My life long battle with alcohol
My name is Morgan and I am here to ask you to accept me for what I am; not
reject me for what I am not. I fear you cannot do that. My own mother could not accept
who I am.
Alcoholism is a topic that is very near and dear to me. It is also extremely
difficult to talk about. Recently I fear I have embarrassed myself again and for that I owe
this explanation and an apology.
I was born into a family of alcoholics. My Bohemian grandfather brewed beer in
the basement during prohibition. The family was not only large but poor. My mother and
her siblings grew up drinking beer with their meals because beer has yeast in it and that
made it nutritionally good for you. Milk and juices were cost prohibitive while beer was
readily available downstairs. When food was scarce, everyone filled up on beer.
Dieticians had not yet come into being. The food pyramid was a thing of the future.
Rickets was a major health problem nationwide as well as other nutritionally based
illnesses. The predictable end result in my family was alcoholism.
My mother was orphaned by the age of eight. She was the youngest child and
grew up under the tutelage of five older brothers and sisters. She dropped out of high
school in her freshman year. Too young to get a job she did whatever she wanted while
the older children one by one left home. At the legal age of sixteen she was allowed into
bars but she could not drink, at least not legally. She liked the music, atmosphere, dancing
and the saxophone player in the honky-tonk band. The bywords were 'Do what you want,
just don't get in trouble with the police.'
She married at nineteen and I was born when she was twenty. She still liked to
dance and frequent the bars. Eventually my father who drank very little left. Mom married
the bartender the next time around. She had three daughters and although she always said
she only hurt herself when she drank; her drinking affected all of us. I don't remember
ever seeing her sober or even if I would have liked her if she were sober.
My sister was twice married and has two children. Her first marriage was to an
alcoholic who assigned her as lookout for the police at the local Laundromat while he
spun drunk in the dryers after the bars closed. I have not used public dryers since. My
dutiful co-dependent sister who also drank on occasion did what she was told. There
obviously wasn't any glue holding that marriage together.
Her second marriage was to a joking, humorous card dealer who worked the
casinos at Lake Tahoe. I have no idea how much they drank, but the liquor cabinet was
always well stocked. Their marriage has been a little rocky but it has endured the tests of
time in spite of almost drowning in the bathtub together after a night on the town and
tossing the coffee table through the picture window in the living room. The table laid on
its side in the front yard for three months because neither of them would take it back
inside. They banished our youngest sister from their house for raiding the liquor cabinet. I
broke contact with that sister too. My youngest sister stayed at home until she was forty.
She became Mom's drinking buddy. In her early forties I had the dubious honor of seeing
her walk steadily in four-inch spike heals with perfect speech and a blood alcohol of .40.
The accidents she caused driving under the influence eventually earned her ninety days in
the county jail. After jail she spent the next two years in a Salvation Army live-in
rehabilitation program in San Francisco. She was brilliant in many ways. She passed a
typing test with 118 words per minute on her certificate. She worked for Presbyterian
Hospital in San Francisco writing grants until succumbing to her addictions once again. I
started refusing all correspondence from her and she stopped trying to make contact. Ten
years after I last saw her she committed suicide by overdosing on street drugs. The note
she left requested that she be cremated and her ashes scattered. No emergency medical
treatment was to be done and above all she did not want to be buried with her parents.
My personal problems with alcohol are much different, about 180 degrees
different. I was never a child to empty the sips of alcohol left in a glass or sneak into the
booze cabinet. On my sixteenth birthday my bartender stepfather gave me my first mixed
drink. It was horrible and I didn't finish it. In fact an instant replay shows that I really
couldn't hold my liquor. What went down came up immediately without warning. You
see I was manufactured with a built in antabuse system. I'm convinced this was a genetic
flaw in my biology and it didn't make me the most social creature on the planet. Yes, I
had bad protoplasm. I was not antisocial. I wasn't against people. I was asocial and
preferred being away from people; especially social gatherings.
You might think my alcohol problem was a good thing and in some ways you
would be correct. I never had to have a drink when I awoke in the morning. I cooked with
alcohol and made my own extracts without ever being tempted. I could pass any DUI test.
I never woke up face down on the pavement. I have never had a hangover the morning
after or seen creepy crawlies under my bed except when they were really there. I've never
awakened in the morning and not known where I was or the stranger lying next to me. I
never have to panhandle for a bottle of wine. I've never urinated in a taxi cab the
police called to take me home. I've never spent all of the food money for alcohol and had
to beg and borrow to feed my kids. I've never had to go to an AA meeting or be court
ordered into a substance abuse program.
On the obverse, I'm perfectly happy by myself. If your most important family
members are on another planet and can't accept your sobriety or don't want you around
when you are very young, you learn to be by yourself and to like it at a very early age.
Eventually I broke all contact with my family. We just don't mix if you will pardon
the pun. A priest counselor made me promise to go back if I was ever needed. I did.
People want to know why I order water or a soft drink when everyone else is
having alcohol. Being around people who drink doesn't bother me, but it can certainly
bother the people who drink to be around me. My mother would say, "She thinks were all
a bunch of drunks." I didn't think it, I knew it but never said it because I didn't care.
Regardless of what your family does, it is still your family. My husband was not an
alcoholic, but our marriage didn't last. There has to be something to marriage besides
sobriety. You see, I know how to live around alcoholics, I just don't know how to live
with sober people. My sober husband was eventually killed by the alcohol in the system
of a seventeen year old driver. I avoid celebrations such as Thanksgiving, New Year's
Eve and Christmas where you have to toast something. I make an excuse to slip out of the
room when everyone is toasting the bride and groom and at certain other special events. I
skip the wine at communion. When I go on a date, I have to respectfully decline the
invitation for a drink. Many think I'm an alcoholic on the wagon. Rude is the way I am
seen at times. There are worse things in life than being rude and there are degrees of
rudeness. If I drank with you the end result would be much ruder than a simple refusal.
In my work with mental health I refused to work with drug and alcohol clientele
regardless of how lucrative the position might be. It just wasn't my cup of tea. Women's
maximum security was more to my liking. Unfortunately, most of the people who worked
maximum security came to work under the influence to fortify their courage in a violent
environment.
My children went out into the world to seek their fortunes leaving me sitting alone
on the proverbial empty nest. I sought after something to fill that horrible void finding it
at searches end in Catholicism. I poured my soul into mother church as a new convert and
became inextricably intertwined in the mystagogia of conversion. I was appointed
president of The Legion of Mary and later quit my eighteen year career with the State of
California to work for a disgustingly low salary as the personal secretary of the parish
priest who baptized me. Studying, teaching, doing helped fill the emptiness for almost
three years. I learned that even the church has its alcoholism. Some priests offer Mass by
themselves in the middle of the night, "Blood of Christ inebriate me," "Blood of Christ
intoxicate me." Cloistered convents and monasteries are no exception. I found that
abstinence leads to wanting the very best for another person even if I am not the very best.
Fasting can lead to an acceptance of alcoholism when all else fails. The Liturgical Hours
and Perpetual Adoration are not only prayers but acts of obedience. The road of poverty is
paved with riches. Some people are called to be victims and it's OK. The glass is no
longer half empty and I can live quietly within the confines of a world where everyone
else can drink and I don't fit in.
That is the story of my life long battle with alcohol and my apology for offending
you because of it. I hope you can accept me for what I am and not reject me for what I
cannot be.