Getting It Through My Thick Skull

by Mary Jo Buttafuoco

  I’ve got to get out of here! was the only thought in my head. Now! It was an all-consuming urge. My brain was literally screaming, Run! Go! I grabbed the kids, abandoned my cart, and ran out of the store. Once I got outside, I felt normal again within three minutes. I packed the kids back into the car and sat there wondering, What the hell just happened to me? The most debilitating wave of sheer terror had come from nowhere and taken over. I had never felt that scared in my entire life. I gave up on shopping and drove home.

  Of course, I had to go back to the store the next day to get the diapers, but once I parked in the lot, I couldn’t force myself out of the car. The fear of another attack kept me rooted in the front seat. If it happened to me again while I was in the store with the kids, what was I going to do? I agonized for half an hour, then gave up and drove home. The voice in my head that constantly monitored my behavior was taunting me full blast. What kind of mother are you? You can’t even go into the store and buy diapers. What a dope!

  The fright had been so overwhelming that I felt like I was going to die. I almost would have preferred to die rather than live through an experience like that again. The anticipatory anxiety of having another attack was horrible. I could not make myself go into that grocery store. Not that day, or the next, or that week. The wave swept over me again the following week after I’d sternly told myself to pull it together and screwed up all my courage to enter the hardware store. Once again, I found myself shaking, sweating, and gasping on the sidewalk.

  Still, I tried to keep up appearances. Nobody knew that Joe was disappearing for days on end, nobody knew I had excruciating panic attacks, nobody knew that my life was falling apart. I was too ashamed to tell anybody; that old feeling of not living up to expectations kicked in, effectively sealing my mouth. It took all my energy just to keep daily life moving along. I was holding all my problems inside while playing the role of happy, devoted wife and mother. It was killing me.

  Joe’s father and brother had a pretty good idea of what was going on with him because they saw him every day . . . or didn’t, when he didn’t bother to show up for work. His brother Bobby in particular had his suspicions, especially after things started to go missing in the shop—money, car parts, tools. But Joey could look him straight in the eye, tell him a story, and make him believe it. Joey was Bobby’s kid brother, the good guy, the prankster, the lovable rascal. Joey knew just how to handle his brother. His father, meanwhile, ignored Joey’s erratic behavior and hoped for the best, handing out his regular paycheck every week as he’d always done. All of us were enabling Joey, but we didn’t think of our behavior in those terms. It was family, and we all wanted to help.

  Paul was enrolled in a nursery school, and part of being a parent there meant helping the teacher one day a month. When my day came, I forced myself to get to the school and inside the classroom. But right in the middle of handing out juice to ten preschoolers in the bright, toy-filled playroom, I felt the now-familiar wave engulfing me. I stammered to the teacher that I wasn’t feeling well. “I’m going to pass out,” I told her.

  She sat me down and tried to help. She was kind and understanding, but eventually she had to call Joe to come and get me. I was not capable of driving. I broke down on that car ride home. “You’re making me crazy, Joe. I can’t take this anymore. I’m going out of my mind. I am literally cracking up!” Grim and stone-faced beside me, for once Joe had nothing to say. He was well aware of how his disappearances affected me. He could easily see that I was sinking, and knew that his behavior had everything to do with it.

  He didn’t stop disappearing on binges, but he picked up the slack—he had no choice. Joey took care of the grocery shopping and errands for me when I couldn’t make it out the door during the day. He didn’t complain, but that only made me feel worse. My self-esteem was steadily eroding, and this gave the scolding voice in my head plenty more to say. Your husband is God-knows-where doing drugs, and you can’t even take care of your own children! It was a dreadful, downward spiral that soon left me almost completely housebound. I found excuses to have family and friends come see me instead of going out. The planning, fibbing, and hiding my condition exhausted me even further.

