My dad

My dad got pneumonia and was admitted to the hospital in March. He quickly suffered multiple complications, went into septic shock, and suffered strokes. After being on a ventilator and unconscious for 2 months, the doctors told us it didn't look like he would improve much beyond his comatose state. We came to terms with the idea that our dad was going to die, but then he began to recover unexpectedly. I had spent a month in California meeting with doctors, monitoring his progress, coordinating the dissemination of information on his health to family and friends. I was in a haze, as my brothers and I also coordinated shifting the caseload of his law practice, paying his utility bills and basically doing all the things it takes to run a person's life.

When my dad started to come to, he couldn't talk because he had a tracheostomy. He would grasp the nurses' hands and look at them intently and mouth out "Thank you." He didn't say that to me, although he did kiss my hand. He gained more consciousness and awareness with time. One day I went to visit and a friend of his was in his room, waiting to meet me for coffee. When I walked in, I was arguing with my brother on the phone, who wanted to sell the furniture in my dad's apartment, and give up the lease to save money while my dad recuperated at a rehabilitation center for around 6 months.

My dad was angrily trying to say something to me. I moved closer to read his lips. He mouthed "waiting for you." I said "Who?" And motioned with his head towards his friend who was waiting for me and gave me an exasperated look. I was early to meet the friend, but that's not the point. The point is that you can never do enough for an alcoholic. After all the time and energy I put into caring for him. I sat by his bedside, holding his hand and talking to him while he was unconscious because the doctor said it might help. I brought his CDs from home and played them for him. I told him stories and when I ran out of things to say, I just told him about what flavor of frozen yogurt I would eat when I left the hospital. And when I left to come back to New York, a friend of his asked him if he missed me and he made a talky motion with his hands and rolled his eyes, as if to say that I talked too much.

It was really painful for me when I got home to feel like all my effort was not recognized or appreciated. But it really shouldn't be surprising, because it never was. So many nurses, doctors, friends and associates of my dad told me how lucky he was to have a daughter like me when he was unconscious. And I kept finding myself hoping that they would tell him that when he came to instead of me. But it doesn't matter if they all told him that, it doesn't mean that he would hear it.

I am so grateful that my dad is alive. It means that we have the opportunity to work on our relationship. I know I can recover from all of this pain and damage done to me and my thought processes and feelings without anyone in my family's support. But in order for my relationship with my dad to recover, he would have to recover too. He's only sober right now because he's still in a rehabilitation center and now he has cirrhosis. So, it's exciting that for the first time in my life, my dad is sober. But it's also scary. I am just grateful for the opportunity. However it plays out is not something I control. I can try to have conversations with my father and he can choose to do whatever he wants with that.

Untitled - written on the back of a playbill 2002 (At 20)

smoked a cigarette
a man told me it's 12:22
sitting with my head in my hands
and nothing left to do

i'm waiting for the bus now
it seems i always wait for something
and this is just one day -
another way to wait for you

oh i can talk -
i can tell myself what I want to hear
and I know how to believe it too
but that doesn't change
or preordain
the reality that still surrounds you

now something is hurting
and somewhere i'm sure you know you're hurting too
and that to me is a just a luxury
of people with plenty of clothes,
enough to eat, and a heaping,
steaming portion of tv

so i'll just go (just so you know)
this is how i feel
everything is wasted and
you just may have tasted
the only thing that's real

we never really are returned
all the things we give
if that's the way life goes,
then that's the way i'm forced to live

Now that I'm reading Co-Dependent No More, I see this poem from a different perspective. The last stanza about giving is such a co-de thing - to give and give and give and give and then resent that it never comes back around. This poem was about this guy that I had an on and off thing with in college. He had a girlfriend who went to school out of the area. We used to spend a lot of time together and I hung out with him and his friends - unless the girlfriend came to visit, and then I wouldn't hear from him until she left. In retrospect, I let my feelings and expectations get all tangled up in this guy who firstly, wasn't faithful, and who secondly, called all the shots. If he wanted to see me, I was there. If his girlfriend was around, I disappeared for him and never said anything to him about it when it was my turn again.

