Month: July 2019

Guilt is Good When It’s Time to Sleep

On By drwiebIn Pet lifeLeave a comment

Every now and then, I feel guilty for locking the cats out of my bedroom at night. Maybe I’ve been gone too long during the day, or for a weekend, or I’m going to bed almost as soon as I get home. They meow pitifully and wrap themselves around my legs and look at me with those dewy, kitty eyes and I cave. I leave the door cracked so they can come and go as they please.

What a mistake…that I won’t make again for a couple of months, like twelve. It’s been a while since the last time I felt this guilty, so I’ve conveniently (for them) forgotten why there is a no-cats-in-my-room-at-night rule. It doesn’t take long to remember.

Clint, the orange tabby, insists on being on top of me at all times, and likes sleeping as close to my nose as possible. If he has to climb onto my chest to do so, so be it. He also likes to be petted as he dozes, and uses his front still-with-claws feet to gently remind me…unless I try to ignore him and actually sleep, myself. Then he becomes not so gentle, snagging the nearest forearm to attempt to drag it to his head in a subtle hint. When I put my hands under the covers to avoid bloodshed, he resorts to rubbing his head on any part of my face that he can reach. These love rubs become increasingly aggressive until his teeth are scraping across my skin, probably his idea of a gentle warning. He’s the first one pushed off the bed.

Pooki, the grayish black memory-impaired cat, then takes his shot at being on the bed. He starts with these pathetic little mews and not-so-pathetic head butts into my arm, then my boob, and then my head. He will rub himself under my hand and will chase it under the covers if need be. If he can’t find my hand, any part of my body will do, and he starts rubbing along the entire length of one side of my body, mewing the whole time. He’s the second to be pushed from the bed. Pooki has accepted the limitations of bed-sleeping, and will jump back up at the end to curl up by my feet. It’s an acceptable compromise.

All is well for a couple of hours. Then, 10 Second Tom forgets the bed rules and the entire process starts all over. If the mewing directly into my ear doesn’t wake me up, the subsequent head butts will. The ones to the nose hurt the most. At the renewed commotion, Clint comes back to try his luck. Sometimes Clint avoids the rush and will climb back on the bed to begin Pooki’s bath time, which annoys Pooki, who then decides it must be playtime. So begins the growling and the rolling and the biting and neither one distinguishes between a feline appendage and my feet. There goes both from the bed again.

After several bouts of how-much-can-we-annoy-mom (which is a LOT), it starts to get light outside. Both cats decide it is now breakfast time and so it must be time for me to get up. Pooki tries the head-butting routine, which is never successful. Clint has always been more resourceful in his wake-up methods. First comes the sitting-by-my-head-and-staring contest. If that doesn’t do it, he’ll reach out one recently-been-in-the-litter-box paw and start tapping me on my cheek. The claws make a gradual appearance if I don’t take the bait. After he deftly avoids my flailing hand, he waits a bit before climbing delicately onto my chest so he can not-so-delicately begin kneading my boobs with his front claws. Once he gets back on the bed from where I’ve once again shoved him off, he tries one more time on my chest, but to purr in supplication for food…loudly. Initially, I forget the typical sequence and feel too guilty to push away a purring cat. As the purring gets louder and the cat creeps closer to my nose, I begin to recall this particular attack and no longer feel so guilty about pushing him off the bed again. Eventually, they give up and go looking for more agreeable amusement or the alarm goes off.

What kills me in all this “it’s breakfast time, get up” routine is that they have an AUTOMATIC FEEDER. There is ALWAYS food available on regular intervals, one of them being 6:15 am. When I do finally get up in the morning, they meander out to the other room, jump up to their feeder, and nibble. I have tried over and over to explain to them that I do NOT need to watch them eat. They disagree.

One night of these shenanigans and I remember why they are not allowed in my bedroom at night. I have no guilt shutting the door the next evening.

While this doesn’t completely deaden their attempts to interrupt my sleep during the night, it helps. With the door shut, they sit right outside, mewing or scratching gently until they are sure I’ve either died or crawled out the window and escaped. I have learned to ignore the various thumps and bumps and even crashes that occur on and off from beyond my door. If I go to investigate, they sneak into my room under cover of darkness and wait for me to get back in bed before attacking. Whatever has fallen can wait til morning to be picked up. I need sleep. When the door opens in the morning, they are both sitting right in front, patiently waiting for my arrival to observe their phenomenal eating skills.

I (mostly) love these critters during my awake hours. When I’m lying in bed, trying to avoid bleeding from their abundance of affection or listening to them destroy my house outside my bedroom door, I start to wonder about the sanity of adopting two cats. One wasn’t good enough. I thought two would be more apt to entertain themselves. I was so wrong. Two just means they are co-conspirators. I now realize I have adopted two very intelligent, sly, needy, furry toddlers.

