It is October at The Small Bow, or as I like to call it, “Maggie Dietz SZN,” thanks to her poem “Zoloft,” one full of lines I quote aloud while I’m walking outside this time of year:

There are a few elderly-mother-caretaking entries this month—very much appreciated, thank you—but also some real haunters that will stick with me. Thank you, everyone; stay safe, sober, sane. —AJD

by The Small Bow Family Orchestra

The resonant trajectory of my whole-ass life right now is a total upheaval of control and a temporary loss of hedonistic pleasure. A bad thing? Not really. A difficult thing? Yes really. Pregnancy means no weed, cold brew, cocktails, roast beef sandwiches, mechanical bull-riding, psychedelics, and no energy to, like, move and stuff. Gestational diabetes means no almost everything else, unless you’re really, really into raw-dogging heaping tablespoons of nut butter off the spoon. Job loss means no fun spending, cute dates before the onslaught of New Life kicks in, constantly having to be “on” in interviews, pretending that yes, that hustle culture bullshit job paying below market is actually exactly what I’ve been looking for, and watching old moronic boss leave right after the layoff “because she just doesn’t feel like working anymore.” Fun!! Good option!! Love that for you, even though it could have saved my job!! 

It all kind of sucks. I’m forcing myself to find meaning and monastic elements of this current trend of being swept away by the trending current and it’s very possible that there is no meaning, that this is just the place where things are at right now. I’m desperately clinging to the potential that there’s something to find at the end of this, aside from a baby and a new job, that makes me feel like I’ve conquered something and not just experienced it. The yawping void tells me, I’m not sure there’s anything there to find. Just void. Just vessel.

Good thing I like nut butter.

It finally happened, my mother died. Two years after I tried to be her caregiver and it went so badly I attempted suicide after five months. I wasn’t told she was on hospice. My aunt and the caregiver daughter my mother adopted five years ago kept my sister and me out of the loop. My sister wants to go to the burial. I won’t go where I’m not wanted. I’m struggling telling people in my life and getting sympathy I don’t deserve. It’s so messy that I can’t bear it but also this sword of Damocles that hung over my head for years is gone. I’m not a good person, there’s plenty of evidence to that effect. Sometimes I just wish I wasn’t so aware of it but that’s what sobriety is for.

I can’t stop crying. I can’t stop crying because I keep thinking about Jane Doe and Cornell. I can’t stop crying because I am Jane Doe and I waffle between wanting to tell my story to burying it deep deep deep within me. Deeper than it already is. I can’t stop crying because the relationship between consent and alcohol abuse are so fucked up. Did I black out or was I slipped something? Can it be consent if I can’t remember. I can’t stop crying because I know if I saw one of my perpetrators today, I would hug him and say “nice to see you.” I can’t stop crying because there is a direct correlation between “grab ’em by the pussy” locker room talk and a “free pussy” Snapchat and yet people still support that fuckwad. I can’t stop crying even though I went to a meeting last night and I made an emergency appointment with my therapist today.    

I continue to struggle with the idea of “good enough” caretaking. I am my 82 year-old, Alzheimer’s-diagnosed mom’s primary caretaker, and like a lot of ACA guys, came to that fellowship about 30 years after the other one (minus the middle letter). So I’m in the process of parenting my senior mom who’s slowly fading out the door, while also processing what a lousy fucking mother she really was growing up. Meanwhile, I’m coming up against my own sense of perfectionism in providing this care, and trying to figure out which piece is me trying to “maximize potential,” and which piece is me trying to deny her Alzheimer’s ultimately winning. Oh, also contemplating divorce, struggling with the concept of monogamy, managing my eating, trying to establish and maintain friendships with other men, and develop my own caseload, and write the god damned dissertation. I vacillate between resenting the dogs for making me get up early in the morning and realizing what a real joy they are to have in my life. They’re sweet and loving, and incredibly needy sometimes. And my selfishness is still very present in my life.

My safe space has felt less so lately due to people with a lot of needs wanting more support than I’m willing/able to give them. It feels like people who want to be “friends” with me are actually attracted to the sense that I will support them, without asking for the same in return, through their outside-of-the-norm struggles. I feel like they are barreling over boundaries to get closer to me as I try to be polite and caring in a shared space. 

After 5 years of carefully negotiating a relationship with my brother (read: walking on eggshells), things really came to a head last week. My 45-year-old sister died 5 years ago, leaving D, her then 9-year-old, parentless. My brother stepped in to be primary caregiver when I was jobless and had just started living with my girlfriend (now wife).

