I'm Just Happy to Be Here

by Janelle Hanchett

  He came two days before his due date in a birth that felt like the sunrise. When I walked in the door of our home I knew life was going to be different. This son. This perfect son. Nobody could ruin this life, not even me.

  Part Two

  7

  Failure That Isn’t Funny

  I woke from a few moments of sleep, or maybe just shut eyes, shaking. Not the shaking of a chill, but a quiver I couldn’t quite feel. It drove me up and out and around the house in circles, though my body perhaps stayed on the couch, drinking leftover alcohol out of a coffee cup and rocking back and forth, like the baby on my left who wanted breakfast. It was as if the blood in my veins wouldn’t settle down, as if it were pulsing out of me rather than through me, scratching the walls for escape, tossing me around the room and into every insane thought, regret, and memory of the past twenty-four or forty-eight hours, or maybe my entire life.

  It drove me outside for yet another cigarette, the twentieth or fiftieth in the past two days, but it was worse in the sun, in the flickering leaves and slamming roar of passing cars. I squinted and hid from my neighbors behind our house, pulling that cigarette with all my strength, but it didn’t have what I needed.

  I fed my baby, Rocket. This was the only variation of “Rocketship” Ava would allow. For an entire year, none of us had the heart to tell her we weren’t rock stars. The name grew on us while we waited for her to change her mind.

  When Ava shuffled into the living room in her flannel pajamas, I turned the channel to PBS because it was a decent learning channel with soft colors and slow images. I hated the cartoons that screamed and slammed her little mind with fluorescent images and rapid-fire, vapid dialogue. She was five. I wanted her to see wholesome things.

  Mac and I had been on cocaine for two and a half days. We went out on Thursday to have a few drinks. Then it was Sunday at eight a.m., and we had been awake the entire time.

  But this Sunday was Rocket’s first birthday, and I had an enormous party planned. I had bought an outfit for him weeks before—a deep blue button-down shirt, black pinstriped pants, black leather shoes, and black socks to match.

  Seven hours until the party, I thought.

  Maybe I can feel better by then. Maybe I can sleep.

  But the quiver would never let me rest, and I knew it. I considered drinking enough to pass out for an hour or two before the party, but then I would be drunk at the party, though I probably wouldn’t wake up anyway. After spun-out days, sleep, when it finally comes, is cavernous.

  I had decorations, streamers, and presents. I had Brie and blue cheese and baguettes and figs. I have it all ready, son. I prepared it all, thinking of you, my boy, and loving you, with your endless blue eyes and curls of strawberry red hair that stick to your forehead when you sweat. (I always say you got the red from Daddy’s beard.)

  I can’t do it. I can’t show up like this.

  I resolved to cancel, then immediately remembered how grandparents and great-grandparents were coming from other towns, and twenty friends. It was too late.

  Here I am again.

  Six months before, when I felt myself slipping back into drinking after Rocket’s birth, I enrolled in a master’s program in English to “challenge my brain,” thinking, Surely, I must be bored. Surely, my vanilla admin job is driving me to drink.

  When the red wine continued to pour despite rampant critical theory courses and Marxist analyses of lost generation texts, when I looked down and noticed my very own hand pouring that wine, night after night, despite continued daily declarations of not tonight, not tonight, not tonight, the thought came to me: Janelle, maybe you are an alcoholic.

  I thought of my father, newly in recovery. I thought of when we were sure he was going to die from alcoholism. I thought of his brother, my uncle, who did die from it. I thought about how those D.A.R.E. cops always told us alcoholism is genetic.

  And then I thought, If I am, so be it.

  Because by then, the consequences of not drinking were far greater than anything that could have happened from drinking. Internally, that is, because I drank to repair my inner self. The external penalties for my habit were damn near imperceptible in the shadow of the colossal misery that was sobriety. I drank because sobriety was intolerable, and that intolerability arose from within me, slowly from my guts, increasing with every passing sober hour, until I found myself drinking again, only to soothe the wild discomfort. If not the bottle, it seemed a bullet to the brain would be the only viable alternative.

