Hooked (4 page)

Nothing to Do with Me

Hannah's father often embarrassed her with his overeating and public drunkenness. But growing up she knew that she was normal, and solid, and sane—and that his bad behavior wasn't her fault.

Two different dads

When I was just four or five years old, I asked my mom, “What's wrong with Dad?” He seemed to me to be two different people in one body—as if he had two personalities when everybody else I knew only had one. I think the fact that I picked up on that when I was so young says a lot.

Drinking can often lead to personality and behavioral changes. Someone who is normally friendly can become angry and aggressive after a few drinks. Other drinkers become depressed, while still others become unnaturally happy and euphoric. Researchers believe this is because alcohol prevents the brain from functioning normally.

When my dad
wasn't
drinking, he was generous, caring, funny, and charismatic: a loving person with a good heart. When he
was
drinking, his personality would completely morph. It was like Jekyll and Hyde. This other person—the drunk one—would often say things that were inappropriate, obnoxious, lewd, and offensive. Sometimes, he would sit at the kitchen table and after a few glasses of scotch or wine, he would sort of slump forward and his eyes would droop and he would get all deep, brooding, and philosophical—always in a negative way. He seemed to have a lot of stress in his life. Something was dogging him and he was trying to escape it, or to cope with it internally. I'm not sure I will ever know what it was. After a while, it got so my little sister, Emma, and I would see it coming and we'd roll our eyes and think,
Here we
go again
.

Drunk Dad was angrier than normal Dad too. Once, when I was nine, he got really mad at me. We had a refrigerator with two handles, one for the fridge and one for the freezer. Well, I decided he'd had enough to drink so I took my bicycle lock and locked the two handles together so he couldn't get at the wine. After I did it, I went outside to get away from him. Of course, shortly afterward, my mom came looking for me because Dad was “not happy.” She wasn't kidding. When I got home, he was furious, and shouting … really, really angry. His drunkenness would often make him angry like that, and in between bouts of being angry he would drink, and eat; and drink, and eat; and drink.

Embarrassed by Dad

Because of his overconsumption of alcohol and food, there was one phrase that my dad heard me say often: “Dad, you're embarrassing me!”And it was true. I tried to ignore it most of the time, but when I couldn't ignore it, I simply felt ashamed. He would pass out on the couch while my friends were over. And there were a few times when he actually threw up in public.

Once, my whole family was out to dinner at a nice restaurant and he ate and drank so much that he threw up right at the table. Then, as we were leaving, he threw up again in the parking lot, and the restaurant staff had to hose down the pavement. He kept stumbling around and making a scene. I usually did my best not to take things too seriously, but I sure wasn't laughing then. I remember sitting silently in the backseat with my sister while my mom drove us all home. We were just so mortified that no one said anything.

My mom, the middlewoman

Maybe I idealize my mother or have a tendency to look at her with rose-colored glasses, but honestly, I think she did a really good job of getting in between my dad and me. She did her best to calm him down, but also recognized that I was less than thrilled with the situation. She obviously knew that it wasn't ideal for a child to be sitting at a kitchen table with a father so drunk that his eyes were glazed over. So she always had to walk that line between the two of us, especially because I would sometimes bait my dad and provoke him. So my mom was always doing her best to persuade me to go outside and play rather than irritate Dad.

While I was growing up, my dad always worked and my mom stayed home. That was their deal. I think part of the reason that suited my mom was because, with Dad away so much, she could kind of do her own thing. So, despite his behavior, she was able to have some sense of normalcy, and a routine, and a nice house. Sometimes it felt like our real family consisted of my mom, my little sister, and me. And as soon as Dad came home it felt like we were walking on eggshells—not knowing what his mood would be.

I'm not sure what made my mom stay with my dad for so long. Eventually he left her for another woman, but I don't think my mom ever dreamed of leaving him. You have to be a certain kind of person to say, “I'm not putting up with this.” My mom wasn't that kind of person.

How I coped

Sometimes I would try to call my dad out when he had been drinking and was acting like a jerk. Later, I realized that you can't really have a logical conversation with someone when they're drunk like that.

Talking to an alcoholic while he or she is drunk is inevitably very frustrating and unproductive.
It's virtually impossible to win an argument with a drunk person, and even if you do manage to have a worthwhile conversation, they may not remember it properly the next day.

He'd be slurring his words, and I would make jokes about it to try to get him to realize how ridiculous he sounded. I took comfort in the humor. Something he could never pronounce properly when he was drunk was “key lime pie,” and to this day I only have to say those three words to my sister and we'll both burst out laughing.

As I got older and became more moody, I began to have less and less patience for my dad's behavior. Gradually I entered a really rebellious phase, where I began to clash with my dad even more. After a while, I was doing more than just making jokes about his behavior; I was actually saying to him, “This isn't cool. You can't behave this way. What do you think you're doing?” By the time I was in my teens, I had started to think of his habits as unacceptable rather than just funny and sad.

Not my problem

I think what saved me from becoming too upset about my dad was the fact that I always knew I had nothing to do with his bad behavior. That's huge. I think if you know that what somebody is doing is simply not okay, then you're not as much of a victim. I obviously wished my dad were different. I saw other kids who had nice relationships with their dads and I thought:
Wouldn't it be nice to have
a dad like that? Wouldn't it be nice to have a dad who was
interested in me, and what I'm going through?
But I didn't spend a lot of time in my room crying about it, because I think that's where suffering comes in. I was more like:
Well, this is a less than ideal situation … but I guess
c'est la vie.