I really should have just waited for grandchildren.

20863348_10154952199382898_2315224661747553969_o

Doors, cont.

On By drwiebIn Alcoholism, Being a mom, mental health and parentingLeave a comment

When my daughter became a widow, I was shocked. I never expected to have so much in common with her so quickly. I lost my husband very unexpectedly after 23 years of marriage. She lost her husband after 3 months. Both passed in the same ward of the same hospital, ten years apart.

I started learning how much my daughter had hidden from me in the past decade, starting with her first husband and bleeding into her second. Her first husband was a high school sweetheart, and they’d been together for 13 years when he walked out. They started out young and in love, even if he was a little critical and never-wrong. They went off to college in another town together when he graduated a year after her, and she has never returned home. They lived together after two years of college, and she supported him for a year after she’d graduated and he went on to grad school. She had a terrible head for finance, and instead of helping her learn, as would any other dedicated partner, he simply walled “his” off from “hers.” He put off marriage for just over a decade, but finally caved when she  grew adamant. By this time, I was not his biggest fan or anywhere close. He was lazy and critical and cold towards her. She bent over backwards, then tucked and rolled when she fell over, and went right back to bending over backwards.

She was extremely jealous of any female presence in his life, which I didn’t really understand, because while he was a nice, funny guy to others, he wasn’t what I would consider “a catch.” I guess he just wasn’t “a catch” towards her. Seeing as how she’d inherited her jealous streak from me, I tried to counsel moderation. She didn’t listen. I wouldn’t have either while her dad was alive. I trusted him. I also thought he was pretty fantastic and just knew other women would figure that out and felt my jealousy would be justified. It never was.

I moved back to my home state just before they moved back here. Both found jobs quickly, his in marketing and hers in online writing. She bonded with one of his female coworkers over shared distaste and distrust of another of his women coworkers. Her new-found friend was newly married and fairly shy, and my daughter would consider it her duty to draw her out to a  more comfortable social presence. One December, my daughter and her husband drove up for Christmas dinner. She stayed the weekend; he went home the same day to work. When she got back that Sunday, he told her he was leaving. They were divorced in a matter of months, and he was in a public relationship with her “friend” from his work not long after. It’s anyone’s guess when the private relationship began. I now know her jealousy had some foundation.

It devastated her. He was her life. I was beyond furious on one hand at how he had hurt her. On the other hand, I was dancing a jig. She never would have left him…never. She needed to leave him years before, or he should have had the balls to admit he was no longer in love with her and at least forgone the wedding. He verbally corrected her constantly in public. He belittled her constantly in private. He ridiculed her writing, her job, her appearance. I was starting to see that my confident, outgoing high-schooler was now a self-conscious, anxiety-ridden woman with no self-esteem, a gigantic need for confirmation, and a habit for drinking.

As she could not live without male affection in her life, she immediately turned to a high school boyfriend who had moved back into town sometime in the year before all this happened. She had been head over heels for him; he had used her and then verbally put her down as he broke up with her to move on to his grand life in New York. He was off to be a great director; he was sure she would remain a small-town nobody for the rest of her life. I detested him then. I was no fonder of him now. They both knew it. It didn’t matter; she needed him to rebuild her heart and he needed her to rebuild his life. He came back just as pompous as ever, but with a cemented status as an active alcoholic. While he did appear to love her in his own way, it included a healthy dose of manipulation. She moved him into her house in January, regardless. I tried to bite my lip, and we grew even further apart.

She let me know they were getting married in September. I went, with my youngest and my sister. I was determined to be happy for her. They did seem so happy that day. She looked better than I had seen her in quite some time. Him, not so much. They came for Thanksgiving but didn’t stay long. I was surprised they even came.

Then came the late night phone call from the hospital in December. When I got up to the room, I was again in shock. He was in a coma. She was dirty and either drunk or hungover and babbling constantly. She was hearing music, at first, and then voices talking, and then voices saying terrible things to her. She had a seizure in his room and was taken to the ER. As she was coming back around, I had to explain why she was there, why her husband wasn’t, and why the hospital staff wouldn’t just let her get up and leave. She became very angry and said some very cruel things to me. Even the nurse was shocked and tried to steer her anger towards the hospital. I knew she had no idea what she was saying, and only got angry when she just wouldn’t shut up. I was still trying to process who this person was that used to be my daughter; the words coming out of her mouth were incidental.