I'm trying not to judge my former selves, because I know that's not going to be productive. But sometimes I think of these things and feel disappointed or ashamed at myself for not stepping up more. But I guess it's hard to have boundaries and self respect without being taught it at home or by a community of people who have gone through it. At least I have the latter.

My Me - written 4/19/09 (At 16)

And furthermore
I could be perfectly content
in a cabin, in a cave, in a hole,
on an island, in a bathroom stahl

Away from faces
it is the faces
that will thrust themselves
on top of you
strangling the only thought that
you hold dear:

there is no thought
not a thought in her head,
not a thought in this world
but i can't explain it
of course, no not when
you're around

i can't think about the
absence of thought
because i'm swallowed, submerged
in your world
and that thing to rely on -
is gone.

As though the thread that is me
was somehow braided and
tangled with everyone
else's

And there's no clean way to do it.
Not a nice thing about it.
I want mine back.
Snip.
We'll have to cut, rip
everything
and then I'll have my me

This poem speaks to how I feel a lot of the time around people. In my head I am screaming things I want to say, but I hold them back and then I always feel like nobody really knows me. I guess I've always felt this way.

Untitled - written 7/20/09

wallpaper
a floral design
dainty taste
of stained lace

family portrait
the corners roll up
haunted faces
before we were grown up

hollowed cheeks
absent eyes
do as you're told
so we all donned smiles

just to make sure
just to be certain
the neighbors believe
we're a nice family

so the flash goes off
now quick close the curtain
before they look in
and get a chance to see

Untitled - written 1/20/1997 (At 14)

So much emotion,
so many pleasures,
that i can't feel
because they cancelled
each other out,
and i wanted them
but couldn't take
needed them,
for my sake.

This poem was written when I was 14, but it reminds me of something that happenned when I was in college. I lived in the dorms the freshman year and then sophomore year I signed up to live with 3 other friends in on-campus apartments. There was a tight lottery system because there were far more students than apartments. We got an early pick, but we wanted one of the best apartments on campus, with views of the canyon. When it was our turn to choose, we didn't know if our pick would be taken. The moderator of this whole process announced that it was available and my 3 girl friends started screeching with joy and jumping up and down. I stood there watching them, perplexed. One of my friends exclaimed, "Aren't you excited?" And I said yes, but I'm not sure that I really was. That unabashed, girlish enthusiasm is not something that I expressed as a child, so it certainly doesn't come easily to me as an adult.

I think I protect myself from getting too excited about things because I have a sense that anything good could so easily be taken away. I've always described myself as "chill" or able to go with the flow - no high highs or low lows - just even. Now I'm learning being able to go with the flow isn't always a good thing, especially when the "flow" is unhealthy. So much unlearning to do...

What Love Looks Like

I was out with a few friends tonight in Brooklyn and one of my friends just found out that her boyfriend of about a year cheated on her while she was away. She said that something that has been hard for her to come to terms with in her relationships is not comparing them to her parents' relationship, because they are very much in love. She said she grew up seeing that love was hard work because her parents argued, and worked at things, and supported each other through the bad times. She worries that she will never have a love like they do.

Another friend in this conversation, we'll say Kevin told her that his parents are also very in love and he has the same fear. He told her something his mom told him once when he expressed this fear to her. She said that his love will look different from hers because it will be a different kind of love, but that he has the good fortune of knowing what love looks like because he saw it between them growing up. She told him not to compare his relationships to theirs, but to use what he knows about love to find someone.

I thought it was very sweet that Kevin shared this with my friend, but it also made me very sad to hear two friends discuss their functional families. I envied the open communication Kevin had with his mom and the idea of growing up in a home without a distorted love. I know all families have thier problems and that there is pain in any family or relationship, but I also know that there is a stark contrast between the type of home I grew up in and a home with love and without alcoholism. There was and is love in my family, but it has always been distorted, fleeting, and usually unfulfilling. I am truly happy for my friends that they have that model, just as much as I'm sad for me that I don't. I struggle with love and I have to say that I don't know what it looks like. And that's okay. It's another thing to explore. I'll add it to the list. And it's kind of a relief to think that whatever relationships I've had previous to this were not love. So whatever it is, it can only be better, right?