  Alcohol was my most reliable friend, offering me with every warm hot kiss that which the rest of the world promised but never delivered: peace and meaning.

  I knew this somewhere. I knew I drank to fix the unfixable, and I knew it when my outer life was “perfect” and nothing had changed. Here I am with a good job, a good house, two perfectly good children, physical health, a scintillating life in graduate school, and I still cannot stop drinking.

  I imagined my childhood must have really fucked me up. Psychiatry was the obvious answer. I began seeking help to fix my insides, thinking, If I just get happy, I won’t need alcohol anymore. But on the night I met Ben, the cocaine dealer who delivered straight to our front door, I wasn’t wondering what was wrong with me anymore. I was simply buying more.

  • • •

  My crying on the morning of Rocket’s first birthday was unhinged.

  “What’s wrong, Mama?” Ava asked. She had changed from pajamas into a green Tinkerbell costume with a tulle skirt and jeans underneath. Her eyes were wide with concern beneath unbrushed waves of blonde.

  “Oh, nothing, sweetie,” I said, but I didn’t mask the lie. I was still in jeans. My eyes were set in deep black circles. I said it through gasps and tears.

  Mac was at work. I tried to imagine him there, wet and muddy, punching the hide off a lamb, handling knives with vibrating hands. It felt like the morning I left him at the college field trip when he tried to smile.

  What kind of fucking people have we become?

  I feared he would die. I feared he would cut himself, or fall asleep in front of the meat saw, or flinch while killing a cow with a shotgun.

  I called him, and said words I knew wouldn’t do a damn thing. “Mac, this is insanity. You can’t stay. I know you feel like I do. Please come home.”

  “Alright. I just have to finish cutting this meat.” I was correct. He was standing next to a meat saw coming down off a three-night cocaine binge, and I realized it had gotten so bad he agreed to come home.

  • • •

  I wanted it to be just right and nice for you, son, the cake I ordered from the fancy bakery, food from the nicest store in town, the recipes I chose a week ago. I wanted it all to come together in this exact moment, and for me to be there, and for all the guests to celebrate you, but instead I am sitting on a couch, shaking but not shaking, reeking of dirt of the internal kind, and wondering if anybody would notice if I just drove away. Maybe into that fucking cement lake in front of me.

  I stared at the shifting water, smoked another cigarette, and wondered how much money we had stolen to make the last three nights happen, how many checks I had written to myself with money I couldn’t cover to put in the ATM machine at three a.m. to get cash out, knowing they would only bounce and be deducted from the same account from which I was trying to pull the cash. One more bag, just one more bag.

  With renewed strength rising from self-disgust, from a will to never repeat the hell I was then living, I decided not to cancel the party. I will get through today to make this pain mean something. Right now it all changes. This failure, this coke-addicted drunk fuck of a mother in a suburban home on her son’s first birthday. It will not happen in vain.

  This is it. This is the day I learn.

  It’s okay, now. It’s okay, son.

  I meant it. I had the party because I knew it was the end, and I succeeded. Nobody knew, because I smiled and laughed and only collapsed after the last guest had driven away.

 
; • • •

  Three weeks later, nine a.m. rolled around on the day Ava was supposed to attend the birthday party of a little girl at her school. I didn’t wake up like the day of Rocket’s first birthday, because I was already awake. Still awake, still high. The quiver remained.

  It occurred to me we had no gift. I considered telling Ava she couldn’t go, but it was the first birthday party she’d ever been invited to, and I couldn’t disappoint her. Not again, not now.

  “Hey Ava, let’s pick something out of your closet to give to your friend, and I will buy you another one tomorrow. I promise. We will go tomorrow. Is that okay? Can we do that?” My words rushed together in idiotic cocaine excitement.

  “Sure,” she said. “That’s fine, Mama.” And she ran up the stairs with her blonde hair bouncing around her, and me, behind, nearly dead weight.