He passed away the second morning, and I took her home. I actually bought her vodka on the way, as she said she really needed something to help her sleep. I wasn’t sure, but didn’t want to cause a scene in Walgreen’s. I’ll never forget her reasoning that “the 750 is a better deal here so let’s get that one, that way I won’t have to leave the house too soon.” Alarm bells that were already shrilling in my head just grew louder.  The mental and physical exhaustion just wanted to get her home so I could get some sleep.

Her house was a mess. The dog was a mess. She casually explained that she didn’t get around to cleaning because her husband wanted her to spend time with him when she was home, not working around the house. As we sat on the couch while she medicated herself towards sleep, the rest of the news started filtering out. He hadn’t worked for months. He’d been on house arrest for awhile. The car was wrecked. The key fob was broken. The staff at the ER knew them personally. It wasn’t unusual for the ambulance to be at their place to take him in. She drank right along with him so he wouldn’t have quite so much to drink. He’d gotten her to start smoking cigarettes a few months before. She didn’t have hot water. The boiler had stopped working that winter. The kitchen faucet was broken so no dishes were done. There were mice running anywhere they wanted. She hadn’t bathed in a while because she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to stay upright that long. I could barely stand to sit on the couch.

I called my youngest then, due to exhaustion and shock, and some well-hidden idea that maybe I should be better functioning before I opened my mouth about any of this. She stayed the night, and I’ll never forgive myself for putting my youngest in that situation. It was a nightmare of a night, with my oldest drinking steadily, falling steadily, and eventually trying to push her sister out the door at 3:00 am because “You’re not my sister; you’re wearing her face but you’re not my sister. Who are you?”

My animosity towards her late husband grew daily. I felt nothing but sympathy for his family, especially his parents. I tried to feel both sympathy and empathy for my daughter, but I could feel nothing but relief, personally, that he was out of her life. The funeral was a place for her friends to reveal more and more of the hole in which she was literally drowning. I gave my phone number to her neighbor in case something happened. It was used several times. I met her coworkers, which was  helpful when I talked her into going into rehab about a month later. She had stopped drinking only because I got to her house at 10:30 one night in January. By the time she was admitted to the hospital the next day around 12:30 pm, she still blew over the legal limit on the breathalyzer. She was sweating vodka out of her pores. She stayed a week, came home to a house I had cleaned from top to bottom, and stayed sober for almost ten days. Then she took right back up from where she’d left, and lost her job.

As I said before, she never had a head for finances. Her dad and I supported her financially throughout college, and I continued after his death, partially due to guilt at being the parent that lived. Also, I just couldn’t let her drown if I could help it. We, then I, paid for college. I paid the odd bill here and there. I paid the house rent now and then. After her divorce, I paid the rent more often. After her husband’s death, I paid it even more. I bought her a car right after her dad died, then the uninsured car they wrecked, and at least had the presence of mind to take it back within days of his death. I started getting tickets from around the area where she worked, as she had never transferred the plates from the first car to the second, over a year prior.  Both her sister and I had been getting calls from collection agencies for years. They had quieted for awhile, but they returned with a vengeance.

I started attending Al-Anon meetings, sporadically.

I knew this problem was bigger than me, and I knew I couldn’t fix it for her or even help her fix it because she simply refused to listen to me. I learned one of the worst parts of having children was when you were still the mother but no longer the parent. I tried to accept that this was completely out of my hands, and I tried to practice detachment. I failed spectacularly.

Oh, I cut off the flow of money. I refused to buy cigarettes or alcohol, but I would get groceries when she needed them. I’d given the car back to her at one point, when she’d gotten a new job, but that was faltering, she had not insured it or gotten it registered in her name, so I took it back. I’d opened a joint checking account with her so she could have her paycheck deposited, and ended up closing that when the balance went negative. I stopped paying her rent. We communicated almost exclusively via FB messenger or text. This way, I couldn’t hear if she was drunk or hungover, and she couldn’t hear my anger or disappointment. I tried not to talk to her when she was drunk; she was rambling and irrational and mean. I would try to stay calm, but one barb too many would send me into overdrive. It was better not to talk at all. I sunk into a great depression that summer, and spent days on the couch in the same pajamas, only moving when I absolutely had to. I was sure I would be burying my daughter before the year was out. While my heart screamed I could never survive that, my head knew I would have no choice. I’d already done it once before.

Even though I was really bad at it, the little detachment I could manage did help. While I did pull out of my depression, my adrenaline spiked every time my phone dinged. She would cycle between sobriety and binge drinking. We rarely saw each other. She started dating almost as soon as she had hot water again, once I’d paid the bill. We had lunch on her birthday, where she detailed the three guys she was currently dating. Two were exactly her type: fun-loving and out for themselves, due to no fault of their own other than youth. The third was way too nice to be someone she would usually have chosen. I’m not sure how they actually started, but there was some part of her that felt pulled toward him. I silently, or maybe not so silently, cheered for him from the sidelines. The more time they spent together, the more I heard from her.

