Ten years

I was fifteen when I noticed my dad didn’t order his usual beer with lunch. We sat at the bar—me on one side of him, my brother on the other—in one of the three restaurants on rotation in our small town. Immediately, I said, “You didn’t order a beer,” maybe to be helpful because what if he forgot? Or maybe to show him I was paying attention, he liked that.

“Nope. Too many weekends on the couch not spending time with my kids,” he said proudly, keeping his eyes on the television.

I felt like someone had taken heavy grocery bags from my arms.

We’d never talked about the drinking, but I felt the danger of it: the way his voice changed, the fights with his girlfriends, the din of the TV on low volume the day after while he slept it off. My brother and I would count out pizza coupons from the kitchen drawer to see if we had enough to get a free one so we didn’t have to wake him up. More than once over the years, my grandma had said to me conspiratorially, in her gravelly voice thick with her native Italian tongue, “You know, Laura, your mom left your dad because of the drinking.” I heard the words, but what does a kid do with that? He was God to me; we need our parents to be good.

After lunch that day, we drove to Denver, and my brother and I sat in the car while he went to an AA meeting. Afterward, he drove us to the movies sounding high as a kite on whatever happened in there. This became a new addition to the weekend routine.

I’ve long said my dad likes to talk at you, not to you, and his favorite place to do this was the car. I’d ride shotgun while my brother sat in the back and if Rush Limbaugh’s show wasn’t on we got my dad’s version of one. Once he started going to AA, the sermons included a stream of their aphorisms, or stories of how so-and-so was on death’s door or in prison or disowned by their family but turned their life around. He made friends there and got a much younger girlfriend who moved into his house. A year passed, then another, and I settled into the surprising safety of my dad’s sobriety.

We didn’t talk about it much, but I always noticed when he passed on a drink, and I took a strange pride in him turning down a dessert with alcohol in it, like tiramisu. Every so often, I’d ask him how long it had been and why he stopped so that I could hear it again: too many weekends on the couch not spending time with my kids. Once in a while, he’d share stories from his drinking days, like how he drove nine miles home one night from the bar he owned and couldn’t remember any of it the next day. The stories sounded fantastical, like something from a movie, even as I was surrounded by heavy drinking and had started to toy with it myself.

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Ten years later, I’m sitting in my cubicle in Boston when my desk phone rings. It’s my dad, and he’s got me on speakerphone with his new girlfriend. This has been the norm since they met a few months ago, and I loathe it. He—they—have a surprise, he tells me: they got married!

I’m shocked, angry, gut-punched. I hadn’t met her yet, and the plan was for that to happen when I flew home in a month. I try to sound happy, but my voice cracks. She can’t wait to meet me, she says.

A month later, my brother and I are invited to her house, also now my dad’s house, for dinner. We’re greeted by her dogs and cats and her teenage son—my new stepbrother. My dad seems embarrassed, and I think you should be, but I smile, sit down for dinner at this stranger’s table, and let her pour me a big glass of red. I notice my dad is drinking wine, too. I’m struck with panic but keep my face straight. When I ask my brother about it later in the car, he says, “Oh, yeah, he’s been drinking again since he met her.” I feel like I am freefalling.

The morning I’m flying back to Boston, I meet my dad and her for breakfast. When I arrive, it’s only him at the table; she’s in the bathroom, he tells me. I blurt, “You’re drinking again!” My chest is hot, and I start to cry, though I promised myself I wouldn’t. He looks at me, concerned, and says, “You’re upset. You’ve got splotches on your neck because you’re upset.” I nod, angry and embarrassed. “What is going on!” I say into my hands. After a moment, he starts. “Laura, I had a spiritual problem, not a drinking problem. I went to AA ten years ago to resolve my spiritual problem, and I have. We’ve talked about it a lot and decided this was the case and that I’d see how it feels to drink again. It feels fine, I’m good.”

“Who’s we?” I ask, already knowing.

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Ten years later, my dad’s on a rare visit to Boston for business. I walk to meet him for a drink near Fanuel Hall after work, and we have two glasses of wine at the bar. My husband and I have been separated for a year, and I’m still shaky and unmoored on my child-free nights, which I typically spend out drinking with friends or colleagues until I take a late train home. It seems like freedom, but there’s an undercurrent of danger I continually drown with booze and men and work. On this night, though, I feel like a grown-up: meeting my dad for a drink after my work day, in my smart work clothes, in this city I’ve made my home, at a place I chose because I knew he’d like the wine list. I try to talk to him about my life in a way I imagine some daughters do with their dads—in a way I’d always yearned for—sharing more intimate bits than is custom for us, either because of the wine or because I’m so scared and lonely or both.

As his dinner meeting draws closer, he asks if I want to join them for a drink, though he says I can’t stay for dinner; they have things to discuss. I do, so we walk up Beacon Street to the fancy steak house. He orders us a glass of expensive red while we wait for the guys to show up and another when they’re late. I drink both glasses faster than him, I notice, and when they arrive and we meet, I hear my voice come out louder than usual. I know it’s my cue to leave, but the guys encourage me to stay for a drink, and I accept the invitation before my dad can argue. By the time I finish it and leave, I am very drunk, but believe I hid it well.

Throughout the next day, I cringe when I recall bits from the night: my dad’s face, my loud voice, my hungry drinking. I tell myself it was no big deal, that I’m imagining it. The day passes and my dad travels back to Denver, but Sunday morning, my phone rings.

“I don’t want to do this, but I need to tell you what I saw, Laura,” he says.

“Okay…” I say as my face grows hot.

“You don’t drink like a normal person,” he says, uncomfortably, business-like. I’m not telling you what to do, but you need to know that.”

I can’t get off the phone fast enough, so I say a small, “Okay,” and wait, hoping he doesn’t continue.

It works. He needs this to be over too.

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I used to tell myself that if I hit ten years sober and I wanted to drink again like my dad did, I could; I just had to get there first.

But I hit that milestone last week and, luckily, I don’t.

It wasn’t my dad’s words that got me to stop, but they made a mark. In the early days when I wrestled with the unfairness of it all, I would scream at him in my mind: YOU STOPPED AND STARTED AGAIN! YOU AREN’T NORMAL EITHER! YOU’RE A HYPOCRITE! But this was just one of many punches I’d throw at the air back then.

Recently, someone I was once close to used my sobriety against me—or rather, my addiction. They told me control was my new alcohol, that I wield it to manage my addict brain. My addict brain. Pejorative.

I immediately thought, Thank God I have this much time under my belt. Because those words would have destroyed me had they hit in the early years. Then, of course, I thought, Fuck. You.

My ten year mark passed quietly. One friend left me a congratulations voice message that I didn’t hear until the next day because we were celebrating my mom’s 70th birthday. Several other friends chimed in later that week, which I appreciated but didn’t need. The quiet felt perfect. This is mine.

And that’s how it is, or I guess that is what I want you to know. The big gift of recovery, at least for me, is slowly getting back more of myself: the real self, the dignified self, the self that cannot be told who they are because they already know.

Mom’s birthday. My ten year.

P.S. Next week I’ll be writing about my experience with Hormone Replacement Therapy. That’ll be for paid subscribers only.

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You are reading Love Story, a weekly newsletter about relationships, recovery, and writing from Laura McKowen. Laura is the founder of The Luckiest Club, an international sobriety support community, and the bestselling author of two books, We Are The Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life and Push Off from Here: 9 Essential Truths to Get You Through Sobriety (and Everything Else).

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