And the Winner Is ....

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I saw a new movie last night, “The Spectacular Now”, and I don’t want to turn people off to the movie, it was well-acted and nicely done but it fucking pissed me off! Seething drive home. Mumbling to myself in my sleep. Cranky morning coffee. That pissed off.

It’s from a best-selling book so it wasn’t the filmmakers fault that the story sucked big donkey balls. And the writer got a lot of things right; the codependent young woman played by Shailene Woodley will break your heart, but they perpetrated a cardinal sin in my book –they over-simplified the huge problem of teen-age alcoholism.

I don’t want to give too much away but I probably will so if you’re going to see this movie stop reading here and come back after you’ve seen it. I’d love everyone’s comments on this one for sure.

Their first mistake was that the word alcoholism or alcoholic never occurred. Although it was clear that the main character’s (a young man with an impossibly cute name) boss was aware that he was drunk most of the time he never mentioned treatment. Although the mother had been abandoned by an alcoholic and her son had already crashed their car once, the kid still had a car and seemingly no consequences for his behavior. The first girlfriend left him because he couldn’t make future plans but it was clear she knew he was a drunk and a bad influence on her. She uttered the best line in the movie when she told him she had decided to only do things that were “good for her”. Bravo! But she was a minor character.

The character of Amy – the real love interest- drank with him, drove drunk with him, and enabled him even after he almost got her killed. These are the girls I wish the movie had tried to reach. The fact that many people love alcoholics is not the problem. The problem is that loving one can kill you.

 Hey, I was one of those girls. I would do anything if someone popular and cute wanted to be with me. I forgave everything. I rationalized the most obvious and disturbing behavior. For instance, on one of our first dates my now ex-husband drank four Long Island Ice Teas. FOUR! Red flag, anyone? Anyone?

Did I leave him? Confront him? Not a bit. Instead I rationalized my way into a drunk man’s car. Why not? I had spent my entire childhood driving with a drunk man. My mother never threatened to take a cab or his keys. That wouldn’t have gone over too well. So she dutifully got in the front seat, put us girls in the back and even though Daddy had had several martinis’ at dinner explained to us that he could “hold his liqueur.” 

I don’t think my Mother felt she had a choice. She had no job, no means of support for herself or us. She had no credit cards and her family had all died. Where would she have gone? No one in our idyllic suburb talked about these things. Men drank. Period. It was Mad Men in the little city.

But I did have a choice, so what was my problem? My problem was that I was a raging, untreated, unrecovered co-dependant of the first degree. I had a black belt in denial and a P’hD in justification. I was so desperate to be wanted by someone, to be chosen, that I never walked away.  We children of alcoholic homes are never the center of attention. It is always, always the alcoholic. Toby Rice Drews in the marvelous “Getting Them Sober” series calls them our Tin Gods. Nobody knows how to hold the spotlight like an addict. Nobody. Cute kids didn’t stand a chance.

My mother and father modeled for me an enmeshed marriage; intense, passionate and destructive. They fought to the point of violence and my father left on a regular basis. But he always came back and this is what kept my mother hooked. He needed her. He wanted her. He chose her.

The joke on all of us who felt chosen is that an alcoholic never choses anyone or anything over the booze. It does not happen. By the time I did wake up to my ex’s drinking we were engaged. I had lost two of my best friends who refused to be around him and I had been warned by everyone. One friend told me “I think he’s going to hit you one day and I can’t be around to watch it. Again.” She’d already seen me be emotionally beat up and tossed to the curb too many times. I was self-destructive and it hurt her too much to be around it.

  

So I told him I wouldn’t marry him until he went into rehab. So he did. Wow! Such a feeling of power! This man wanted me so much, loved me so much, he would give up drinking just to be with me. Man, was I CHOSEN!

What I didn’t know was that I had entered into an unspoken contract; he gives up booze and I give up everything else. Our marriage and his sobriety lasted as long as the world revolved around my Tin God. His problems, his desires, his feelings. But when I dared to take my eye off the ball and go to graduate school, the drinking began and now it was all my fault. So he told me. So I believed. So my father told me. So my mother believed. I refused to subjugate my needs to his and that made me a very bad wife and unworthy to be chosen. So he chose someone new. And I chose to take the wake-up call.

My first sponsor in Al-Anon told me that he had loved me as much as he could which was, sadly, not much. She also told me he had only chosen me because I was as sick as he was and when I decided to get better he had to choose someone sicker than me. That made me feel better. A bit.

I went to a divorce seminar at the church I was attending and I’ll never forget a very important thing I learned there; that there are tangible things we lose in a divorce (money, homes, sex) and intangible (status, self-esteem, love) and that the intangibles are the hardest to recover from. You can get more money, a new house, another lover but it takes a long, long time to get over being “un-chosen.”

So back to the movie. They do hint at her need to be chosen in a mean but true thing the alcoholic boy tells her. It was something along the lines of –you would have gone with anyone who noticed you. 

Yup.

 Like a puppy in a pound, I’ll be loyal –and blind –if you will just choose me.