My husband had been a recovered alcoholic for 13 years. It saved our marriage. He started drinking “a little” right before his death. While it would eventually have become a big problem again (I have no doubt), I’m glad he had the chance to try it again before he passed. I would never begrudge him that. Had he lived, I would have drawn the line in the sand one more time. I lived with active alcoholism for eight years before his drying out. I knew the signs and the excuses. I knew the sleight of hand maneuvers and the subterfuge and the outright lies. I also knew the absolute transformation that occurred when he stopped drinking.

I have discussed all this with my daughter over and over. She insisted she wasn’t an alcoholic, and she couldn’t stand the thought of never, ever having another drink. She didn’t see the oxymoron-status of those statements. She got better at controlling it, but I knew it was a cycle, at best, until she admitted there was a problem. She has yet to admit it.

They are now exclusive, and I am starting to see glimpses of my daughter reappear. By last winter, they were moving in together, and she was finally getting out of the house from hell. By this summer, they were buying a house and planning for their future.

I am happy for her; I am happy for her chance at her own happiness. I am thrilled she has found someone who loves her and respects her and supports her for who she is. She is learning that she deserves that kind of man. There are doors opening for her right and left. She has choices upon choices upon choices.

I also know that not all doors lead to good things. Bad things know how to hide themselves very well until the last possible second, slamming their own door shut with you on the wrong side.

I also know those doors don’t usually lock. If you can’t get that one open, you can always look for another one. There are any number of entrances and exits along the paths of our life, but you have to be willing to look.  While I am really hoping that my daughter understands the power of looking, I am well aware of the doors along my own path. I have opened many right ones, and many wrong ones. I think I have more right ones opened at this point, but who knows?

My lesson appears to be, at this moment, learning that if I’m watching too closely which doors my daughter is contemplating, I run the risk of slamming my own hand in the wrong door. On the other hand, if I completely ignore which door my daughter is wandering through, it can be exhausting to be pulling frantically on that wrong door that’s trying to shut her in. I’m still going to be pulling on it, until it either shuts completely or I can drag her through it backwards.

As a mother, I know I’ll never stop watching. As a parent, I’d prefer to take the damn doors off their hinges and be done with it.

 

Doors

On By drwiebIn Alcoholism, Being a mom, mental health and parentingLeave a comment

My oldest daughter  was once my only lifeline. When she was young, just before she turned four, she was the only reason I made any effort at all to remain sane. It seemed the older she got, the further away she went, until one day, she went away to college and never came back.

She was an almost-perfect baby. She slept when she was supposed to sleep and ate regularly and gurgled and babbled and smiled and giggled and was just the cutest thing most people had ever seen. We took her everywhere because she was so accommodating: to restaurants, to movie theaters, to motorcycle races. She saw it all.

The first seven years of my marriage were pretty volatile, and she was the solo observer for five of those years. She doesn’t remember much of that time, thank god, but I do. I still feel guilty about making her so much of the center of my life that she had to be the axle that kept us going. The months her dad and I were separated were hard, and I didn’t see him at all for that time. I was angry about that, but what made me absolutely livid was that he also didn’t see her during that time.  I have no poker face whatsoever, so everyone was very much aware of how I felt, including my daughter.

Somehow, we managed to somewhat reconcile our differences and add another daughter to our family at the same time.  It took another two years before our issues were completely laid to rest and we became a really solid family. She became her daddy’s princess and I think he spent years trying to make up for those four months of our separation and his voluntary silence.

She was razor smart and beautiful and creative and, luckily, had dad’s eye-hand coordination, so actually grew to like sports. She made friends easily and loved to play outside and had somehow started learning to keep her hurt inside where I couldn’t see. Her first 5-6 years of life had been so tightly entwined with mine, and everything we did was together. Now, she was creating a life separate from mine, and I was busy enough with her sister and just educated enough to know this was how it was supposed to happen, like it or not. We were still close, but suddenly there were doors that were shut to me.

We moved, and she had to learn to make new friends and find a new niche. She went into middle school, still smarter than most everyone else, and then learned what it meant to be smart at that age. Things started changing, and more doors started closing. Some things I could let go as a part of growing up. Others, not so much. Closed or not, I was going through those doors and we were going to deal with whatever was behind them. Sometimes, it worked, and she’d let go of that “friend” who did nothing but use her and make her miserable when I’d convinced her that she deserved better. Sometimes, it didn’t, and even though I opened that door, she’d immediately close the one behind it.

