I never thought I would become someone who was estranged from their father. Growing up I had an idyllic life. Saturday mornings I would wake up early to help my dad make pancakes, standing on a little blue stepstool because I was too little to reach the counter. Summer evenings would be spent playing catch outside with my brother, my sister, and him. We went on little trips, he taught me how to play checkers and Cops and Robbers, and he tirelessly searched everywhere for my favorite stuffed animal that I had lost. He was a wonderful father, and I was so incredibly lucky to have had him.
But things began to change around middle school. At first, it was little things. Sometimes when he drove, he would cross over the centerline or drift into another lane, and if I asked, he simply said he was showing me what not to do when I learned to drive. He would forget things easily, constantly interrupt conversations, make inappropriate comments, and become spiteful and mean. Without fully realizing why, I began to dread having to be alone with him. If he ever had to take me somewhere, I would arm myself with excuses to have at the ready whenever we left the house together, just in case someone asked. He's hard of hearing, so you'll have to talk slow and loud. My dad's taking new medication and he's still getting used to it. I'm sorry, he's just not feeling very well today. The warning signs were all there, but we were too far into denial to see otherwise.
The moment I realized he was an alcoholic was when I was in tenth grade. It was the Thursday before Thanksgiving and my mom and I were on our way back from my trumpet lesson. We were almost home when we passed a minor car accident on the side of the road. It took us a second to realize that the man struggling to get out of the driver's seat of the black BMW was in fact my father. That was the first time I heard my mom swear. What followed was a blur of my mom trying to make sense of what my dad was saying; of the woman whose car had been hit asking if my grandfather was okay; of my mom asking to smell my dad's breath; of the woman's concern turning to disgust; of me not knowing how my dad—a man who taught driving classes and participated in amateur car races—could have gotten in a car accident; of the police pulling up; of my first time being the focus of people staring as they drove by and not the perpetrator; of my watching my father get into the back of a police car. When my mom and I got home, she kept asking if I was okay, if I wanted her to call my best friend. I listened as she cried on the phone to her siblings and her parents. I couldn't ever remember her crying before then. I went to the basement and watched Grey's Anatomy. I held my cat. I didn't cry.
Life between then and now can be delineated between the rare moments of sobriety and the lengthy periods of drinking. His times of drinking, thank God, were never violent. They would be marked by bitter arguments between him and my mom. He would sit alone in the dark of the living room. His jokes lost their humor and became spiteful and mean. I once went into the garage and heard the sound of bottles clinking as he bent over the trunk of the car. When I went to tell my mom, he followed me in and wouldn't let me be alone with her. At my brother's wedding, he had just fired everyone in the office and I learned that after the fact my mom had enlisted her brother and sister into keeping an eye on him at the reception. He would go weeks if not months without talking to his parents or siblings. Sometimes, though, he would stop, and he and I would have long talks about alcohol and its effect on him and me. Each time he would say he would do better, only for him to come home drunk a few days later.
It stayed that way until my sophomore year of college. I got a call from my mom, in tears, saying he was in a downward spiral. He had two handguns in his possession. The cops had been called due to an incident between him and another coworker whom he was convinced was out to get him. After telling my professors through tears that I had to leave for a family emergency, I flew home in a state of shock. Once again, it was the week before Thanksgiving. Along with my siblings, my mother, and the few close friends my father had left, we held an intervention. We each read letters that we had prepared, and though the points of them were to have an effect on my dad, they had a far greater effect on ourselves. We learned how my dad's drinking had affected us individually, that he had been drinking abusively for upwards of ten years, and that patterns of his disease could be traced back to high school. While all of us held back tears as we read our letters of love and concern and fear and anger, he sat in silence. He seemed to fold in on himself, his hands holding a knee as he stared pointedly at the floor. Sitting across from him, he seemed like a shell of the man I remembered from my childhood. His cheeks were sallow and swollen, and sometimes his fingers trembled. I did not know him anymore, and yet I still loved him. In the end he went to rehab and I went back to school, surprised that I didn't feel more relieved. He came home about a month later and started drinking again soon after. I felt consumed by hopelessness, and each phone call with my mom drove home how lost he was.
This cycle of sobriety and dependence continued until the day my mom and I found him basically unresponsive in his office. After asserting to the emergency room doctors that he was a danger to himself, he was checked into a detox facility in Minneapolis, surrounded by people from all walks of life addicted to all sorts of things, from cocaine to alcohol to heroin to opiates. He came home saying he had hit rock bottom and voluntarily went to a rehab program in New York. I left for a semester abroad in Denmark while he was gone, relieved to not have to say goodbye to him.
Denmark was a breath of fresh air for me. I was away from everything that was painful for me. I was becoming the person I had always envisioned myself being. I was learning and exploring and living. But that all came to a screeching halt about a month in when I got a phone call from my brother. As soon as he said he had bad news I thought my dad was dead, that he had crashed his car on his way home from work or had succumbed to alcohol poisoning and that finally we were free. But it wasn't my dad. It was my aunt, a woman who had been like a second mother to me. She had died, so suddenly. As soon as I heard those words, I clearly remember wishing it had been my dad instead. How come she had to die and he's still alive, wasting everything that was given to him?
Three days later, we kicked my dad out of the house. The cops were called, tears were shed, and he was driven away by his sister. Since then I have seen him once. Since then my parents have gotten divorced. Since then I have wanted to tell people he's dead because the father I knew has long since disappeared from my life. Since then I have found myself beginning to slowly lose any love I have for him.
I feel sorry for him, and each time I hear about something else going wrong for him, my heart aches. I have not cried so much for someone except him. Sometimes the amount I care for him and the amount I want nothing to do with him are physically painful. I struggle to come to terms with the idea that a daughter doesn't want a father in her life. But because of him I am four times more likely to become an alcoholic myself. In fact the odds are in favor of me either becoming an addict or marrying one. I am more likely to end up in an abusive relationship, to develop depression or anxiety disorders. Even now I find myself worrying about ridiculously pointless things or over-planning for what should be spontaneous excursions with friends, and I'm hyperaware of any behavior that could mean someone is drunk. I get irrationally angry when people say they are practically alcoholics because they like to get wasted on the weekends because chances are they do not live in fear everyday that today could be the day they turn to alcohol to get through the motions. And for that I almost hate him.
I still want him to get better. I think about him everyday and hope that today is the day that he realizes his family is more important to him than the burn of whiskey in his throat. Alcoholism is a disease, yes. He did not choose to have it, and I do not blame him for it. What he can choose is to get help, to try to gain control of his disease. But right now he still doesn't believe there is a problem, and until he does, he will not be a part of my life.
Share This Article
