A Stitch in Time

I apologize in advance for the mixed tenses in this post.  I consider myself lucky to be able to share this much of myself at all.  Thanks, God!

Hi.  My name is Patti. I'm an alcoholic.  Once upon a long-ago time, a child sat upon a couch, one leg tucked up under her, the other bouncing over and over off the chill linoleum floor.  In her right hand was a small sewing item used for taking out stitches.  Slowly, with deep concentration, she picked at some decorations on the arm of the couch.  

It was a new couch, proudly purchased in installments by a fairly young couple to furnish their small apartment.  It was in government housing, available to the couple because the husband served in World War II as a U.S. Marine.

  
The child on the couch, a slightly overweight brown-haired girl, deliberately picked and picked at the stitches, making the couch arm ragged and ugly.  She smiled, but her eyes were not happy.  She believed there was a monster in the house, but that if she was very quiet, vigilant, and careful, she could survive the monster and live happily ever after.

There was a younger daughter as well.  Playing with her doll, she watched her older sibling working away at the couch.  Mom was going to cry, and Dad was going to hurt them all.  Her small, slender face resembled that of a war orphan.  Her eyes were huge and ancient.  

The youngest was a boy, probably the most intelligent person in the family, who it was later understood, was doomed to struggle with schizophrenia all his life.  At the moment, he was playing somewhere outside.  Probably by himself.  He didn't actually do friends.

[cut to]

The older daughter was now in her teens.  She was away at Junior High for the day.  While she was gone, the monster crept into her room and added humorous captions to all the many pictures and posters she had posted on her walls.  He grinned while he worked, imagining how angry and upset she was going to be.  When she returned from school and saw the captions (think memes before the internet), she raged and wept and carried on, yanking all of them off the walls.  

It would be a very long time before it occurred to her that it had taken him hours to caption all those pictures without damaging them.  He had known she would lose it, but he had also thought it was funny.  He didn't know that he didn't have the right tools to be a father.  He had grown up living under a bridge with three younger brothers to take care of.  He had gone to war at the age of 19, baffled by fellow Marines who spoke faster than he could listen, but they cared for one another...would die for one another.  And did.  He was the only survivor of his platoon on Guam.  He was offered a twenty percent disability pension after the war, but he refused.  Men didn't do that.  

[cut to]

The older daughter was now in her thirties.  Her mother had died of cancer when the daughter was about 24.  [Okay, the older daughter was me.  I know you're not stupid.]  She was an alcoholic who was fortunate enough to bottom out at a fairly high level, still having her job and her own child and her own apartment.  She had done her moral inventory and made her amends.  Not everyone had forgiven her, but that was okay.  She'd tried.  Her own daughter was beautiful and smart and rather fond of street life.

The younger daughter now lived with her own husband and children in another town.  She had built a beautiful life with someone who loved and cared for her.  She was a  wonderful mother and a deeply spiritual person.

The young son was living in a group home, where someone would remind him to take his meds and would call his social worker if he disappeared, or decompensated and needed to go to the hospital. By now, his heart was enlarged from anti-psychotic meds and he looked thirty years older than he was.  Usually, he would find his siblings during the holidays and manage to visit for about fifteen minutes at a time -- his limit for social interaction.  Lately, he hasn't shown up.  

There was a knock at the door.  The older daughter opened it.  There stood the monster.  Only now he was simply a little old man.  It was astonishing.  After three years of praying for him, in strict obedience to her AA sponsor, even though she hadn't believed it would work, the little old guy no longer had any power over her.  She invited him in.  She gave him coffee and doughnuts. They even laughed together.  They laughed together until tears ran down their faces.  They were glad to be alive.  

[cut to]

Years later.  The old man was now in a nursing home.  He had alienated everyone in the family with his rage and his cutting words and ways.  Sometimes the older daughter visited him after work, but he had sundown syndrome now and was often asleep by the time she arrived in his room.  When the day came that she got a call at work and was told the old man had died, she was sad, but not destroyed.  

As time went by, the older daughter had learned how broken the monster was.  It was never going to be okay that he had behaved so badly, but he couldn't hurt her anymore.  She even realized that she had his sense of humor and his intelligence.  She was grateful for that much.  Even if she did see his eyes and nose in the mirror.

She asked for him to be cremated directly.  When the salesperson at the funeral home tried to guilt her into spending lots of money for a funeral, she pushed back with, "If I told you what my first memory of him is, you would be amazed that anyone even claimed his body."

[Return to the present]

Hi.  I'm still an alcoholic, forty-some years into my sobriety.  I pray and meditate every day, so I won't go back to the drink.  I examine my conscience every day, tell God I'm sorry for what I did wrong and for what I was too scared to selfish to do.  I sometimes think about my past with deep regret for the people I have hurt.  I attend meetings so I can share my story.  Not because I'm good or holy (though I am, and so are you), but because it keeps the craving for alcohol in the pit where it's been since I hit bottom.  I am looking forward to my first in-person AA meeting since the pandemic began.  I miss them and I miss getting hugs.  They might have to be booty bumps, fist bumps, or Mr. Spock's "Live Long and Prosper" signs, but they will work all the same.  Because we are all broken, and messy, and full of real, disinterested love for one another.  

And I am grateful.  Because I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I've committed until Him against that day.  Because though I am still crazy after all these years, my daughter and her son, my great-grandson and my sister's brilliant children and grandchildren are completely aware of how messed up the world is right now, but know that they were born to deal with the world as it now is.  I can rest, from time to time tip my toe into social activism again, and recall why it was all so urgent and so desperate and so much fun.