I was. Attending university full-time, while also freelancing, had been exhausting. I was thrilled to be taken seriously by national magazine editors, but was emotionally raw, barely a few weeks after having been grabbed through my bathroom’s low open window and hit on the head while bathing. The assailant took off and I never reported it.

My father never got the letter—so he had no idea. And he never welcomed weakness and fear.

That visit ended very badly, with a shouting match in a French parking lot at midnight. I was proud of my writing success which, somehow, he found dubious. Why, he raged, would anyone take me, then just turned 20, seriously?

Well, why not?

I had arrived desperately needing a relaxing break but, as usual, I disappointed him for reasons that made no sense to me. He wasn’t paying for university or any of my living costs and I didn’t need him financially. I sure didn’t need him emotionally if this was to be my lot.

For the first time in my life I stood up to him and flew home early.

They came back and re-settled in a small town 1,200 miles away from me, and I tried again, in my mid-20s, another summer vacation visit. They now had a son who was five or six.

There was another explosion of rage at me, and my father flung a heavy glass goblet into a metal sink, shattering it. I didn’t leave that time. Why was he always so angry with me? I rarely spent time with him and his second family, and had become a successful young journalist any parent would normally take pride in.

In the decades since, I’ve been the brunt of his anger —verbal, never physical—too many times. There’s never an apology, just the assumption this is the price of admission to our relationship. He’s had quieter arguments with my husband. After each one, we withdraw for months or years and hope he’ll be civil the next time.

He was wonderful at our wedding in 2011, terrible when I got breast cancer in 2018. He came out to support me at a successful event I organized, elegant in jacket and tie, beaming with pride – then a few years later excoriated me in front of others for a minor mistake.

He was cordial in our most recent conversation, just before his birthday. Relieved, I enjoyed it and wondered how many years we even have left to mend fences for good before it’s too late.

But, let down too many times when I really needed his help or support, I never know what to expect and learned not to rely on him years ago.

I keep trying because he’s my only parent.

Because his own father, a self-made businessman who died before I was born, was apparently very tough—and who knows what he learned to become?

Because I just do.

People wonder why I persist and so do I—how can a woman who considers herself a feminist keep tolerating such abuse?

I don’t have a tidy answer.

I just know that one day I won’t miss his anger—but I will miss the best of him.
    [post_title] => A daughter reflects on a volatile father who brought out her best and hurt her the most
    [post_excerpt] => I have wished often for a father who was calm and consistent. Someone for whom I could find the right Father’s Day card.
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    [post_date] => 2020-05-08 03:51:34
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    [post_content] => Want to stop a conversation cold? Tell someone you haven’t spoken to your mother in a decade. Then tell them you’re her only child.

The annual Mother’s Day frenzy culminates with the actual celebration this Sunday, with a sentimental blizzard of flowers and cards that included, in pre-pandemic times, restaurant tables often filled with happy mothers and daughters celebrating their love for one another.

On social media, there will be endless tributes to mothers who have died, recently or decades ago, still much missed and deeply mourned.

That won’t be me.

My mother died suddenly this year, at 85, sitting in her nursing home armchair watching television—in a city a seven-hour, cross-country international flight from me.

I hadn’t seen her in years nor tried to re-connect. I knew better, even though others repeatedly urged me to, including my father, 50 years divorced from her but lately back in touch.

“You’ll regret it!”

“What if she dies?”

“Just go!”

“You never know…”

But they didn’t know the full story.

Every year I sent her a Christmas card filled with the past year’s news, but never received a reply, not even in 2018, the year of my early-stage breast cancer, surgery and radiation. When she had had a mastectomy decades before, I’d flown from New York to Vancouver to get her back home and re-settled.

A few years ago, she told my best friend, a local who went to visit, to tell me to stay away.

How does one end up so estranged?

More easily than you’d think.

Yet no other relationship carries as much emotional freight as the mother-daughter bond.

The very word, mother, is a verb as well as a noun, implying loving attention, an open heart and arms, a ready ear. A welcoming place to run back to whenever you need comfort and solace.

But that’s just not everyone’s experience.

She left my father when I was seven. I was sent to boarding school, and every summer to camp, my battered blue trunk shuttling between them. I shared rooms for years with four to six other girls, summers in a raw wooden bunk, winters in a brown metal bed.

At school, we were shouted at routinely by ancient housemothers, women who’d been widowed or never married, old enough to be our grandparents, to whom we were nothing more than a name on a checklist and someone to discipline, but never to hug or console.

I saw my mother on weekends and holidays. She did throw great, lavish birthday parties for me, with cakes and sparklers and lots of my pals.

