Childhood Trauma #1: Alcohol and Insanity

CWs:

• Violence

• Death

• Mental illness

• Substance abuse

• Domestic violence

When I asked for feedback on what I should write about for my next mental health blog entry, a plurality of respondents recommended that I move through my life chronologically, starting with childhood traumas that I believe contributed to my mental health struggles.

I’ll preface everything that’s about to follow by stating that my parents were both very loving, supportive – albeit deeply flawed – people and that I love them both very much.

Trauma is complex and comes in many forms. To tell this story, I will be breaking down each form into its own separate entry. This one is focused on my father.

My father was an alcoholic when I was a young child. He was a heavy binge drinker. On Friday nights, he’d go straight from work to local bars. He’d make a circuit, hitting two or three of his favorite haunts, then stumble home after midnight. I remember helping my mom drag him into the apartment, several mornings, after he’d fallen asleep on the pile of garbage bags outside the front door.

Drinking made dad unpleasant. He’d get into bar fights. One time, he put out a cigarette on the man sitting next to him at a bar during an argument. There were a few alcohol-influenced occasions during which he got physically aggressive toward my mother in my presence. This didn’t happen often – maybe 4 or 5 times across a 42-year relationship – but once is too many times. He was never violent toward me or my sister.

When I was about 5, something else was beginning to manifest in my father. He started to become paranoid. His behavior became increasingly erratic, to the point that his boss contacted my mother one day to discuss his declining hygiene and job performance.

Violence at home became commonplace. Most of the violence was directed at inanimate objects: furniture, windows, the TV, and walls. By the time I was 6 or 7, I was pretty good at patching holes in drywall. My mom taught me how to do it. Whenever I found a hole, which seemed to materialize out of nowhere on a nearly daily basis. I’d pop out the fractured wall pieces, use wadded newspapers to create a sort of backing, spackled over it with a patching compound, sanded, then waited on my mom to paint it over.

At no point did I think that any of this was unusual or unhealthy. As far as I knew, this is just what people did.

The first time I realized something was wrong was on a terrifying night in November 1985. My father, totally out of control, trashed our living room, kicking holes in the wall, flipping furniture, and destroying the TV, while shrieking about “messages” he was receiving.

My mom and I fled the house. It was so dark. We drove through wind and rain, falling leaves slapping against the windshield of the car. We ended up at a motor lodge one state over, where we watched a movie about a boxer. He was killed during a match at the end of the movie and his son wept over his father’s dead body. We wept, too.

My father quit drinking when my sister was born in 1986. We hoped that would end the craziness, but instead it accelerated. My father lost his job that year. He never held steady employment again. He’d been the breadwinner, and my family sank into poverty, which worsened drastically a few years later.

When I was 8 or 9, my father made a threatening phone call to a town official. The town had torn up the end of our driveway to do work on a sewer line, and my dad missed work because his car was stuck in the driveway. Police came, and what ensued ended with my father having a broken jaw and eye socket and misdemeanor convictions for menacing and resisting arrest. The entire neighborhood witnessed this calamity because it happened on a weekend afternoon in July, on my parents’ front lawn.

I was already poorly adjusted in school – to put it mildly. This event added to my social isolation by making my family pariahs in my neighborhood. Parents disallowed their kids from spending time with me. I began to daydream about the family moving away.

I need to pause to point out that I do not look back at my father with these experiences at the forefront of my mind. More than anything, I remember a father who read to me at night, who played catch with me, who took me to libraries and museums, took me sledding, taught me to swim, and always challenged me intellectually. He was friendly, kind, and personable. He could make friends instantly, anywhere he went. I’m pretty sure he read every book ever written, twice. He was the type of person who would bend over backwards to help anyone in need, and I love and miss him terribly, as do my sister and my mother.

Still, it’s important for me to address and process these experiences.

After his arrest, my mother insisted that my father start addressing his increasingly obvious mental health issues. He went to a therapist and began taking meds that helped him some. Things leveled out for a couple years. Then my dad decided he was all better and quietly stopped taking his meds. A few weeks later, everything hit a wall.

My father had a deep-seated dislike and mistrust for cops that went back to his youth, and that had been made exponentially worse by the violent encounter I previously described. One night, my dad noticed that there was a K-9 unit SUV parked across the street from our house. There was no cop in it; he was inside the house across the street, visiting his girlfriend.