  In my mind, I thought that maybe having the kids with me all the time was the problem behind these attacks. That was my main fear—passing out or becoming incapacitated while they were in my care. So I asked my mother to come babysit so I could do some Christmas shopping alone. She knew nothing about my anxiety attacks or how days and days passed when I was unable to leave the house. A good five years into my marriage, I was still very much invested in being the good, responsible daughter, wife, and mother. I dreaded my mother’s disapproval. I looked fine, so she assumed everything was fine. There was no way I could tell her what was really going on.

  I parked my car in the Toys “R” Us lot and gave myself a pep talk. The kids aren’t here. You can do this! I told myself. You’ll be okay. I got myself into the store and filled a cart. Everything was going fine. And then it started again. Panic engulfed me. My heart started pounding, I couldn’t breathe, I felt like I was about to faint, throw up, and pass out all at once. I abandoned my cart in the store and ran out to my car.

  I would have done anything to keep this secret from my mother, but for the life of me I could not get out of that car and go into that store again. I sat in the parking lot, weeping, pounding the steering wheel in frustration, knowing that my mother was about to learn that her daughter literally could not function. For two hours I sat there ashamed, crying my heart out, willing myself to go back into that damn store, check out, and get the presents home. But I couldn’t. Finally, defeated, I drove home to face the music.

  My mother could see that something was wrong the minute I walked through the door.

  “What’s the matter, Mary Jo?”

  “I had to leave the store, Mom. I couldn’t stay. I have these panic attacks that come over me. I don’t know why, but I’ve been getting them a lot. I get so scared that I have to run outside.”

  She was concerned, not at all judgmental. “My goodness, how long has this been going on?”

  “A long time,” I choked out. “Probably six months or a year. Mom, it’s really bad.”

  “Well, honey, it’s hard with two little ones. It’s exhausting. Maybe you need a checkup?” My mother, who could at times be quite critical, was supportive and sweet, but the shame of living with a drug addict wouldn’t allow me to tell her what was really wrong. I felt like a ten-year-old who was hiding candy under her bed and immediately started backpedaling.

  “Yes . . . I’m just overtired . . . I’m sure I’ll be fine tomorrow. But, sure, I’ll get a checkup.”

  Being exposed, even to my own mother, had been mortifying. I vowed to fix myself somehow. It started with a trip to the local library—an ordeal in and of itself. “Freaking out,” I wrote on scrap paper. “What’s wrong with me?” I brushed aside the librarian’s offer to help and headed straight to the card catalog. I looked up “anxiety” and “panic.” I pulled a pile of medical and self-help books off the shelf and read up on panic attacks. They were totally in my head, I learned. I wasn’t really going to have a heart attack or die; it only felt like it. Talk therapy and drug therapy were the recommended treatments. It was a relief to know, in clinical terms, what was happening to me and that I hadn’t completely lost my mind. Still, I wasn’t ready to admit my troubles to anyone. I redoubled my efforts to pull myself together.

  That spring, Joey and I decided to build an addition onto our house. With two small children, we desperately needed more room. I was attempting to live normally and do regular things like remodel the house, even though my life was falling apart. Some more space and breathing room would do us all good. If I couldn’t make it out into the fresh air, I would at least expand my living quarters. The painter, a friend of ours from high school, was coming over to show us paint swatches one night after dinner, and I was racing around trying to clean up. I ran after Jessic
a, leaned over to pick her up, and discovered that my arms were frozen. I literally could not pick up my own daughter. For a moment I thought I was having another attack, but this was different.

  With an enormous effort I picked up the phone, punched in the number to the shop, and told Joe, “Something’s wrong with me. I can barely move. You have to come home—it’s an emergency.”

  He raced home. I had scared the hell out of him. “I can’t move! I can’t move!” I cried as he walked in the door. I literally crawled into bed. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me!” I cried hopelessly. The constant anxiety, the debilitating panic attacks, the agoraphobia, and now this inability to even move—my life had come to this. My nerves were shot and were now getting the best of me. My body was rebelling. I was done. “I need to see a doctor,” I told Joe. “I need to be on medication because I literally cannot function anymore.” The next morning, I picked up the phone book, thumbed through the yellow pages, called the psychiatrist nearest our house, and booked an appointment.

