undoing
WE WERE SETTLING into our family life. And then we found ourselves unhappy with what we’d settled for.
Richard kept taking promotions, jobs with greater responsibility and longer hours—he wanted to prove himself. He came home tired, his temper sharp with our kindergarten-aged son. I’d taken a terrific job working for the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies and was scrambling to transform their marketing program. For two years we both worked too much and were unable to support each other emotionally. The more he confined me with his expectations, the more I wanted to rebel. He wanted a woman who would come watch his tennis tournament. I wanted to play games at a pub. He wanted me to take care of all matters related to the children’s education. I wanted to take weekends away. I drank, he yelled. I was living in one of the wildest places on earth, yet completely unable to access my own wildness. When I looked around me, I saw athleticism, countless people who excelled at sports I’d never had the resources to learn. In my mind, Richard kept me from becoming who I really wanted to be. I couldn’t yet look at him and see myself reflected there. So I punished my body with alcohol.
Every month or so, I’d stay out dancing at the luxury hotel’s club, sipping wine and sweating it out under the lights. But the booze-fueled exercise wasn’t enough to compensate in a body just over a hundred pounds, and I got drunk fast, somehow never realizing my altered state. After last call one night, I drove a few blocks toward the tidy houses on Sulphur Mountain, where we lived. The road was icy. I veered into a snowbank.
“Fuck!” I screamed, as the car’s front bumper slid into solid ice.
I spun the wheels, but the car only dug in deeper. I wouldn’t leave the car and walk home because I couldn’t face this scene in the morning, under the town’s gaze. In those early hours, I called Richard to rescue me. Still believing that I needed to be rescued by someone else. Scorching shame seared through my body. Richard arrived with a shovel, silent in his fury. I watched him dig out the car. He poured sand under the wheels and expertly maneuvered the vehicle out of the tall bank of frozen snow. I bit the inside of my mouth. There was no way I could promise him I wouldn’t act like a maniac again. I seemed to be incapable of reining in the self that refused to obey rules. We went to sleep pretending we were going to be okay.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he said one night not long afterward, as we cleaned up after dinner.
I’d never heard him surrender.
He sat down at the table, his hands against the sides of his head, his eyes closed. I leaned over to kiss his black, cowlicked crown.
“You need to quit that job,” I said, expert at deflecting and denying what was really at stake.
“And do what?” he asked with a kind of desperate curiosity. It was in his voice; he wanted me to name something that might return us to our former magic.
“Tell me what you’ve always wanted to do,” I said. Richard had been trying to take care of the family for so long that he’d forgotten he could choose to work at something that he loved.
“It’s impossible,” he said.
“Try me.”
“I think I’d like to be a physiotherapist.” He looked shocked to hear himself say the words. “But I can’t. That’s four years of school. How would we take care of the kids?”
But we flourished when we were in motion. In a few weeks, we discovered a two-year physical therapy program at a university in Louisville, Kentucky, where my family lived. My father offered us a house he owned to live in until Richard graduated and found a job. Immigration for my Canadian-born husband and children went smoothly. Richard called the college placement office every week to see if he’d been accepted. He was given the good news that spring, and the following summer he started back to school. Our children were four and eight. We packed up our few things and headed south.
After we settled into our new home, we rolled the first garbage bin to the curb, our son following behind. Joshua looked at the easily sideswiped container and frowned in deep thought.
“Daddy, what about the bears?” Joshua asked.
Until that question, I didn’t realize how fully we had altered our children’s experience. And changed our own frames of reference. America ran on a bootstrap ethos that was difficult to describe, especially to Americans, who didn’t realize the country to the north was governed substantially differently. Richard and I had grown up in la mosaïque culturelle, and now we’d been tossed into the melting pot, assimilating as fast as our thirtysomething minds would allow. I took a job writing press releases for a public relations company. We had our first encounter with the terrible problem of gun violence when a rageful man brandished a gun at our daughter’s preschool. Our children played games that didn’t involve snow. On one of his internships, Richard went to live with Mimoo, my maternal grandmother, in western Kentucky. He did four rotations to physical therapy venues: a hospital rehabilitation, a neurological rehabilitation, a hospital burn unit, and an orthopedic outpatient clinic. He charmed my grandmother, charmed his patients, charmed his teachers, charmed his colleagues. He was passionate about his work and thrived when learning anything. In the summer months, he took a job at the distillery my father managed, charring barrels in warehouses where the temperature reached over one hundred degrees. Richard came home covered in soot, with burns on his arms. We took the kids swimming on hot summer afternoons and wondered at how fast a life could change.
Richard graduated second in his class and was honored with an award for professionalism. My family blew horns and whistles in the audience. He took a job to learn about treating spine injuries from one of his mentors. My husband had found his calling. Every day he leapt out of bed, helped get the kids ready for school, and marveled at how he was able to get patients moving again. He was excited to help people, and he was great at it.
