The blessing of recovery

I wasn’t at all familiar with the mission or work of Adult Children of Alcoholics when a group approached the church I served near Memphis, inquiring about whether we had meeting space.

The church already hosted a number of Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon meetings. ACA was new for us, and its work immediately spoke to me: I was the adult daughter of a father who had become an alcoholic. I knew firsthand the range of emotions—from a sense of abandonment, to fear, grief, loss, anger, resentment, among many, many others—that might be experienced by children of alcoholics. ACA’s work, I was convinced, was important.

We readily extended them an invitation to join the fold. In time, we discovered that there were more ACA meetings on our campus than AA and Al-Anon meetings.

My earliest memories of my father are memories of a laughing, fun-loving man—playful and joyful, a man who laughed with me and sang a lot. He loved entertaining; he’d learned during his time in the Army that he was a pretty good cook, and for a time, we shared his grilling and barbecuing with family, friends and neighbors.

But as time passed, my once-jovial father became a sad, short-tempered, impatient, angry man. I didn’t understand the weight that was on my father until I was a young adult. Looking back, I can understand how alcohol could have become his drug of choice, to help him escape the stresses of home. My father had—surely, unknowingly—married a woman, my mother, who struggled with mental illness.

My parents married a few years after the death of my father’s first wife. They were both 42 years old when they married at the home of the minister of the church they attended. There were certainly clues that might have suggested to my father even before they were married that all was not well with my mother. The truth was that family members had always been aware that something wasn’t “quite right” with my mother.

I understood from my earliest years that our household didn’t seem like any other household of family members or family friends. At 4 or 5 years old, I likely would have said that my mother was not okay. She seemed to be paranoid about everything and everyone, often hid in the house (and wouldn’t answer the door) when she wasn’t teaching school, and spoke abruptly and unkindly to virtually everyone around her. Amazingly, teaching seemed to be her only joy. But her behavior beyond the classroom left her isolated from tongue-wagging relatives, school colleagues, neighbors and church folks. As it turns out, there was indeed a name for her illness, but because of her fear and avoidance of doctors, she wasn’t seen or diagnosed with the schizophrenia that had plagued her, likely from her youth, until she was 90 years old.

My father’s drinking seemed only to add to the chaos of our home during my childhood. My mother was already unstable, and if my father came home drunk or drank himself to sleep after work (as he often did), she became even more unstable. I learned that staying in my room and reading a book, or losing myself in my piano music, provided an excellent escape. I am fortunate that it never occurred to me to adopt his drug of choice as my own: I was too busy trying to be the one stable and reliable person in a dysfunctional household.

I watched my father sink deeper and deeper into an angry sadness. He’d always said that he wanted to travel when he retired; there were still so many places he wanted to see. My mother’s illness made that travel impossible. He remained at home, puttering in the yard with his plants, going to church as long as he was able, enjoying occasional visits with relatives, and drinking excessively until progressing dementia seemed to dull the need for the alcohol.

The fact that my father developed dementia at about the same time he was diagnosed with cancer proved to be fortuitous. He would forget soon after physicians’ visits that he was sick, go on living, and not obsess about dying. But my mother wasn’t able to care for him adequately, and that presented ongoing challenges. He died two days before I was to move him to a memory care residence where I’d prayed he’d receive better and more consistent care.

In 2018, I wrote a piece (msepiscopalian.com/dont-always-see) acknowledging that, in my own frustration, I had failed to give my father credit for all he’d survived with my mother. I had so badly wanted the gregarious father of my earliest years, before he’d become broken and beaten down, to come back to me. Too many years passed without my understanding how, during a time when it was even more difficult than it is today to get help for a loved one who is suffering from mental illness, he had done the absolute best that he could under enormously trying circumstances, and how much he had sacrificed of his own life to care for my mother and for me.

I wish he could have attended even one AA meeting—for his own sake, not for mine—so that perhaps he could have known some small amount of peace and health in this lifetime.
It is because of my father’s suffering that I am firmly committed to recovery ministry. It is for all of the persons I’ve met through the years who owe their lives to recovery ministry that I will zealously support it. It is for all of the loved ones dear to me who did not survive the battle with addiction that I ardently advocate it.

Many of the churches in our diocese host 12-Step groups. Please, please, for the sake of your life, connect with the resources you need to be your healthiest and best self. Our Creator God, and all of the people who love us, want us all to survive and thrive.