We try to schedule visits with D as much as we can. Pick ups are strange because my brother hides or leaves the house so we never actually see him. I’m pretty sure he’s either drunk, high, or both—but it’s impossible to say what’s going on.

After years of poor communication and strange last minute cancellations, I finally said something. I sculpted a succinct, four sentence message. I called my brother and told him that my intention is to spend time with D. That his lack of communication seems like he may be intentionally keeping me from having a relationship with our niece.

He yelled “I’m not doing this” over and over. “That’s the kind of crazy shit Mom would say.”

I could feel the hot, scalding lava of resentment come up but I didn’t take the bait.  

He said that he “has a lot going on. A lot you don’t know” with a spooky intonation. 

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “But you said you would get back to me on Friday and you didn’t.”

“Oh because you’re so perfect and have never made a mistake,” he said as he hung up on me.

Now all I have is faith that a power greater than myself will step in and guide us all through what happens next.

My mother died in April after a fall in memory care. I’d been waiting (hoping?) for her to die for so long that the actual event felt like the mother of all anticlimaxes. I found a bunch of old letters in her things from when she was 19 and had no idea what she wanted to do with her life. Did she ever extend that grace and understanding to me when I was the same age and in the same boat? No, but now I see that however much she loved me, she wanted me to avoid the same fate so her way to express her love was a level of control most prisons don’t exert. So that’s a bunch of shit to work through in therapy.

My 81 year old father moved in with my husband and me and to say he’s addicted to weed is an understatement. Pot was never my drug of choice, so I’m not tempted but I turned the garage into his “green room” because he’s not doing that in my living room. 

It’s been one hell of an adjustment but even though I have many days where I think “This entire situation would go better with black tar heroin” or “I want my house back,” I’m not drinking or using.

Progress not perfection has become my mantra. Onward.

I love fall, but how is it October already? I spent the summer on a conveyor belt of medical visits, getting only sips and bites—never a full, belly expanding, all-you-can-eat experience of summertime. I missed the goodness of summer. In its place there was debilitating pain in my right shoulder and arm, then loads of fear as that pain invited numbness and tingling to the party before it spread to the left side, just for shits and giggles. My September calendar page holds an unwelcome diagnosis. One naming childhood trauma from fifty years ago as the culprit for my cervical and upper thoracic vertebrae being more vise to nerves than foramen. October’s page hangs heavy with the weight of uncertainty and even more medical appointments. The aperture on the life I know is shrinking along with any certainty that I want to stick around. All of this as the news keeps reminding me of what I learned painfully as a toddler: that this world isn’t a safe place for women and children. I am burning with rage. I’ve got twenty years of recovery and haven’t been tempted by alcohol or drugs but I've been eating ice cream like an unsupervised toddler.

I started a new job a few months ago at an old-fashioned organization that requires us to be there, in-person, four days a week. I’m expected to dress nicely, be punctual, and to let others know of my comings and goings. I’m 45 years old and have never had a job like this before. My inner teenager is shouting in my ear, “It’s not their business when I come and go! Why can’t I wear what I want?” It’s no different to when I was 13 and my mom had to drag me to school.

I’m nine years sober and happily married with a nice, fulfilling life—and yet the urge to blow shit up is ever-present. I miss the mess sometimes. I saw a recent photo of myself and barely recognized the graying man in business casual. Is this me now? What happened to the sexy young guy who chatted women up in bars? He’s long gone. I didn’t like him, but sometimes I miss him. Or maybe I just miss being young.

My built-in forgetter is a selective editor of my memory. My drinking life, when I think about it, consisted of a lot of boredom and misery. It wasn’t wild sexual adventures with thrilling women. It was waking up alone, fully clothed, at 3 a.m. with a half-full tumbler of whiskey on the coffee table and the lights on bright. It was telling everyone I was ok and secretly wishing I’d be struck by a car. I’m glad those days are over. But I wouldn’t mind a little more excitement, you know?

I’m sitting in a 2006 Honda CR-V (Comfortable Runaround Vehicle) outside a Midwest donut franchise in Kansas. It opened at 3 a.m.—too late to call evening, too early to be morning—and saved me from three more hours of dazed rumination.

My October status is the following, all of which are true:

I am doing very well.

I have significant memory loss from two dozen-odd-ECT treatments, and my brain has compensated by telling me I don’t really mind, but I do. I really, really mind.

Every day it hurts to be alive—mostly a numb ache; occasionally disgusting, pathetic, skin-crawling, bitter terror. But wishing I were dead is done (barring psychosis, which my friend reminded me is a caveat for everything).