I was happy for Richard, but disconnected from myself. I’d taken a job to help transform a sleepy history museum into a technologically adept science center. This was the kind of work I excelled at. To much of my world, I was a wonderful professional, a good mother, a loving wife. But my close friends and family knew that when liquor entered my body, I became another person. I blacked out when drinking now. Sometimes I blacked out for a few minutes, other times most of a night would go by and I wouldn’t know what had happened. I didn’t know who had shown up, said things, and when I woke the next day, I’d wait for details of my history to arrive from my friends and family. Richard was embarrassed by my behavior. He played sports to cope with his anger, but sometimes it spilled over in insults spit through gritted teeth, in sadness that kept him alone in a dark room, waiting for me.
I was often tired and needy. One morning, I pulled at his coat, asking him not to leave the house we shared with law students, who lived upstairs.
“I have to get to work,” he said.
“Please. Just call in sick,” I begged. We were whisper-yelling at each other, to avoid scaring the children, who were getting ready for school.
“I can’t do that,” he said, ever the responsible one.
My arms went out to him, to hold him back.
“Let go!”
I blocked the door of our bedroom.
He turned and pressed me up against the wall.
“Sonya! I can’t do everything you want!”
I slid down the wall, crumpling into my fears: that I was losing my mind, that I couldn’t really be known by the man I loved.
Living so close to my family of origin was thorny. My parents had divorced, and I was out of touch with my mother. She had left for California to start a new life, and had never been good about wanting contact with other people. I would sometimes call her, to let her know how her grandchildren were doing. But after a while, I grew tired of the responsibility and stopped reaching out. My father was impatient with my boisterous, freethinking son, and dad had a clear preference for ambition, in himself and others. We were reliant on my father’s assistance for two years, something I’d never been willing to take for myself but was willing to accept for the sake of my husband. I secretly wanted to be a writer, but couldn’t give myself permission to do anything other than the big career. I resisted my father’s influence, yet longed for the patriarch’s approval. Barely thirty years old, I didn’t realize that I’d be saner if I lived by my own choices. Contradictory impulses—to belong and to rebel—ran my thinking. While I drank Canadian Mist whiskey, the very brew that had once brought my family to Canada, my mind reasoned that I couldn’t be an alcoholic because my father was a distiller. Insane logic, and a trap.
Two years after graduation, Richard moved farther south, and the kids and I drove down to look for a home a couple of months later. He’d been offered a promotion—director of a clinic in Memphis—and I urged him to take the job. Our worn Corsica pulled up in front of Richard’s downtown apartment, and behind us came B. B. King’s luxury tour bus, with its stately hum, its burgundy shine, its side panel painted with the iconic Lucille, the name of King’s famous Gibson guitar. We thought this was a sign of our good fortune.
In the city of the blues, I drank. I tried to stop drinking. Then I drank again. Big blackouts of drinking. The kind where you forget what you did after the first sip. Our children were in the third and sixth grades. We struggled to understand the city’s history of racial division, its citizens’ apathy, and its socioeconomic disparity, which was so severe that the majority of public school students were eligible for the subsidized food program. I took a demanding job for the city, which was planning to rebuild and rebrand several major historic attractions. In a few years, our son was experimenting with drugs, our daughter was singing her heart out in a girls’ chorus, Richard was managing several clinics, and I was pouring whiskey into a coffee thermos and sipping it between costume changes at the child beauty pageants where Dylan’s troupe of tiny troubadours entertained.
Even the friends I made were—like me—distraught, forlorn, sinking. My friend Jo, whom I’d met at yoga class, became suicidal and threw herself in front of a truck, an event that ended not in death but in brain injury. I stayed around long enough to ensure she made it home to her children after she was released from the hospital, but I couldn’t stand the cheery milquetoast she became in place of the transgressive sprite I had adored.
“He got the wife he always wanted,” I said to Richard, after running into her and her husband at a Thai restaurant, my sadness showing in my pathetic cruelty.
I dragged myself out of bed hung over most mornings, Richard already at work, the children having made their own lunches. Sometimes I’d drive them to school, come home, and sleep another hour. Or I’d go into team meetings at work smelling like alcohol, trying to mask the scent with mints. Unable to quell the alcoholic onslaught, Richard reverted to the domination that had been effective with his four alcoholic stepfathers. He screamed. He bargained. He used his physical power to control.
One day, when we were leaving to go out for dinner, I was in the bedroom getting ready when I heard Joshua mouth off to his father, some mumbled complaint, and then a loud scream, “No!”
Before I could walk around the corner, Richard had thrown the twelve-year-old down to the ground and was holding his arm to the child’s neck. Dylan screamed in the corner. I ran into the den and pushed Richard away from his son.
