And the Winner Is ....

.

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.

Everything I needed to know about Recovery (and Parenting) I learned from my CAT

My cat is a selfish little beasty. He does what he wants, when he wants and he doesn’t take any shit from no one. And I love him. So there goes that basic untruth –that no one will love you if you’re selfish. I heard that all my life. My cat did not. My cat does not give a shit if you like him or not. Just as long as you fill his bowl.

So much has been written about whether cats or dogs are superior to each other and the truth is, and always has been, that dogs are a tad bit co-dependent and cats are not. The biggest thing I hear from cat-haters (and they say this as though it’s a BAD thing) is “cats are too independent.” Really? That’s a bad thing? So someone or something should be needy for you to love them? What kind of message is that? I’ll tell you what kind –the kind I heard every stinkin’ day in my crazy, alcoholic, mentally-ill household. 

In fact, my mother was so scared my sister and I would have no use for her if we didn’t need her, she never taught us how to take care of ourselves.  The sad truth about my Mom, at least in my case, was that she was probably right. But I was trained to be a dog and although my mother beat the crap out of everyone in the house (including my father) and terrorized us with her rage, I was always too scared to break away. What if I needed her?

My mother was the one who bailed us out –financially. Long into my 30’s,  my mother was still paying the bills I couldn’t pay, helping me finance a house, throwing money at my bad marriage. She thought my last alcoholic husband was leaving me while I was pregnant because he was worried about money. So she paid his car payment and the rent and he took the money and ran.

A lot of people will read this and think what a great and loving Mom she was for helping me all this time but it isn’t true. She had her motives and they weren’t very pure. I know this because I’m a mother now and my motives are never less than murky when it comes to helping my son.

I KNOW, I mean I really, intellectually KNOW, that parenting is about making a person a strong, independent human, capable of doing whatever they want with confidence and self-esteem. That is the goal, right? We turn our dogs slowly into cats. This starts to happen around puberty –the “terrible teens”, when your loving child first refuses to take out the trash just because you asked him to. Or to fetch your glasses. We parents begin to hear things like “what’s in it for me?” and “You want me to do what?”. Also, just like a cat, they are the masters of the non-verbal. They shrug, they roll their eyes. We want to slap them. 

So why don’t I feel that way about my cat? In fact, I love his little independent ways. I love that when he’s had enough attention he lets me know with a cute ½ inch scratch across my arm. He is the master of “I want what I want when I want it and not a second after.” And I love the dickens out of his furry little ass.

But that’s what I expect from a cat. Ahhhh, that’s the key –expectations. I expect my child to love me as much as I love him. And he doesn’t. He can’t. He’s not an adult. And because he’s a boy he won’t be an adult until his 40’s at least. (a little feminazi humor for you all.) And since he can’t love me out of pure intent I will make sure he needs me. Then he’ll never leave me. Because in the end, we don’t want to be left. We don’t want to be alone. (A little side story: I once told my son who was around 14 at the time that I would step in front of a moving train to save his life. He answered “I know Mom, but I wouldn’t. You’re old and have had a life, I’m still young.” That is when I knew my Labrador had become a Siamese.)

 A dog will let you beat him and mistreat him and will still be loyal and loving but a cat shrugs and hides under the couch. Cats are out to get their needs met and if you won’t do it, he’ll saunter off and find someone who will.

Recovery helps us to stop being dogs, loyal to people who don’t deserve our loyalty. It teaches us to stop looking to get our kibble from an empty cupboard and to seek a place where the food dish is over-flowing. It teaches us to say “no, I have had enough” and bare our claws if we’re not taken seriously. Recovery teaches us that we are beautiful and desirable just as we are and we never need to please anyone to be loved.

I’ll end with this old chestnut but it is still true:

We feed and walk and love a dog and it says to itself “You must be God”.

We feed and stroke and love a cat and it says “I must be God.”

Can I get a hearty MEOW!