Your Little Boy - written 7/8/09

For James

You said you took a lot of beatings
when you were young
but you weren't a bad kid

Well I wasn't either
but I took a lot of shit
I believed it when I was told
I was selfish, rude, irresponsible

Now I know
They were calling me
All the things they believed
about themselves
and when they punished me
they were punishing themselves

I asked too many questions
I noticed too much
I used to go on the roof
and cry
until they blamed me
for the leaks

Where did you go
to be alone?
I know you had a place
I can picture you
tears welling in your brown eyes
before falling down your freckled face

I just want to send my little girl
to give that little boy a hug
we would have been fast friends
We could have protected each other
from the world
We were so fragile
so young
If only we'd had each other then
who knows what we would have become

Adolescence - written 9-19-1999

This poem kills me. I wrote it 9-19-99 at 1:10 AM - I've always been a night-person, as my mom called it. Others call it insomnia. I was 17. Here goes:

Adolescence

I have vowed to remember
remember my youth
because forgetting is death
and I owe my children something

I have vowed to remember
bringing outlawed clothing
stuffed in my backpack
and changing in the bathroom
before school

I refuse to forget
the names I was called
in angry moments
by those who conceived me
(how could you berate me?)

Always in my mind
the way you thought you owned me
I had no privacy
I was only an ungrateful tumor -
it was a part of you

I take it all,
remember it.
I owe my children
that much.

Wow. I was 17 and held with me the reality of my childhood and my particularly painful adolescence. And then, despite my vow to myself, I forgot it. Denied it for years. I really feel sometimes like these poems I wrote when I was living at home are direct messages to my adult self. It's so odd. I feel like my younger self has so much to teach me.

Family Roles

Just uncovering some more stuff from my past in thinking about the roles we played as a family. My dad had the starring role as the alcoholic. What's fascinating to me is how that upsets and distorts everyone else around the "star." So my mom was frustrated, angry, negative, stressed and controlling. The oldest child in my family, "Peter," was the so-called perfect child. He was an athlete, went out with pretty girls, and got into a prestigious university. So then the middle child in my family, "John" was a drug addict. And little old me, the youngest was the peacemaker, the scapegoat. Whatever.

My mom was so angry and unhappy about her lot in life that she took it out on me. But why me? I just realized. Peter was far too perfect. How could you take out your anger on someone who was such a perfect child? And John, well he had a very serious problem. How can you take your anger out on someone who is so sick and especially considering that you're worried about said child ALL the time? The range of John's problems ran the gamut from run-ins with the law to running away to expulsions from school to being stabbed and winding up in the ICU. And then there was me. I wasn't a straight-A student and I didn't have a huge problem to compell everyone to take it easy on me either. So I was an easy target. My brothers followed suit in directing blame and anger towards me - the bottom feeder. I was punished far more severely than John for minor infractions.

Going across the street to McDonalds when I said I would be at Taco Bell -grounded 1 week

Failing 8th grade math - grounded the ENTIRE summer and I had to make the class up in summer school. And now that I am recovering, I wonder, how did my parents allow me to fail a class when I was only 13? I shouldn't have been allowed to make that sort of a choice for myself. They had no idea what was going on at school.

Making friends with a few girls in junior high my mom didn't like - banned from seeing them. They were not allowed to my house and I was not allowed to meet up with them outside.

And yet I saw my brother tell far taller tales than which fast food chain he ate at. I saw him get kicked out of schools and skipping classes and he didn't get punished at all. I saw him hanging out with friends who used with him. I grew up with a sense of very personal injustice. I quite literally could not do anything right. And when John did everything wrong, there was no consequence. The phrase "It's not fair" is like my mantra. I know I need to change that. I'm not a victim and I want to break the cycle of being comfortable in relationships with people where I feel undervalued and unjustly blamed.

