Hooked (5 page)

Dad didn't help

Although my father wasn't an alcoholic, he
did
drink, and he was certainly very tolerant of my mother's drinking. In fact, he has told me that from the time they first began dating, he knew she was an alcoholic. Despite this, he never discussed her drinking with her.

Instead, he was usually the first to pour her another glass. My father comes from a drinking culture, so his relationship with alcohol is very different from my mother's. In France, most people drink with every meal except breakfast. So I think that contributed to my father's tolerance of my mother's drinking. And despite the fact that it was way beyond normal, nobody spoke about—or even acknowledged—my mother's drinking.

Avoidance and denial are very common problems in the families of addicts. Many addicts' partners and spouses will sometimes go so far as to facilitate ongoing substance abuse, rather than risk confronting or shaming their loved one.

After the divorce

Our parents got divorced when Remy and I were fifteen, and Mom's drinking went from bad to worse. She had signed a prenuptial agreement with my father, which left her with very little. As a result, we were forced to move back in with her family in the United States. My mother's father, also an alcoholic, had passed away years before, and none of her remaining family members drank. This meant that on top of becoming more frequent, my mother's drinking also became more noticeable.

I can't remember a time after we moved back to the States that my mother was coherent beyond seven or eight p.m. On weekends it was even worse: by four p.m. she'd be slurring her speech and passing out on the sofa. That was something we hadn't really witnessed in France. Sunday afternoons in France were spent with my father's clients, so she had to behave herself. But once we moved to the States, she had nothing else to do, so she became increasingly depressed. And my mother drinks to manage her feelings. It doesn't work, but she keeps trying.

A code of silence

Like I said, no one in my family spoke about my mother's drinking. This began with my father in France and continued with my grandmother in the States. Although my grandfather (her husband) was an alcoholic, she never admitted it. In fact, I've even heard her say that he never drank, which is completely delusional. Sure, my grandfather wasn't a complete wreck—he had a job and a social life—but he was undeniably an alcoholic. While he was still alive, my grandmother developed a habit of going to bed early so she wouldn't have to see him drunk. That was her coping mechanism during her marriage, and it later became her way of avoiding my mother's nighttime drunkenness.

I remember my grandmother once asked my brother and me, “Does your mother have another glass of wine after I go to bed?” And it was such a funny thing to ask, because Mom actually got drunk on vodka most of the time, not wine. But I guess that was her way of delicately approaching the subject without really touching it. And that's the closest anyone ever really came to discussing it. Even then, I remember feeling such a rush of shame at the question—as though
I'd
been caught drinking. I felt exposed and red-handed. I didn't perceive it as Grandma's way of trying to help. For her part, my mother was never able to admit that she was drunk. She was always just “very tired.”

Coming out

Despite everything, my mother and I have always spent a lot of time together, and often enjoy each other's company. And yet she was the very last person I told I was gay. I think this is because I had decided that if she didn't have to talk about her drinking, I didn't have to talk about my sexuality. I thought maybe if I didn't bring up her slurred speech and emotional breakdowns, I didn't have to tell her I was attracted to men. And even when I finally did come out to her—because I'd already told everyone else—we hardly talked about it. She didn't have any kind of response at all, really.

It could have been worse, I suppose. When I came out to my father (who was still in France) he clung to the belief that homosexuality was a phase I'd grow out of. And when it became clear it wasn't, our already rocky relationship deteriorated quickly. In a way, though, my mother's silence was equally upsetting, because it was another example of how we never talk about difficult things.

Selective memory

When she couldn't simply avoid talking about something, my mother would often claim to have forgotten it. She would sometimes make irrational demands and then act surprised when I confronted her about them later. While my brother and I were in high school, we never really had a curfew, but one night when I was going out, my mother randomly decided I had to be home at eleven p.m. I was seventeen at the time and it was just absurd. We had a forty-five-minute argument about it, and I was so mad at her. But the next day, when I brought it up, she said, “Oh, I would never have said eleven. I must have meant one o'clock!” And I said, “We talked about it for forty-five minutes!” But she claimed not to remember any of it.

Research shows that heavy alcohol use can damage memory, sometimes permanently. Many people will not fully remember events or conversations that occurred while they were drunk.

How I coped

As a young child, I wasn't very good at coping. I assumed that my mother was drinking because I had done something wrong. When I got to high school and finally understood that my mom was an alcoholic and it wasn't my fault, I started acting out. I sometimes did this academically, probably because I knew that was important to her.

By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, I was very depressed and I let my normally high grades start to slip. I became a terrible procrastinator and couldn't bring myself to finish anything. I think this was partly my way of retaliating for everything, but partly I was just so depressed I couldn't do well even if I tried. Fortunately, when I did perform, I made up for the times when I wasn't performing, so I still managed to graduate at the top of my class.

Learning to talk about it

With time, I learned to cope in more effective ways. And ultimately, I learned to talk about my mother's alcoholism. It took a long time for talking to be helpful, though. At first, I confided in Thérèse. The two of us kept in touch after I left France, but we always used very pointed, hurtful language to talk about our mothers' habits. We called them drunks and other unkind names.

Later, in high school, I spoke with a school therapist about my mother's drinking. And I think that was the first time I talked about it in a way that wasn't as poisonous. But I was definitely still coming from a place of anger. And of course, being gay added a whole other layer of complexity to my teenage years. So it was a very isolating time. The only people I was able to talk to were outsiders, and I could only talk to them in a sarcastic, dismissive way. To this day, even my twin brother and I have never really spoken about my mother's drinking. I think this was because we grew up surrounded by walls of silence, and speaking became threatening to us.