  When I arrived at the doctor’s, it all burst out of me. “I can’t leave the house. When I do, I’m shaking because I’m so scared. I never know when these attacks are going to come over me. I have two little kids who need to be taken to nursery school every day. I need to be able to run my errands. I’m thirty years old, and I am cracking up.”

  We had a short discussion about the nature and treatment of panic attacks, and I was prescribed antianxiety medication. I was also given a referral for behavioral therapy, which I immediately started.My problems didn’t disappear—likely because I didn’t mention my husband’s cocaine abuse—but I wasn’t expecting anyone to fix that. I was too ashamed to tell anyone that my picture-perfect life—the son and daughter, picket fence, family business, husband everybody loved—wasn’t really so perfect. That was an admission I was unwilling to make to my mother, my sisters, my friends, or even a doctor who had heard it all before.

  All I wanted was to be able to function again, and Xanax proved to be a good buffer. It was, in fact, a miracle drug in terms of stopping the panic attacks in their tracks. Medication didn’t address my underlying problems, of course, but it certainly managed the symptoms. I found the therapy sessions extremely helpful. I was given all kinds of tricks and tips to try when the panic attacks arrived. The crux of the training was realizing that I might not be able to control when an attack might arrive, but I was capable of learning to control my own reaction to it. I completed an eight-week behavior modification program, stayed on my meds, and slowly but steadily got out of the house and resumed holding things together.

  Once I was back to a reasonable level of functioning, I focused on a new plan. My thinking was that if we left our current neighborhood and moved back to Massapequa, the town where we had both grown up, we would be even closer to both our families and support systems. I could get Joey farther away from all the bad influences in Baldwin: the recording studio, his disreputable friends, the hangouts where he bought and did drugs. Paul was nearing school age, and it was the perfect time to settle somewhere new if we were ever going to make a move out of the school district. So I began a serious house-hunt. This is what an enabler does best—tries to put a Band-Aid on the problem instead of addressing the situation head-on.

  I found the perfect house for sale in Massapequa, right on the water and next door to the Biltmore Shores Beach Club. We loved swimming, boating, and all water sports, so the location alone was ideal. Not to mention that both our families’ homes were only blocks away, and we knew many of the neighbors on all the surrounding streets. We put a retainer on the house in Massapequa, and I prepared to put our cottage up for sale.

  Joey came home one night with great news. He had found a private buyer interested in the house who would pay cash for it. “How can he afford to do that?” I asked. Joey went into a whole explanation of how this buyer was a single guy, a successful entrepreneur, that our house was perfect for him, and blah blah blah. I met the guy. He seemed all right and gave me basically the same story. Hmmm, I thought, we won’t have to pay any real estate agent fees for the sale of this house. Great—let’s do it! That was easy. I proceeded to get on with the major cleanup, toss-out, and packing that came with ten years of life in one house. It was a huge job, but I was motivated and excited. We were going to make a fresh start.

  When moving day arrived, Joey and I had an appointment midmorning at our lawyer’s office to close on the Massapequa house. I rose at dawn and raced around, packing last-minute boxes and loading our cars with things we’d need immediately at the new house. Eventually, I glanced at my watch and found my husband in his garage. “Come on, let’s go! We have to get over to Mike Rindenow’s office. Where’s the money, Joey? The guy gave you a cashier’s check, right?”

  “Ahhhh . . . let’s go inside and talk for a minute,” Joey said. He looked guilty and nervous. I followed him into the cottage, dodging all the boxes stacked in every room, impatient and anxious to get moving. He sat me down on the bare floor of the living room, where the imprints from the legs of my coffee table remained. He then walked across the room, as far away from me as he could get, and slumped to the floor, leaning up against a blank wall. He was trapped with nowhere to go. I knew something was up, but nothing could have prepared me for what came out of my husband’s mouth. “It’s gone, Mary Jo. There is no money.” He couldn’t even look at me when he said these words. I started to shake. I thought I was going to vomit.