Anyway, these roles in my family still persist today. John, after going to rehab at 16 and relapsing until he was 25, finally decided to join the army. He spent a year and a half in Iraq and these same dynamics were perpetuated. Everyone was worried sick about John and Peter got his MBA and landed a lucrative finance job. John is now out of the army and going to school on the G.I. bill. When I visit home, everyone is so enamored with Peter's super-success, his travels, his quest to buy a home. And everyone is so relieved that John is alive and well after all the ways it could have turned out. And my mom still takes out her anger on me. It's amazing how the saner you get, the more insanity you see.

My Place - written 9/4/07

Isn't it over yet?
Hasn't the birdie taken the bait?
You said, shut up little girl
impatience is for those who wait

I stomped my foot
and I shook my head
you said, quiet foolish girl
you keep fussing
I'll put you to bed

So I bit my mouth shut
and turned red in the face
now they say, speak up girl
but I already know my place

This poem is interesting to me, because I wasn't in recovery yet in 2007. I'm often surprisingly unaware of what my poems are about, so I bet I didn't even realize it at the time, though it seems so obvious now to be about denial and repressed feelings I grew up with and how it continued to affect me as an adult.

In a Time

I wrote this poem sometime in junior high. I'm always kind of amazed at how wise I seemed as a tween, and how naive I grew with time as denial sunk in deeper and deeper. This poem seems to track my more careless childhood and then identifies its abrupt ending and the onset of isolation, and ends on a note of numbness, which is where I ended up and am just now working to undo. I noticed from going through my junior high and high school poems including this one that I directed a lot of animosity and anger at my friends, blaming them for not identifying with my pain. Looking back, I feel more understanding towards them. They were just tweens and teenagers worried about boys, makeup, and what have you. It wasn't reasonable to expect that they could have supported me in what I was going through living in an alcoholic household. My parents or other adults in my life should have been the ones to recognize the pain I was in and provide support.

Note: I am preserving the formatting and typos of my old poems. I feel as though they were written by another person and it isn't my place to alter them in any way.

In a Time

In a time
the sun always shone
upon my happiness
I ran from nothing
and never cared

In a time
I listened to you
I never wanted to die
Until my life was through

Now I wish for an early ending
To come to me
Take me away from this
And somehow make them see

In a time
All that mattered
was pleasing you
With that hope shattered
Leaving everything blue

In a time
The days were short
My friends were real
Not lying chameleons
But now I can feel

The pain, no gain

When all that hurt was physical
And falling down
had a different meaning
All my thoughts are circling round
And where they stop is void
of feeling

The shallowness of not caring anymore
The waves are crashing a nonexistant shore

Burning It - written 7/19

Burning It

Burning it back to life
and not to numb the pain
it's a different sensation
I'll follow you today

I've been on a warpath
all breastplates and javelins
like some sort of viking
but nothing ever really happens

Warpaint smears my face
and drips into my eyes
planning top secret sneak attacks
the greatest enemy is compromise

so i guess you could say
it's not working out
it's something i have to admit
so if we're gonna do this your way
I'll need a little time
and a lot of gentle encouragement

Chaos Living - from the Swarmite

I love this post. I'm the child of an alcoholic, but I've never had problems with addiction. But the more I read about addict behavior, the more I see myself in the descriptions. Even though I never got into any substances on a prolonged basis, I have all the emotional characteristics of addicts. I completely relate to this post about living chaotically. When I moved into my first apartment in college, my roommates must have thought I was crazy. I didn't unpack for months, I collected glasses from the kitchen in my room, left my stuff everywhere. I literally didn't know how to take care of myself. It still crops up and the key, as the Swarmite says, is confronting it. So true. So hard to do. But it feels so good when you do. Check it out: Chaos Living

Repressed Anger

One of the things that really hurt and surprised me as I began to go through the recovery process - well first a word on recovery. So I'm new to all this stuff and am just now embracing the word "recover" at all, and here's my understanding of it so far.