There were adult years when she and I got along well, and even traveled together, with adventures in Fiji, Peru, Costa Rica and Colombia as I flew in to visit her, mid-journey. She had inherited enough money to travel as long as she liked and lived frugally. Later, I visited her home in British Columbia a few times.

But her alcoholism worsened, and her bipolar illness blitzed my life repeatedly, usually without warning. That meant hospitalizations, worldwide, and I learned to dread the inevitable phone call detailing the latest mayhem – when, manic and acting out wildly in public, she landed in foreign jails and hospitals or trashed her rental apartment, sometimes many time zones distant.

At 19, living alone and attending university full-time in downtown Toronto, I had no idea what to do. You really can’t turn to someone in your Chaucer seminar and ask for that kind of help. My father, also away traveling the world with his soon-to-be second wife, showed no interest.

And talking about any of it, rough enough for me to handle privately, felt like telling tales out of school. Who could possibly understand, sympathize or help? She would just keep doing whatever she pleased anyway, consequences be damned.

The worst moment for me was when she ended up in a locked London psychiatric ward. I had just finished the happiest year of my life, on a Paris-based journalism fellowship. Her illness, a trio of frosty English doctors told me, could be inherited, while offering me no advice or comfort. I was a young, ambitious journalist with a growing career, now terrified my mind was potentially as susceptible. In a small, highly competitive industry, I couldn’t risk anyone wondering if I would be next.­­

Her weary friends gave up.

Her three American cousins, living many miles away, fed up with her late-night calls and wild-eyed visits, gave up.

No one really knew what was going on but me.

I had fled her care after a terrifying manic breakdown that occurred when I was 14, when we lived in Mexico. She drove a van carrying me and two others down a major highway with the headlights turned off, ending up crashed in a ditch at midnight in a city we’d never seen before. For two weeks it fell on me to care for a friend who’d just arrived from Canada to visit.

A few weeks later, I returned to Canada and moved in with my father and his girlfriend. I never lived with my mother again.

No one ever discussed her illness with me, or offered me tools to cope with it, even though I knew the name of her psychiatrist. Later in life, I intellectually accepted that mental illness is an illness, but at 14, I was too scared and angry at having been so endangered. Nor was this the first time I’d been subjected to a manic breakdown; she had one when I was 12 when we stayed at a friend’s house. I awoke to find a massive potted plant spread at the bottom of the stairs --- but remember nothing after that. I have some gaps in my memory, likely protective.)

Yet, for decades, like a broken robot, I did keep visiting her, hoping, naively and childishly, for the kind of mother so many others took for granted – healthy, loving, reliable, attentive. Too often, I endured another drunken rage.

So, I too, gave up.

Only in the weeks after her death, that little flickering pilot light of hope for eventual reconciliation finally extinguished, did I realize that I’d won more than I’d lost.

Without her, I’ve created and navigated a successful life, living and working in five cities and three countries. A life filled with loving friends, a strong marriage and a successful writing career.

No one taught me how to dress or apply make-up or cook or any of the skills mothers traditionally pass on to their daughters, let alone how to handle finances, work or relationships. I learned, even as a teenager, to rely on a few others, happy to help me out when needed.

The more I figured stuff out, most of the time successfully, the more self-confidence I gained. I didn’t need a lot of direction or advice.

I learned to challenge authority – or, more crucially – not genuflect to it in the first place. Would my mother disapprove of my choices? She’d never even notice. That itself offered  substantial freedom when I see so many women miserably buckling, sometimes deep into middle age, under the weight of their mothers’ disapproval --- of their bodies, their partners, their work or their parenting.

And I learned to celebrate my own triumphs.

When I graduated university, all of which she’d missed while traveling, she refused to attend my graduation, even in a huge hall with thousands of others, because I’d also invited my father. So, I asked him to stay home; when I called her back, she’d already committed to the graduation of a friend’s daughter instead.

So, friends became my  closest family.

The Christmas Eve my mother threw her gifts around my living room in a drunken rage, I fled the next day to a friend’s home in Pennsylvania, racing from my New York home down the highway to a place I knew for sure --- never having met his parents -- would be calm and kind. As usual, the homes of others were my refuge.

When I married for the second time, a friend stood in as my witness and helped me with  the last-minute primping every bride craves before heading down the aisle. For decades a friend 10 years my senior welcomed me into her home, year after year, whether I was single, divorced, re-married.

The world, I learned, is full of other mothers.

 
    [post_title] => On Mother's Day, I feel no desire to pay tribute to my mother
    [post_excerpt] => The very word, mother, is a verb as well as a noun, implying loving attention, an open heart and arms, a ready ear. A welcoming place to run back to whenever you need comfort and solace. But that’s just not everyone’s experience.
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