Hooked (8 page)

How it affected me

As the child of an alcoholic, I always wanted my parents to address the problem—but the problem was
them.
And
they
were absolutely out of my control. I couldn't do anything about the fact that my mom was sick and my dad was helpless, and so I've spent the rest of my life feeling afraid of losing control. I'm very concerned about safety, and I don't open up to people very well.

It's hard for me to make connections with people. I'm very suspicious of outsiders, and I constantly feel like I'm about to be let down. When I do make a connection with someone, it's extremely hard for me to let go of him or her. When I was in my late twenties, my mom died of causes related to her years of drinking and bulimia. And it was very hard for me to have any relationships after that. Romantic relationships were especially tough, because I didn't want my emotions to be under someone else's control. But I'm learning that relationships don't have to be like that.

I went through a long period of time when I was very angry. I felt like a victim, and I thought that if my mom had loved me more, she would have stopped being an alcoholic. But a while ago, I came across a box of letters my mom had written to friends and family members over the years. I guess they had been returned to us after she died. They were full of these loving descriptions of the wonderful people that Graeme and I were turning into. And reading them was such a powerful experience for me, because I hadn't known that she thought we were beautiful. But now I know it's true.

Legal, but Not Okay

As an alcoholic, Brendan's mom was never actually breaking any laws or using any illegal substances. It took him a long time to realize that didn't make her actions okay.

My two moms

I often describe my mom as two totally separate people. One is the hardest-working woman I know: going back to grad school at the age of thirty-six, running a support program for teen moms, and leading the social-activist committee at our church. The other is a drunk.

My parents split up when I was six years old, and around that time it became clear to me that my mom had a drinking problem. She would pick me up after school and we would drive to the liquor store. Usually she'd buy one of those big bottles of wine that holds like eight normal glasses; most nights she'd drink the whole thing before she went to bed. But she still got up every morning, took me to school, went to work, and did her job. That really confused me. I think my parents' divorce had more to do with their relationship than her drinking, but the drinking certainly became worse after the split.

Basically, my mom was a textbook functioning alcoholic. She worked hard and always had a job, but after seven p.m. she became a whole different person.

A
functioning alcoholic
is someone who, despite their addiction, is able to lead a largely normal life. They can hold down a job and pay a mortgage, but they cannot prevent themselves from drinking routinely.

When she got drunk, my mom was weirdly happy and disconnected. She would wander around the house and not pay any attention to what I was doing. She'd watch TV, or go into her room and close the door. She never seemed to have much of an appetite, which meant I had to fend for myself if I was hungry. She never asked me about school or wanted to see my report cards. Come to think of it, I don't think my mom has once checked to see whether I've done my homework or what I got on a test. And she certainly never made a habit of talking to me about my feelings—in particular, the fact that I was transgendered.

On my own

Drunk or sober, my mom has always been a very hands-off parent. In her view, as soon as I was old enough to read, I was old enough to keep myself occupied with books and games. She never arranged play dates or sent me to any extracurricular activities. That meant that I spent a lot of my time with adults rather than other kids. I don't think either of my parents has ever really enjoyed kids. I mean, they both loved me, but they worked hard to make me independent from a very young age. Things that other kids' parents did, like make their lunches, never happened in our family. Instead, I learned to cook when I was seven because I was worried that if my mom made dinner while she was drunk, something would catch fire.

I even had to fend for myself when I was sick. One time, shortly after my dad left us, I had a case of pediatric acid reflux so bad I missed a month of the third grade. I had no appetite and was experiencing chest pain all the time. And I have this very vivid memory of my mom being understanding and supportive during the day but then not caring at all at night. One evening I was lying on the couch in our living room, trying to explain to my mom that I was in a lot of pain, and she drunkenly threw a bottle of Pepto-Bismol at my head. I literally had to dodge it. She seemed to think I could just take a spoonful of this stuff and it would make me better. I was scared of her that night. I felt like she had violated the code of conduct that said it was her job to take care of me when I was sick. But alcohol did something to my mom that totally threw that code right out the window.

Being transgendered

We already had our challenges, but things were complicated further by the fact that I was transgendered: I was born in a girl's body, but I was really a boy. The nineties were a funny time for someone like me to grow up, because nobody knew much about being transgendered. Back then, child psychologists didn't really understand gender-bending kids like me. What I really needed was someone to help me sort out my confusion, but instead I had this neglectful mother.

I felt misunderstood. I
was
misunderstood. For a long time, I was scared of social situations, and my mom didn't help. She seemed to believe that my boyish tendencies were something I would grow out of. It wasn't until I was sixteen or so that she finally admitted:
Okay, this is
not temporary. This is the deal.
But once she'd done that, it was like a done deal—nothing worth talking about. Her attitude became:
Of course you're transgendered. What's
to discuss?

Dad to the rescue

Between the ages of six (when my parents broke up) and thirteen, I only saw my dad one afternoon every week. I pretty much hated our get-togethers and didn't want anything to do with him. I felt like he was a deserter and had abandoned me with my mom, whom he knew was an alcoholic. His excuse was that he didn't want to put me through a custody battle. But my parents still get along, so this never made a lot of sense to me, because I'm not sure if there would have
been
a custody battle. I still have conversations with my dad where I say, “How could you do that to me? How could you leave me with her?” So for a long time, I was really mad at him and didn't want to see him, but when I was thirteen my mom said, “All right, you have to spend one night a week with your dad.”