First, I was open to learning about Adult Children of Alcoholics and curious about the idea that growing up in the kind of home that I did could have had a lasting effect on me today in relationships, work, and life in general. Then, I educated myself through books, websites, and after I got the nerve up - Al-Anon meetings. As I educated myself, I began to remember things and put them into a framework of things that families of alcoholics do and feel. I was able to look at my memories in a new way and think, "That was my mom in denial." Or... "That was my dad and his alcoholism demanding perfection from me." It was really liberating to be able to understand so many interactions by thinking of them from an educated viewpoint instead of from the viewpoint of a little girl who had no idea why these people who were supposed to love and support her were always so angry.

And then I started to feel really angry and sorry for myself. Most of my anger was targeted at my mom, which was weird to me, because she wasn't the alcoholic. But, since we now have what I would have previously described as a close relationship, I had blocked out a lot of my memories of her and the hurtful way she treated me. My dad's problems were more obvious to me, as was my anger toward him. I was angry at him most of my life, but as I've gotten older, I've felt more protective and sympathetic toward him, so maybe round 2 of repressed anger will be for him. We'll see. As these memories came back to me - sometimes hazily and sometimes in razor sharp flashes, I remembered how unavailable my mom was to me and how much it hurt growing up.

My dad was an alcoholic and the younger of my 2 older brothers, "John" was a drug addict by the age of 13. Clearly, my mom had her plate full, and around the time they sent John off to Hazelden in Minnesota for rehab, my mom decided to leave my dad. My mom told me recently that she started going to Al-Anon meetings around 1990 and eventually left my dad in 1996, between the years I was in 8th and 9th grades. Needless to say, this was a tumultuous time at home for everyone.

What really angered me though, was that my mom sought help in a fellowship and got herself out of a toxic relationship, but I feel that she left me behind. I split time between my mom and dad, and after my dad got physically violent with me one day, I stayed with her for most of the time from when I was around 16 on. So, it's not that she left me behind physically. But, she got help for herself, and she got John help through counseling, expensive rehab programs, etc. and it felt like since I didn't have an urgent diagnosis, I didn't get anything. It was as though by removing herself from the situation, she solved all the problems, but that didn't do anything for me and my relationship with my father.

She never offered to get me a therapist or bought me a book about alcoholism or even really sat down to talk to me about how I felt about everything that was going on. I know she mentioned Alateen to me and asked if I wanted to go, but I was so lost inside myself that I didn't have any idea what I needed and I just told her that I didn't have a drinking problem - dad did. I know I was stubborn as a teenager and she told me so many times herself. But now looking back on it, I didn't accept things that she offered because I harbored a lot of resentment and pain. I wish she had tried more, pushed more, because now I'm 27 and I've never dealt with any of this and I'm learning now that it doesn't go away on its own. I was the scapegoat of the family - more on that later. But basically my parents blamed many little things on me instead of accepting responsibility for the elephants in the room.

As I thought more about my interactions with my mom growing up, I couldn't remember a single positive thing that she had told me from the 6th grade on. She said I dressed like an orphan (grunge was in), I was an embarassment to the family, my friends were rude, my room was dark and messy, I was irresponsible (got that one a lot), I didn't put on makeup correctly, I was selfish, etc. The same messages came from my dad too, but I had forgotten how much my mom played into the negativity. I'm not as angry now as I was when I first started having these memories, but it still brings tears to my eyes as I write this.

Ex-Files

So I traded some e-mails with my ex and he explained his negative, nasty behavior during the end of our relationship (and a time when my dad was critically ill) by saying that he was sorry for it and that there was no excuse, but that he treated me that way for "many reasons" which included him feeling that I was being malicious or vindictive towards him.

If you're an ACoA, then you know how easily people can flip your feelings and understandings on their heads. Partly, I think this is because we were often told the way we felt was wrong. Another reason I think is that things were never as they seemed at home. There were secrets the family kept from the outside as well as secrets between members of the family. I found out after my parents divorced that my mom had been married before marrying my dad. My oldest brother got in trouble for selling weed from the public pool he worked at in high school, and I didn't know what he had done until years later. I remember that period of time because my parents were upset and they had many top secret meetings with my brother. The atmosphere was tense and no one told me what was going on. I came to expect that there was more going on than I was aware of in situations and relationships.

