Shades of grey: paternal version

I remember believing as I grew up that whenever my dad started drinking again after a period of sobriety--which happened many times--it proved I was right about his feelings for my mom and my brother and me. He didn't really love us.

I believed this despite the fact that I read, as a teenager, every book I could get my hands on about alcoholism. I knew it was a disease and that everybody in my family was enabling the progression of the disease by protecting my father from the consequences of his drinking. I knew that the things he said when he was drunk weren't necessarily reflective of his true feelings, that the alcohol twisted his thinking. I knew he wasn't entirely responsible, that he was possessed by an inner demon I couldn't understand.

I knew these things in an intellectual sense, but because the evidence around me belied this description of alcoholism, I never bought into it fully. What I saw and heard made clear my father's lack of empathy for and commitment to his family. If he loved us at all, he loved drinking much more.

I'm only now starting to understand that these views of my father--that he had a disease and that he didn't care much about us--aren't mutually exclusive. They are, in fact, two sides of the same coin.

What I'd never realized until I became an alcoholic myself and got to hear the stories of dozens upon dozens of other alcoholics is that the disease changes you in ways that make you progressively less capable of consistently engaging with other people in any meaningful way. I certainly never realized that this twistedness of personality and mind holds true of any active alcoholic at any given moment, whether the person is drunk or sober or somewhere in between.

It's not like you can be a normal, semi-healthy human being between bouts of drinking, in other words. The internal mechanisms in play make that impossible. On a micro level, unless you're drinking at a given moment the brain wants more alcohol, period, so until you deliver you've got a serious distraction from all other matters at hand, no matter how significant. On a macro level, the continued overuse of alcohol and the resultant addiction short-circuit your thinking to such an extent that you can't assess yourself or others accurately, can't recognize the changes taking place in your behavior, and can't fully or consistently notice the people around you, much less take care of them.

So he didn't much care, you see, because his disease made it impossible for him to care. His ability to engage with us varied depending on how much he was drinking in a given period, but at his very best he was a dry drunk who felt a generalized goodwill toward me, a low-key affection, not interest or concern or understanding that I was a kid for whose well-being he was fifty percent responsible. We were part of the ambiance, more or less, and to the extent that we directly or indirectly helped him drink or prevented him from drinking he was prompted to notice us and react accordingly. Everything else was secondary.

Before I skated slip-slidingly into sobriety, I was walking his path. My outlook on other human beings had shifted in tiny increments from one of active engagement to one of avoidance. I went through the motions of being a daughter or sister or friend or girlfriend, but I wasn't really showing up. I had too much to hide, for one thing, and if I wasn't inebriated I was starting to think about getting that way. Without knowing it I'd begun to resent people for not being X enough toward me: attentive, accepting, etc. I'd begun to view most everyone around me, A excepted, as being obstacles to my happiness. I didn't consciously realize that I'd equated happiness with undisturbed, unhassled drinking, but I had.

I think now that in terms of disease process, the difference between my dad and me--so far, I should note, as I'm obviously still an alcoholic--is mainly that I stopped earlier in the course of my alcoholism than he did. (He died during a period when his drinking was on the rise after a time of sobriety; he never recovered in the sense of redefining his point of view about his relationship with alcohol.) And why did I stop when I did? Primarily because I had the (admittedly dubious) benefit of having been his kid. I'd read all those books, after all. I knew the signs, and once I recognized them in myself I had to tell a couple of you what was going on, had to start writing here, had to get honest. I knew where I was headed if I didn't.

It's beyond my imagination to consider what my dad might've been like without his disease. But I do think he would have been a different person, a different parent. It's bizarre, to put it mildly, to recognize that I'd have also turned out to be a different alcoholic--maybe one much more like him than I hope I'll turn out to be. Maybe far worse. Talk about a perverse kind of silver lining. But I'll take what I can get from him. He didn't have all that much to give.