What was weird is that he ended up being helpful. Whereas my mom—in her drunkenness—kind of dismissed my whole experience of being transgendered, my dad sat down with me and listened. We spent many, many hours talking about it and he worked hard to understand it. By the time I was in high school, it was clear to me that my dad was more of an ally than my mom. My mom had made it clear that she wasn't all that interested in what was going on with me. Whether it was school or my being transgendered, she was too preoccupied—or too drunk—to pay attention. I still had to live with her, though.

How I coped

For the longest time, I was sure that my mom's drinking was my fault. I think that was partly because I went to a nice private school and we lived in a nice neighborhood and all the other kids I knew basically had perfect lives. They had two parents. They did nice things like go to ice skating lessons and play soccer. So I already felt like I must be doing something wrong because my single-parent family was so different from theirs. Plus there was the fact that I was transgendered, which also made us different.

Many addicts' children blame themselves for their parents' substance abuse. In the case of alcoholism, some children feel they are driving their parents to drink. In reality, the children of addicts are victims, and their parents' behavior is out of their control.

Above all I was certain that, if I talked to anyone about my mom's drinking, people would find out that we were even more different than we already seemed. So most of the people I grew up with had no idea that my mom was an alcoholic.

I think one of the ways that I dealt with the secret of my mom's drinking was by maintaining total academic control. Even though my mom didn't care how I did in school, it was essential to me that I get perfect grades and impress my teachers. I decided that if I couldn't control other parts of my life, I would control school.

I also took over many household responsibilities, so by the time I was seven I made all of our meals, bought a lot of the groceries, and even did some small repairs to broken fences and leaky faucets. On the one hand that was a burden, but on the other hand I found the responsibility comforting because it was something I could control.

Not breaking any laws

Growing up, I thought a lot about the fact that my mom wasn't doing anything illegal. Also, my mom would often tell me stories about people who were really over the edge. For a while she worked with drug addicts whose children had been taken away from them, so I knew that my situation wasn't as bad as theirs, and I felt like I didn't have all that much to complain about. I also believed that, if I spoke up, someone might take me away from my mom—like those addicts' kids—and no matter how bad things got, I didn't want that. So I thought my mom's drinking was just something that I had to deal with.

To make matters worse, a lot of liquor stores where I grew up were operated by the government, so I sometimes felt as though my mom's drinking was state sanctioned. I figured, if she's buying this booze from a store that's government run, how could it be wrong? On top of that, my mom was always trying to educate me about drugs and crime. She'd ask me questions like:
Where do drug
deals take place?
And then in my head I'd compare that to:
Where do we buy alcohol?
And it's this nice, well-lit store with uniformed employees. So I think my mom sort of used that comparison to make me think that her behavior was somehow okay because it wasn't breaking any rules.

When things got ugly

By the time I was about fifteen, my mom had stopped drinking quite as regularly, partly because I'd confronted her about it once or twice. The drinking still happened, though, and in a way it just became less predictable. I was into acting at that point, and had just come home from a rehearsal one evening to find my mom passed out. Well, I accidentally woke her up and she was so angry that she chucked me against a dresser and tried to strangle me. By this point I was almost bigger than she was, and I was able to take her by the shoulders and lead her back to bed.

I still don't really understand what happened. I guess she was just so drunk that she was acting crazy, but that was an extremely scary moment. As soon as she fell back asleep, I ran to my room and sobbed hysterically for quite a while.

Another time, when I was about sixteen, my mom picked me up from my job at a grocery store near our house. I didn't have my driver's license yet, but she was clearly very drunk, so I had to drive. And I'm thinking,
Great—I got my learner's permit a month ago, I've never
driven at night, and you're hammered!
So there I was, breaking the law because of her, and it just made me so angry.

When we finally got home and I was backing into our driveway, I was so mad that I deliberately backed the car into the side of our house. It was so totally unlike me. I rarely ever confronted my mom about her drinking, but for the next four years we had a huge scratch along the back of our car. It was done in retaliation, on purpose. And what was weird is she never got angry with me for it. She's never once said a word to me about it, or even acknowledged that it happened. It's the sort of thing that could have been repaired, but she never bothered.

Selective memory

Now, on the rare occasion that I find the courage to confront her about these events, my mother claims to have no recollection of them. She doesn't remember the night she tried to strangle me, or the incident with the car. There are a lot of things that she doesn't remember, or chooses to forget. And generally speaking, when I try to confront her about the bad times, there's one set of lines that she uses: “I still took you to museums. You still went to a great private school. You grew up in a church community. You have nothing to complain about.” So her response whenever I try to talk to her about the stuff she's done is always:
Look at you. You're fine. No big deal.

Where I ended up

My mom still drinks. I don't live at home anymore, but sometimes, when I call her in the evening, it's clear that she's plastered. She still only drinks after work, though, so my dad and I basically have an unspoken rule that we only call my mom's house if it's before seven p.m. Now that I'm older, my mom also tries to use me as an excuse to drink. She'll act as though she's buying a big bottle of wine so that we can share it. And meanwhile, she knows full well that I'm never going to have a drink with her.

Like I said, one of the benefits of my mom's drinking is that I did well in school. This was true in university as well. In my last year of university I broke a school record for academic achievement. What was funny is my mom came to my graduation ceremony and everyone was congratulating her and she had no idea what they were talking about; she didn't know why she “must be so proud.” So, to this day, she's out of touch with what's going on in my life. For the most part that's okay, though, because what's going on in my life is pretty good, with or without her acknowledgment. And despite everything she did wrong, it's partly because her drinking forced me to become independent that I've been so successful.