So, when my ex said that I was malicious and vindictive, I tried the accusation on to see if it fit. Did I engage in unhealthy behavior with him? Yes. Did I argue and yell and participate in a negative, co-dependent relationship? Sure. But malicious and vindictive are words used to describe a person whose sole motivation is to hurt another. And that certainly does not describe me or my actions towards him. And as long as that's how he perceives me, then I don't need to have any type of contact with him. Why would I want to keep someone in my life who sees me so unclearly?

So, I told him as much. I said that if he wanted to be "friends" or keep in contact, that he would need to give me an unconditional apology that assumes responsibility for the way he treated me instead of passing it to me. So, he wrote back and said that he apologized wholeheartedly for his "behavior" and that I am a kind, loving, noble person who never deserved it. What?! How did he change his tune from one day to the next? Manipulation, my friends. Oh, okay so the whole blame you for everything tack isn't sticking? Well how about groveling and complimenting you? Will that work? And how about him apologizing for his "behavior." What does that mean? That means I don't know what I did wrong, but I have another motive so I'll give a blanket apology and hope that covers it. This is what manipulators do. They don't explain their real motives. Instead they interact with others in the way they see best to achieve a desired effect. So, it makes you crazy trying to figure them out because they don't state what they really want. Yeah, I definitely don't need that in my life right now. I haven't even responded to his last e-mail in which I was exhalted on high. No time, energy, or space for this in my life.

Repetition of a Dream

Here's a poem from a book of poems I wrote in junior high called "Repetition of a Dream"
Repetition of a Dream

I swim through a pool of deceit
And sleep in a bed of regret
The ground I walk on withers my feet
Before they have a chance to get wet

I stand on concrete mixed with falsehood
And run on asphalt based on a taunt
If you had the chance to do what you should,
Would you ignore it to do what you want?

I wish on stars that will soon decay
I've wished on stars that were long dead
Everything I have to say
Has somehow already been said

The line "The ground I walk on withers my feet/Before they have a chance to get wet" just kills me. It's just so sad to me now to think of a girl coming of age, who hasn't gotten her feet wet yet and they're already withered. To me, this poem refers to the idea that in an alcoholic family, nothing is as it seems. It's like a house of mirrors. The concrete - the most solid, safe substance for humans is mixed with falsehood in the poem. And the asphalt, another substance strong enough to support our weight is based on a taunt. It's like everywhere I tried to go and stand on as a person couldn't support me, or couldn't be trusted. And then at the end of the poem I just seem resigned. I don't know if I'll ever be able to read these old poems of mine without feeling this sadness.

Adult Children of Alcoholics Bill of Rights

I love this... from Realistic Recovery


Adult Children of Alcholics Bill of Rights

Moles

So, my ex-boyfriend has been e-mailing me lately. But, first a word on the ex... After moving in together toward the end of '08, he became increasingly disconnected and when he passed out drunk on the floor for the second time in as many months, I literally started packing. I couldn't believe that I was back to where I started as a child - watching a full-grown man getting drunk and feeling like I needed to do something about it to help him take care of himself. The first time he passed out on the floor (in the hallway in front of the door to the bedroom), I woke him up and helped him to bed. The second time I left him there. I worried all night laying in our bed that he would vomit and choke on it and die and then his mom would be so pissed at me and on and on, but ultimately resisted the urge to go wake him up from his stupor and get him to bed. I was intent that this was not going to be my lot in life. My lot in life is not to be the caretaker of these men.

As a child, I couldn't wait to leave home. Where I lived in suburban Sacramento, you needed a car to get anywhere. When I was 12, I asked my mom to get me a bus pass just so I would be able to get around and get out of the house without depending on anyone. She said no. Literally the day of my 16th birthday, I was at the DMV taking my driving test. (I failed the first time). And when I left home for college, I never went back longer than a few weeks for the holidays, and even then, I always found a temp job to keep me occupied. And when I graduated college, a week later I moved to New York and have been here for the last 5 years. So I'll be damned if I did all that just so that it would be physically impossible to take care of a man who it seemed so desperately needed taking care of only to re-enact the very situation I was running from here in Brooklyn.