Where it has left me

It's hard for me to look back and say my mother's drinking did “x,” but it continues to be very difficult for me to talk about my feelings. I also live with a terrible fear of people changing. I assume that if someone says anything positive to me, they're either lying or they'll soon change their minds. I can't bring myself to believe nice things, unless they're repeated over and over again … especially when it comes to love and affection.

Emotions also scare me—particularly great displays of emotion like the ones my mother was prone to when she was drunk. I tend to blow ordinary interactions out of proportion and assume that, if someone raises their voice at me, we'll probably never speak again. For a long time, people crying made me very uncomfortable as well, but I'm slowly getting over some of these things.

My brother, Remy, is even worse. To this day, he's never been in a relationship. And as difficult as I find it to talk about my feelings, he's basically completely unable to do so. He has a tough time connecting with other human beings, something directly related, I think, to our experience as kids. My mom is still drinking, and it still upsets me. But now that I'm on my own, it's easier for me to avoid her when she's in really rough shape.

No judgment

About a year ago, I was taking the subway to work and there was a teenager on the platform with his mother. She was visibly very drunk and very poor. His situation was probably even worse than mine growing up, because my mother would never have been intoxicated in the middle of the day like that, and we were never broke. And you could tell that this boy was so embarrassed about the whole thing and that he thought everyone waiting for the subway was judging him.

I so badly wanted to tell him that no one was looking at him with judgment, and that he had no reason to be ashamed. I wanted to tell him that, if anything, people felt only great sympathy for him. I think that's what I missed out on, growing up: someone to tell me that I had nothing to be ashamed of. I wish I'd said something to him. Maybe next time I see something like that, I
will
speak up.

We Were Dealt the Same Hand

When Nicola and her brother, Kevin, were growing up, Kevin was hooked on the prescription painkiller OxyContin. Nicola's not sure why his addiction got so out of control, but she's proud that she turned out different.

Watching over me

My brother was always very overprotective. Our mom and dad got divorced when I was a year and a half old and he was three, and I'm pretty sure that he was trying to shield me from things even then.

We spent most of our time at Mom's, and I think he felt obligated to look out for me because Dad wasn't there. It became more obvious when we were older and he started taking drugs that made him paranoid. I think mostly he wanted to protect me from people like himself. He would worry about the places I went, the boys I dated, the people I hung out with. He would say things like, “Be careful,” “You can never tell if someone's got a knife,” and “Some people are crazy.” It became a joke between my girlfriends and me, because a lot of them had older brothers around my older brother's age, but Kevin outdid them all. In a funny way, he was totally oblivious to it. He'd just say, “You're my sister,” as if it was normal to be that over the top.

How it began

Kevin started drinking when we were still in elementary school, and by the time he was in ninth grade he was smoking cigarettes and pot too. I guess it was cool at the time, and a lot of his friends were doing the same thing. I wasn't dumb, I knew what he was doing. All throughout high school, he was part of the cool crowd—always smoking pot and drinking. We went to a Catholic high school in a small town, so I guess there wasn't much else to do. And the more he drank and smoked and used, the more overprotective he got.

From pot and booze to worse

The pot and the booze were just the beginning. Things got really bad after Kevin started experimenting with other drugs. He and his friends would carry around little folded-up pieces of colorful paper, each with a different drug inside—among them, OxyContin. It was this whole world that I wasn't a part of. For a while it seemed kind of fun and interesting, and I could see why Kevin would want to be a part of it. But I couldn't understand why he was never able to draw the line and acknowledge that his drug use was getting out of hand. He always had to have total control over my life, but he had no control over himself.

Many addicts, despite being unable to control their own dependencies, are very controlling of those around them. This is often a way for addicts to avoid being held accountable for their behavior.

Once, just after I got my driver's license, a friend of mine was having car troubles and I went to pick her up. I was just going to drive her home after the tow truck came to get her car, but Kevin got all crazy. He said to me, “Listen! Don't you get out of that car. You roll your window down and make her come to you. It's not safe to be walking around on the side of the highway.” He was so stressed out about it that I'm pretty sure he followed me in his car to make sure I did what he said.

Hardly ever home

I'm pretty sure Kevin first got Oxy from a guy that my mom was dating at the time. And after he started taking it, he was hardly ever around. If you asked him where he was going, he would just say, “Out.” And when he
was
home, he was always sleeping or cranky. Of all the different drugs he took, nothing compares to the way OxyContin affected him. It turned him into a totally different person. He could sometimes be an asshole even when he wasn't on drugs, but Kevin after he started taking OxyContin was ten times the usual amount of asshole. Out of nowhere, he would yell and throw fits. It was terrible. Terrifying. He was not my brother—he was a monster. When he couldn't manipulate people to get his way, he would become furious with them. The personality switch was as immediate as turning on a lightbulb. He had my mom and me walking on eggshells all the time.

When people abuse OxyContin, they will often experience mood swings and become agitated or aggressive.
This is because OxyContin affects brain chemistry, and can lead to long-term problems regulating emotions.

Whatever it took

Kevin told outrageous lies and did anything and everything to get his hands on drug money. He would steal prescription pads from doctors' offices and fill them out himself, or he would break into cars and sell anything he found inside. Once, he even had a gun in our house. I don't know where he got it, but it sure scared me.

At the time, our mom was thinking of buying a car from one of our neighbors and she went over to his house to talk to him about it. The guy was married, but he tried to kiss her and insinuated that he would give her a good deal for the car if she had sex with him. Mom made the mistake of telling Kevin about this. You should have seen him. “He's done,” Kevin said. “This guy is finished. I'm going to blow his fucking kneecaps out.” We managed to talk him down, but I was always afraid that he would do something really crazy one day.