  “What do you mean, it’s gone? Where did it go?” Well, it turned out that Joey had signed over the deed to our house to his cocaine dealer because he owed him so much money. As the story came out, I wanted to kill him right then and there in our empty living room. We were closing on the new house in a couple of hours, and there was no money! The Xanax came in real handy that day as I tried to absorb this blow.

  The endless scrambling around and lying had caught up with Joey this time. He cried. He was sorry. He would fix it. So he went to see Enabler Number Two: my father-in-law. His father was shocked and disappointed, of course, but he didn’t want to see his daughter-in-law and grandchildren homeless, so he offered us a solution. He would give us the $50,000 that we had agreed to put down on the new house, but Joe would lose his ownership shares in the business. From that point on, Joe would just be an employee.

  My husband signed the papers and we got the new house, but he threw his whole future away because drugs had become more important to him than his family. You would think that would have been a major wake-up call to him, but, incredibly, it wasn’t.

  It took weeks for me to recover from the shock of the lost $50,000. Fortunately, I had plenty to keep me busy. I was racing around unpacking, setting up the new house, socializing with the new neighbors, arranging for Paul to enter school, and the million and one other details that come with moving. In our first couple of months at the new house, Joey really lost control. He pulled a couple more disappearing acts, and these were major binges. He dragged home looking sick and lost— skinny, with dark circles under his eyes, unshaven. He was unraveling right before my eyes.

  My mother stopped by one morning for coffee. As we sat in my new kitchen overlooking the water, she said, “Joey’s doing drugs, isn’t he?”

  “How did you know?” I asked, while I cursed myself. I had been making excuses for so long about how hard Joey was working, big jobs, late nights—now the secret was out. It was actually a tremendous relief; the game was over. I couldn’t hide anymore.

  A few weeks later, when Joey disappeared yet again, I felt an inexplicable calm descend upon me. This is it . . . the end, I thought. I located a treatment center in the nearby town of Amityville and called to speak to a counselor. “My husband is a cocaine addict and has been for years. Can you help him?” I asked. After a great deal of discussion about Joey’s habit and endless insurance documentation, the man promised that a bed would be held open. He cautioned me that Joey would need to remain at their facility for at least three weeks. “I’l
l be bringing him in the minute he walks in the door,” I promised.

  Then I dialed Cass at the garage. Joey wasn’t there, of course. “Dad, we’re going to lose Joey if we don’t do something. He’s going to die if we don’t get him help. He needs treatment, and he’ll need to take some time off work.” I wasn’t asking—I was telling. Cass had an urgent family discussion with his wife and Bobby and called me right back. “Do it,” he said.

  The next call was to my own parents. “I’m putting Joe into a drug treatment center,” I told them. “I’ll need you to watch the kids while I’m gone if you could, please.” Of course, they agreed. My mother came right over and picked up Paul and Jessica for an overnight.

  I was well over the age of thirty, but was finally, at long last, acting like a real grown-up. I packed a bag for my husband and waited for him to wander home. When he came in, as he always did, with his tail between his legs, I didn’t yell or cry or reproach him. I sat him down and said, “Joey, you are going to rehab. Today. If you don’t go, I am leaving you. Today.”

  He definitely heard something new in my voice. “But my job . . . I have to work . . . ” he started.

  “The treatment center is waiting for you to arrive. All the arrangements have been made. I’ve already spoken to your parents and mine about this. We are all in agreement.” That statement really threw him—he knew very well how invested I was in keeping up appearances at all costs. In fact, he’d been counting on that weakness for many years. But I was no longer going to play that game; I had no reason to. My ugly secret had been exposed.