And the week I was supposed to move into my new place was when I got a call from my brother saying that dad was in the hospital. So I was in California for a month, grieving the imagined loss of my father, because the doctors basically told us after a month that he wasn't getting any better and at any point if we made the call, they would "discontinue care." We were planning for the funeral, going through my dad's house when he started to recover and luckily, has continued to do so. That experience brought up all these old issues with my dad and family and when I started reading about ACoAs and attending meetings, I started grieving the loss of my childhood - don't think I've finished that one yet.

And now it's July and I haven't even had the time or ability or whatever to grieve the loss of this relationship and deal with all that. And I'm just so tired of grieving. This is like that carnival game where the moles pop up and each time you smack one down, another one pops up. So here goes... the thing that hurt me the most about our break-up was not the actual break-up or the reasons for it, but the aftermath. We were fighting and accusing each other of all kinds of things when I was getting ready to move out, but when my dad got sick, I thought that that would hit some sort of pause button and that my ex would put everything that was going on aside because of what I was going through. It suddenly didn't seem so important to me. But when I told him I couldn't move out as planned because I was going to California to be with my family, he responded by saying that I would have to help him out with the rent if I stayed any longer. The night before I left, he was aggressive towards me, instigating a fight, and I just didn't have it in me to respond, I was so upset. I literally said nothing as he continued to come at me with various accusations and snide comments. I cried myself to sleep and on the way to the airport the next morning he sent me a text asking me the name of the hospital where my dad was. No apology. No explanation. I didn't respond. He tried to call a few times while I was in California and stopped when I didn't respond.

When I got back and actually did move out, he was cruel, insulting me in e-mails and threatening not to return my deposit. It was ugly and at the point in my life where I was the most vulnerable, weak and broken. I was beyond disappointed in him. Breaking up is one thing but being human is another. I was mad at him almost as mad as I was at myself. How could I have been in a relationship with someone and invested so much into it, only to find out in the end not just that he couldn't "be there" for me when I was going through some shit, but that he couldn't even be civil.

So, then after all that without any further communication between us, he began sending me friendly e-mails in the last couple of weeks about events going on in Brooklyn that I might like or a video of some little girl on YouTube that allegedly looks like me. And I'm just like, what? So I was marinating on how to respond to this newfound goodwill he apparently has towards me, and so I e-mailed him and asked him what I was wondering. I said, what are your expectations of our relationship now that we aren't together? Because initially you were negative and insulting and now you're acting like we're friends. So I need some clarity on what your expectations are so we can discuss it. And I turned it over before I sent it because I wasn't really sure what I was going to get back, but I decided that I don't want him to have the power to reach out to me when he's thinking of me if I haven't agreed that that's how I want our relationship to be.

He actually wrote a pretty honest response. So you never know. I was really prepared for the worst. But I'm learning that people can surprise you when you put your real intentions out there. He said he thinks about me a lot and that he never let anyone so close to him before, and that he's had trouble just writing me off despite his best efforts. He said he would like to be friends, especially considering the fact that I have maintained a relationship with his 8-year-old sister with his consent. (I'm looking around my room to see if the timekeeper is going to call time on me yet). So, I feel that if we are to have a relationship at all, that there are some things we need to talk about and deal with. But I'm not sure I do want to have a relationship with him at all. So I just wrote him back to say I was going to think about it. I guess I have a new issue to marinate on. These damn moles.

Poem from an old girl

I've been writing a lot ever since my dad got really sick and was hospitalized in spring. I had all these feelings I didn't know what to do with (again) and started writing poems and a novel. I wrote this poem "Rocking Chair" on 6/1/09 shortly after the life-changing revelation: I have issues?!