I think it would have been hard for me to have a sense of humor about my dad if it weren't for my mom. She did a pretty good job of being the mediator in our family, and she raised my sister and me to be solid people. It's hard not to take things personally unless you feel good about yourself and are okay in your own skin. And I think I owe that to my mom, because she helped me establish what normal was; and I knew I was okay, and normal, and sane.

Losing all control

I think all the drinking numbed my dad to normal feelings and sensations. That would explain why he never realized that he was eating too much. He just never seems to feel full. You or I would eat a turkey dinner and say, “I'm stuffed,” but you'll never hear my dad say that. If he's enjoying the taste of something, he'll keep putting it on his plate until his body simply cannot handle any more food. He eventually throws up, because that's his body's only way to make him stop eating.

Eating and drinking aren't the only ways my dad overindulges, either. Whether it's food, alcohol, or sex, he just wants, wants, wants. He doesn't have the normal reflexes that the rest of us have that make us stop doing something when we've had enough of it. Instead, he keeps going until he's passed out, or throwing up, or his relationships are damaged.

The affair

When I was ten, I had a dream one night that there was a woman hiding in the bathroom of our house and that my mom found her. I woke up sweating and crying, and I guess I must've known that something was going on with my dad. My mom later told us that he was cheating on her—and not for the first time. Like with food and alcohol, he couldn't stop himself from being unfaithful. And as I said, he eventually left my mom for another woman, and that was the point when I just couldn't put up with it anymore. My mom had been tolerating him all these years, and then he leaves her? It was so not okay. I remember swearing at him and telling him I thought he was a liar and a cheater and a jerk. That was another one of those times when, try as I might, I couldn't find anything to laugh about.

Moving on

To this day, my dad hasn't really changed. I still love him and we still spend time together. He takes more of an interest in my life now that I am an adult and he can relate to me, but I've come to accept the fact that he will probably never get better. I now believe that you cannot really expect people to change in the long run, but you can definitely learn from your experiences with them. Because of what I've gone through with my dad, I don't drink, smoke, or do drugs. Neither does my sister. That's not a bad thing.

I also learned a lot growing up with my dad. I learned to work hard and be independent. That's meant that I've always taken my job really seriously and done well at it. And I learned that extremes are dangerous. My dad was so prone to extremes that I quickly realized how desire can become destructive. Living with someone like him helped me understand what balance looks like. It helped me understand the kind of person I wanted to be … and the qualities I wanted to cultivate. I learned that you can burn energy wishing things would change (and they might not), or you can focus on the positive and make the most of your circumstances.

Everything is temporary. One day you will move on and create the life you want for yourself. In the meantime, if it is hard to watch someone behave the way they do, keep in mind that it probably has nothing to do with you at all.

No Reason to Be Ashamed

No one in Pierre's family ever acknowledged his mother's alcoholism. And for a long time, the secrecy and mistrust prevented Pierre from speaking about anything—including the fact that he was gay.

Surrounded by drinking

My mother is American, but my twin brother, Remy, and I grew up in France, where my father is from. We lived there until I was fifteen and my parents divorced. During our time in France, my mother drank pretty steadily. There was this whole community of mothers who stayed home during the day and drank together. My friend Thérèse's mother was also an English-speaker, and an alcoholic. Our two families formed a unit where the drinking started early, with cocktails around eleven a.m., and ended in the evening after dinner. It was a way of life growing up, and my mother certainly wasn't the only one who did it.

How it affected her

My mother's drunkenness became most apparent in the evenings. Her speech would slur and her emotional state would change. Aside from telling us she loved us, my mother was emotionally guarded when she was sober. When she was drunk, her guard would slip. Sometimes she would become affectionate; sometimes she would become mean. If my father was away, she would often have breakdowns and cry. She was not what you would call a happy drunk. All the emotional baggage she managed to evade during the day would sort of catch up with her in the evening after she'd been drinking.

I remember asking my mother when I was quite young why she was so different at night, but I don't think I actually used the word “alcoholic” until I was thirteen or so. Around that time, Thérèse and I both came to the conclusion that our mothers were alcoholics, and we'd compare notes about their drinking habits. We'd say, “Your mother is a better drunk driver than mine is,” or “Your mother is a nicer drunk than mine.”

My mother and Thérèse's mother had a pretty toxic relationship. They were very competitive—partly because they were both in love with my father. Much later, after my parents had split up, my dad and Thérèse's mom ended up together. Long before that, though, our moms used to compare lives and try to one-up each other. And because my mother was so crippled by insecurities and felt like such a failure, she could never win.

Once, after one of these “whose life is better” sessions, Remy and I came home to find our mother in the bathroom crying, saying how her life was worthless and meaningless. We tried to console her as best we could, but we were only ten and we didn't really understand where this was coming from.

Failed by her kids

Sometimes my mother's emotional outbursts had to do with our performance in school. My mother had a very high IQ and held us to high academic standards. But because she was usually drunk in the evenings, she never provided us with much guidance or support.

I remember one semester—around the time that our parents' marriage was first on the rocks—during which Remy and I were not getting good grades. When we brought our report cards home, my mother went into this rage. She said things like: “I've sacrificed my life for you, and this is how you repay me? My life is worthless! I should just throw myself off the balcony.” It went on and on and on, all because we hadn't reached the level of academic success that she expected of us. That really struck the fear of God in us.

When I look back now, I'm pretty sure my mother was never suicidal. Despite the occasional threat, I don't think she ever really considered killing herself. But at the time, we took it as literal truth that we were both terrible failures, that we had let her down so badly that she might do something awful. I felt like I would lose my mother because I hadn't worked hard enough. I felt like my Cs were the reason she was sad. And so I redoubled my efforts, and so did Remy, and we both rose to the top of our class.