“Get out. Now,” I said to my husband.
“Mum, make him stop,” Joshua said through his tears. I patted my son’s chest over his heart, convinced that I could change our family’s behavior.
I knew I had to quit drinking, and for four years I had tried to quit, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I’d start by running and lifting weights, by dieting. I went to couples’ therapy, telling Richard he could talk about everything except for my drinking. Then one day a year after the violence with his father, Joshua’s high school principal called me at dinnertime.
“Ma’am, you’d better get ahold of your child quick, because he’s in trouble,” the principal said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“What do I mean? You must know that his grades are sliding! Are you and the father still together?”
“Yes!” I said, wanting to defend my family.
“I’m telling you right now, the kids he’s hanging out with are dangerous. You’d better get on it.”
All I could hear was my father’s authoritarian voice, telling me that I’d screwed up. I drove to the gym and worked out for hours. When I returned, I locked myself in the office and called a colleague, a lovely, calm woman who I knew dealt with an alcoholic in her life.
“I don’t know what to do. I’ve tried everything,” I whispered over the phone.
“Well, you’ve come to the right person. I’m what you call a double winner,” Carrie said.
“What’s that?”
“I’m an alcoholic in recovery married to an alcoholic. Stay where you are. I’m coming to get you.”
She took me to a church basement with a long table lined with candles. Twelve women sat around it, all ready to tell me their stories of how they’d found themselves right where I was. I cried through every one.
At the first twelve-step meeting I went to on my own, I stood at the door in a long coat, with a hat hiding my eyes. A man came to stand beside me. When I finally had the courage to look up, one of my bosses, a museum trustee, looked into my eyes.
“Glad you made it,” he said, nonchalantly.
After I’d been going to meetings for a week, I knew that I was ready to tell Richard that I was quitting drinking. I dropped the kids off at a church-supervised skating program and sat on the floor in the den of our suburban ranch colonial, waiting for him. We’d purchased the home from a decorator and everything about it was prettier than I wanted: heavy floral drapes, blue-painted barn-board walls, curlicue fixtures, custom wood blinds that had to be dusted. The place felt too much for me. I craved something spare and clean, my old Zen practice room, an outdoor waterfall, a mountain cabin.
“Sit beside me,” I said when he walked in, seeing me serious, my hands fluttering like I wanted a cigarette.
“Where are the kids?” Richard asked.
“Freedom Friday,” I said, referring to the church program that would feed our kids dinner and let them roller-skate in the gym, hyped up on Big Red and Swedish Fish. I watched him look down beside my lap and see no tumbler, or even a tea mug disguising its contents.
“Let me get through this. No interrupting. Okay?” I said.
He nodded. Looked at my face. Something clearing there, something returning. He watched my eyes. I was sure that he hadn’t seen them unclouded for a long time.
“I know I’ve tried before and I haven’t been successful but I’m doing something different. I don’t expect you to trust me. I know I have a lot to make up for. But you need to know. I’m an alcoholic. I have to go to a meeting every day. I want to live.”
His throat caught. He man-sobbed, that full-out cry before it’s reined back in, the surprise swallowed.
“What do you need?” he asked.
“I can’t touch the booze. Can you dump it?”
I walked him from room to room, all of my hiding places, pointing at the whiskey bottles in drawers, on shelves, inside boots. I went outside while he dumped them down the sink and put them in a bag. I heard the clank of the bottles in the recycling bin.
We went out to eat burritos, and I told him I was resigning my job, that I couldn’t do it and save my ass at the same time. I looked up at the big and tender man who had been with me since I was a girl. Despite the alcoholism in Richard’s family, or perhaps because of it, he had somehow stayed married to me when I was a ruin of blackouts and bruises.
“I so wanted love that I drank to avoid being myself,” I said.
“I know, sweetheart,” he said.
Two weeks later I told him I was going to take the kids someplace healthier. A place that didn’t have constant reminders of times I’d been drunk. A place where Joshua could get a fresh start too. A place with pristine wilderness, progressive schools, and well-funded libraries.
“We’re not going to make it if we stay here.”
I’d said the same thing in my afternoon meeting, to Joy, a woman with an upswept hairdo, hot-pink nails, and what seemed to be a form of dwarfism, and she’d met me in the parking lot later.
“Sweetie,” she said, “I had an old robe I used to drink in. I burned that damn thing up when I got sober. You just go ahead and listen to yourself. Don’t worry about those sayings about not changing anything the first year.” She pointed to my heart, raising her plump arm nearly straight up. “You trust yourself,” she said.
That night, after we returned home and finished dinner, Richard held me for a long time. “Where are we going to go?” he asked.
I got out my high school atlas. Opened it to the North America page.
“I want to stay with my company and keep my salary, so it has to be the States,” he said.
“What’s the closest place to Canada you’re willing to live?”