Rocking Chair

haven't you heard it?
the what?
the girl
she talks she whispers
what does she say?
no one knows
she's too afraid

that girl
she sits
peering from behind her eyes
curled up in a rocking chair
holding herself
hugging herself
willing her lips to smile

it's a sad story, really
she's been sitting there for years
trying to rock herself to sleep
trying to rock away the tears

Poem from a little girl

The way I dealt with the isolation of living in an alcoholic family was through writing. It has always been a subconcsious exercise for me. Sometimes I thought I was just writing nonsensical words, but when I would go back to read what I had written, I'd realize I was referring to a specific event or person that I wasn't aware of as I wrote the piece.

After reading Adult Children of Alcoholics, I went back through my books of poems from when I was a living at home. I feel enormous gratitude for the gift of these poetry books. If photographs are a snapshot of images, writing is a snapshot of feelings. One night when I first started realizing how much my ACoA issues were affecting me, I poured a glass of wine, got a box of tissue, and sat on the couch reading through my childhood journals. I sobbed spastically, desperately wanting to reach out to the little girl that wrote these poems, give her a hug, hold her, and tell her she wasn't alone and that I love her. I carry that little girl around with me, so I keep trying to reach her to give her my message. I wrote this poem "Pull Me Down" sometime in junior high:

Pull Me Down

Blurred vision
distracts my thoughts
The page in front of me
Blurred with ink blots
Tears slip
And then they smear
All that's left in me is fear
Drunk with hate
You swallow more
Viciously pointing out
What you used to ignore
Calling me
What you know you are
With that in my soul
I can't fly far

I'm surprised at how clearly I seemed to see things when I was younger, and then after I moved out of the house, I didn't want to look at all this stuff anymore. I went to school in San Diego because my parents said I had to go to school in state if I wanted their help. So I went as far away as I could get from Sacramento and still stay in California and in the country. I pretended up until this year that none of my past experiences living in a dysfunctional home had a lasting effect on me. When I go back and read what I wrote at the time, I admire how in tune I was with my feelings and about what was going on around me and I wonder when I lost it...

Intro

Where to begin? From the beginning? Oh, god, that would take far too long. Okay, let's start from the beginning of this year. I had moved in with my boyfriend of about a year and as that relationship quickly deteriorated, I found myself looking for places again by March. Looking for apartments in New York is hellish. I'm sure it sucks anywhere in the world, but New York realtors are a particular breed that magically turn hallway closets into "1/2 bedrooms".

Anyway, that's when shit really went down. On March 23rd, my dad was hospitalized for pneumonia, but then suffered multiple complications and ended up in the ICU on a ventilator and unconscious for about 2 months. I went back to California for a month to be there through this time. The doctors gave us a very grim prognosis for my dad, saying that he would probably never be able to live on his own again, if he survived at all. Thinking and preparing for the thought of my dad dying brought up a lot of issues, memories, and conflict. My dad is an alcoholic and was drinking actively to the point of his hospitalization. I was in close contact with my mom and 2 brothers who all live out West. Being around my family again and trying to work together on issues around my dad's affairs was difficult and painful.

When I returned to New York, after my dad started to recover (thankfully), I was having a very hard time living my life here because of conflicts with other members of my family and because of the pressure and concern for my dad's health. A friend mentioned that some of the issues I was having were very typical of co-dependent relationships. I flinched at the word, thinking of it in its application to couples who live in their couple bubble. But she explained it as the type of relationship people often develop with addicts and she suggested I do some reading on it. Let's call this friend Hope, because she has helped me through so many tough times, and I'm sure I'll be talking about her a lot.

So, I did some reading (and a lot of crying) and I completely identified with the feelings and experiences of co-dependents. I picked up Adult Children of Alcoholics and must have read it in one sitting. Well, the rest is not quite history because that was only a couple of months ago. I've since started attending a weekly Al-Anon meeting and I continue to unpeel the onion of recovery. I know now that I'm far from the only one who has my problems, but I've always been a writer at heart and lately I have a lot I'm thinking about that I want to share with others. I can do this in a number of ways - through connecting with friends, going to meetings, and through this blog. I'm looking forward to connecting with people like me out there, since I now realize there are a lot of you and I would love to hear from you and about your experiences.