I will be debt-free for the first time in 13 years within the next two months. That does not make me feel happy, but fuck happiness. Feeling alive is enough right now, with a shitty cup of coffee.

October 6 is my sobriety anniversary. It will be four years this Tuesday. The week leading up to this monumental day feels very heavy and fraught with so many emotions. I catch myself constantly taking crazy deep breaths to chill out my nervous system. I finally went to a Zoom meeting this past week, because I need help. I can only listen to so many sober casts, Buddhist texts and self-help books. I also listened to the 12 and 12 this week. I do really love and identify with AA but living abroad and not speaking the language fluently does put my recovery in a tender place. I love interacting with my community and not having to stay on a surface level in conversations, and this has just been my reality for the past three years. Getting sober then moving away from everything you know has really been a tumultuous experience.

I think almost 4 years in, far away from everything, raising a tween and having a partner, I have learned to work on my boundaries, see the old toxic patterns in my old alcoholic thinking. Really try to be honest with myself. It has been so much work to get to this place. I left social media years ago, my family hasn’t been keeping in touch as much, and a few friends check-in here and there, this leaves a lot of space to be with myself; which I am still trying to look at the positive side. I have time for my kid, reading, making art. Day at a time.

My dad and I stood in silence waiting for an Uber on Friday. In stillness, not anger. It was my second time seeing him in a year and a half. The first time was in a hospital visitors’ room the day before. Both moments are burned in my brain in that way where I know the plastic-edged table we sat at and sounds of the unseasonably warm city street will return as a mental jump scare. (Because of the context of our meeting, not him.) On the phone yesterday he said, “It seems like not drinking’s stuck.”

I found some old journal entries on my laptop from October 2018. I wrote about stringing together my first stretch of sober days, feeling pain again, wanting to not fear the night, starting a new medication, and the first of many relapses. I wasn’t in the rooms but mentioned small steps—running, preparing meals, doing something for someone else, the tiny victory of writing, recovering true pieces of myself, how quickly and slowly a week can move.

October’s my annual round of shadowy days, the time of year where depression hits hardest. My inclination is to sink in it, listen to sad songs, read sad books, watch sad movies. A friend said something to me recently about needing to experience an awful place to know we don’t want to end up back there. For the rest of the month, I’m leaning toward lighter things. Feigning trust until it’s a practice.

It’s getting really fucking loud in my head. I finally got my Dad into assisted living which is a huge relief but a brutal reminder of the stage of his life we’re in now, and two days later my grandmother died. I’m grateful that my mom doesn’t have to shoulder the burden of being the responsible sibling anymore, but I’m scared because that’s what I am for my dad. The responsible one, the one who’s here. I’ve been teetering mentally for about a month and lately, for the first time in 16 years, I want to fucking drink. It’s not just my dad, it’s the story I tell myself about how little I deserve a good life. It’s how much I just don’t want to fucking feel any of this anymore. I’ve seen this movie before—people telling me they’re proud of me and they’re glad I’m taking care of myself while I hide this unshakeable pull towards self destruction to show them how wrong they are because I’m too scared to ask for help. I want to be punished, I want to suffer, I want to be a miserable, petulant child who shakes his fists at god and demands to be told why he is the way that he is. What’s the point of healing when I lost everything I loved? I resent that I have to try so goddamn hard just to not destroy myself. I also know it doesn’t always feel like this, that this too shall pass and what it looks like on the other side is entirely up to me. I know that I’m the only one I can count on to show up for myself and that if I don’t, well, I know what that looks like too.

This is my first check in after reading your emails for the past year as I have worked on the recovery process from addiction to porn and problematic sex outside of my marriage. 

My wife and I are a little over a year out from discovery day of my hidden addiction and infidelity. It has easily been the hardest year of my life, with the typical ebbs and flows you might expect for anyone in a given span of 365 days, but with the lows reaching farther depths than I’ve experienced, and the highs more muted by the ghost of my actions haunting the both of us.

I have struggled especially as my wife has asked for more distance the past few days. We're sleeping in separate beds for the first time since the months after the discovery. It’s the closest I’ve felt to her leaving me and my actions splitting up our family, in which we’re raising a baby boy.

I am scared. That’s it. That’s the main check in. Fear. I am feeling resolved not to let that fear push me into shame spirals, freeze me into inaction, or to push me to relapse. But I have been resolved before and fallen short. But as I look over to my son playing in his play-pen, pushing himself to stand, I feel some semblance of strength.

fin

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