She was extremely, extremely, creative, and writing was her passion. When she discovered limited fame from blogging on the internet, she was hooked. It took many hours of me dogging her steps and censoring her writing to convince her that some things should remain private….or maybe just taught her how to be sneakier than I am crafty. For awhile, as soon as I found one TMI blog site and insisted she take it down, another went up before I even went to bed. The problem was, it was almost impossible to determine if what she was writing was truth or fiction. She was seamless in transition from one to the other. She was a phenomenal storyteller; I was just afraid of which parts of the stories were non-fiction.

At the same time in middle school, she discovered boys. It became imperative to her that she have a boyfriend. This emotional need, I am destroyed to say, has never abated in the two decades since its beginning. She cannot be without a male admirer in her life. I have been widowed for a decade and have yet to even attempt to date. Even married, her dad and I were still our separate individuals and that, I believe, is part of what has gotten me through the last twelve years. Her absolute emotional reliance on a man is foreign to me.

She met her first husband when she was seventeen and a senior in high school. They went to college together, and lived together, for the next 11 years. She wanted marriage in the worst way. He was content with their current arrangement. He was also an overbearing, never-wrong, critical, willing-to-let-her-support-him asshole, but that wasn’t how he started out. It really was love initially, but gradually devolved into a toxic environment where he destroyed her self-esteem piece by piece. They had a wedding when she finally insisted it happen, and I will never forgive him for that. He knew at that point he wasn’t sticking around for long, and it lasted two more years. He didn’t have enough of a backbone to tell her the truth before he lied over the vows. By the time he walked out, she was broken…and I didn’t know the extent yet.

She immediately turned to a high school boyfriend I had detested back then, and still didn’t like. He was freshly returned from New York, a place he’d run to after graduation, and after he’d raked her over the coals for being a small-town nobody who wouldn’t make anything of herself. He thought he was off to become a big-name producer. He came back a defeated alcoholic. He needed someone to take care of him, and she needed to take care of someone, because she refused to take care of herself. It was a match made in Hell, and the Devil moved into her rented house very quickly. 

He lost his job. He was arrested and wore an ankle bracelet. They wrecked the car. He was either drunk or in withdrawal. They became familiar to the staff at the emergency room and the ambulance drivers. They got married. She started smoking. They never stopped drinking. And I knew none of this until after he died.

My daughter had closed all doors to me about the time her first husband-to-be started nailing them shut on her. She never told me anything she endured, anything she mourned, anything she felt. She never told me anything. She used texting to keep the changes in her voice to herself. She instant-messaged so I couldn’t tell if she was drunk or hungover or tired or heartbroken. She only contacted me when she needed something, otherwise I was contacting her and she was replying via text.  I was dealing with my sudden widow-hood and a suicidal teen and I completely dropped the ball with her. I’ll never forgive myself, yet I still don’t know how I could have opened ANY of those doors. She had very good locks.

She finally opened one at 3:00 in the morning. When the phone rang in the middle of the night, I knew something was wrong. What other kinds of calls come at that time? When I got to the hospital, I was absolutely floored to see the state to which she had deteriorated, and to see her second husband in a coma in the same ward where her dad had died ten years earlier. It was a very long night into day into night into day. She was dirty, and scared, still somewhat drunk, and hearing voices. She had a seizure right in his room during the second night and ended up in the ER. It took almost an hour, me explaining why she was in the hospital to begin with and where her husband was, and her getting downright ugly with me before we were able to get back up to his room. He passed a few hours later, and all I felt was relief.

When I took her home, I started seeing what was behind all these doors she had closed on me. I was in shock. How had she gotten to this state without my knowing anything? I mean, I knew she was pulling away and not letting me in, but….this? She was an alcoholic. She chain-smoked. She didn’t eat. She didn’t clean. She didn’t bathe. She didn’t wash…anything. She didn’t throw out ANYTHING. I thought I walked into an episode of Hoarders for Beginners. I was appalled and sick and exhausted. I called my youngest to come sit with her and went home to sleep, and to process.

What happened next was the beginning of the worst living nightmare of my life. I had lived with an alcoholic for seven years. I had survived all the worry and pain and anger and fear that went with that relationship. We had worked it out, and laid our demons to rest. And here I was, opening a door to something worse than knowing your husband was an alcoholic. Something way, way worse. I wanted to slam that door shut and never go back, but when it’s your daughter…

I took a big breath and stepped inside. I have yet to find the door out on the other side. This nightmare is never-ending.

(To Be Continued)