Immediately after noticing the K-9 unit, dad began pacing the house, muttering about “persecution.” He left the house and began banging on the door of the unoccupied K-9 unit and yelling obscenities.

Then the bottom fell out.

My dad came back inside, and barged into my room. He began fumbling around in my closet until he found what he was looking for: an old shotgun that my grandfather had gifted me.

What resulted was a standoff in my front yard between my father and 1, then 2, then 5 armed cops. My sister, mom, and I had flung ourselves into the no-man’s land between my father and the cops, waving our arms and screaming that the shotgun was unloaded and trigger-locked (which it was, and he knew that). My father paced back and forth with the gun slung up over his shoulder, daring the cops to shoot him.

I don’t actually remember how that standoff came to an end, but ultimately my father ended up in the back of a cop car, uninjured. In light of the ongoing and senseless murder by cops of unarmed BIPOC folk, the fact that my father survived that encounter is a startling example of white privilege.

My mom had a heart attack that night after visiting him in jail, and my sister and I ended up staying with a neighbor for a couple weeks. My mom survived and lives to this day.

The legal bills and fines that followed my father’s second arrest bankrupted my family. Money fears became a way of life. We were constantly in danger of losing our home. The lights weren’t always on. One day, my father came home from the food pantry with a birthday cake that said, “Happy Birthday Jen!” for dinner. My mom cried.

There was a silver lining, and it was substantial. The judge overseeing my father’s case recognized that he was unwell, and ordered him to have a full psychological evaluation, the result of which was a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, and came with a new cocktail of meds and therapies. He responded incredibly well. Within a year, a stranger would have barely known my father was mentally ill at all.

Things with my dad were pretty good for quite a while after that. No more delusions of persecution or reading messages in license plates. No more broken furniture. No more violence of any sort.

Skip ahead a bunch of years. This part isn’t exactly childhood trauma, but it is part of the same arc of events and was in itself highly traumatic. When my dad was 66 years old, he decided to start using hard drugs. He’d always enjoyed cannabis and mushrooms, and we all tolerated that fine because he did it at home and it made him silly and pleasant. Then he made friends with some shitbag 20-somethings at a temp job he was working, and next thing we knew he was addicted to crack cocaine.

Drug addict dad was way better than alcoholic dad. Drugs didn’t lead to violence with him, for one thing. Also, he did hard drugs away from home. The drawback was that he’d often go missing for days at a time and we’d have to go looking for him. He got testy with us when we’d find him and drag him off to rehab, but deep down he knew this was for the best and, other than some wildly-abusive language when we “caught” him, it wasn’t so bad.

My dad moved out. My mom had decided that he couldn’t stay if he was using. This was because unsavory shitbags kept coming by the house saying vaguely threatening things about money they were owed. Unwilling to commit to sobriety, my father opted to move down the street.

The time between moving out and his death was the only time in my life I really, really felt like I got to know him as a human being. He’d always been such an enigma growing up. At home, he was either raging or he lived in my mother’s shadow with barely a word to say for himself. Living on his own, I watched him blossom as an individual, even while on a path of self-destruction. He and I had scores of fascinating conversations that lasted well into the night. He almost always had someone staying on his couch. Most of them were houseless people with their own mental health and substance use struggles. He just let them stay with him, sometimes for up to a month at a time. He would also go to the homes of disabled vets he met at his AA meetings and help them with grocery shopping and cooking. Not for any reason. That’s just who he was, deep down inside.

My dad was able to quit drugs for decent stretches, the longest being 3 years. Then in March 2013, my sister found him deceased in the bedroom of his apartment. He’d died the previous evening from an overdose, having quietly relapsed apparently some weeks earlier. He was 73 years old. His death was one of the most traumatic events of my entire life, and led to the biggest mental health crisis I’ve ever endured.

His funeral was heavily attended. Childhood friends and distant relatives, but also the people he’d collected during the later years of his life: the owner of a local Chinese restaurant, a handful of disabled vets, sex workers, even some houseless people who had taken taxis in from Albany to attend. Despite all the horror he’d faced, the misdeeds, the addiction and mental illness, he had managed to touch a lot of lives in profoundly positive ways… my own included.