  “You’re so awesome! Thank you for being so patient and giving, Ava!” In her closet, I found a silk rainbow streamer. I grabbed it and thought the girl would like it because they went to a Montessori school and that was a good hippie gift.

  “How about this?” I asked. “Can we give her this?” I held it up and tried to smile.

  “Okay, Mama.” Ava said. She didn’t even look disappointed. She didn’t even look at me like I was shoving all my words together or stinking of cigarette smoke or scratching scabs on my shins because I couldn’t stop picking.

  • • •

  Ava put on a pink dress with tiny white smocked flowers around the chest while I wrapped the gift and snorted a line in my bedroom before getting Ava into the car and driving to Woodland, a town twenty minutes away. Mac stayed home with Rocket. He was missing work. He did that more often now.

  He had offered to drive, but I didn’t trust him. I was as loaded as he was, but I never trusted anybody to drive as carefully as I did when intoxicated. People were idiots. They got swept up in the euphoria. They got carried away in the feeling. They forgot it wasn’t real. They forgot that you have to focus on signs, on sober reality—signals of truth—to differentiate between what you see and what’s actually happening. Whenever a friend in high school was tripping too far from us on some psychedelic, I’d say, “Look at the clock. The clock is always sober.” It was a grounding device. And I thought I was a master at that game.

  So I looked at the clock, double-checked my seatbelt, lights, and mirrors, made sure I had my purse and license, moved my baggie from my wallet to a CD case on the floor. I had to take it with me, because I knew I’d need it before I returned home. I drove deliberately, exactly at the speed limit, focusing three times harder than I normally did, watching the lines and speedometer, studying the cars around me in a routine I knew like air. I hated driving drunk and on drugs, and every subsequent morning I would shudder in shame and horror at what I had done, but I knew in the moment I must minimize risk of swerving or speeding or missing somebody’s sudden turn or braking. I refused to turn on the radio. It would interrupt my attention. Ava tried to talk to me, excited about the party, but her voice was like the chattering of a squirrel. In my mind, it was a stream of impossible sound.

  “Honey, please let me focus on driving.” She quieted down for a moment, then started back up again. I tuned her out the best I could and kept my eyes on the road and clock.

  I parked unreasonably far away from the house, put on sunglasses, and walked my daughter to her first birthday party. I was high, half-drunk, reeking of cigarettes, with a stolen gift and a little girl holding my hand, elated, wearing a pink dress and pink Western cowboy boots. I reminded her I would buy another streamer.

  “I know you will, Mama.” She smiled at me, and for a moment I felt better. She believed I would do it, so I could believe that too.

  The girl’s mother invited me in when we arrived at the doorstep, but I mumbled something about an appointment. I told her how sorry I was to miss the party. Then I walked alone back to the car in the relentless sunlight to do another line on the back of the CD case while parked right there on the street. I needed it to get back home. I wondered how I was going to pick up Ava in three hours, but set that aside as a concern of the future.

  As I put the CD case away, I thought of her laughing and playing at the party without her mom, while all the other mothers stood around smiling at their kids’ antics and games, and I felt so blackened with my own sin I slammed my fist into the steering wheel and dash until I couldn’t anymore. I lit a cigarette and drove, telling myself this had to be the end.

  Please, God, let it be the end.

  • • •

  “I was not fired. I was placed on a mental health leave.” That is what I told my friends when they asked why I wasn’t working anymore.

  “Oh, I needed to take a semester off to focus on my mental health.” That is what I told my family when they asked why I wasn’t in graduate school anymore.

  My mother moved out of our big house on the lake, and Mac and I were supposed to move out too, but we decided to leave a couple of months after my mother. None of us could afford the big house anymore. It was 2007 and everything was tanking.

  Two weeks after she moved out, my mother knocked on our front door one Saturday morning and told me she was going to take the kids to the park. I knew this was not true because it was seven a.m., raining, and January, but I told her okay because I wanted to go back to bed. And I knew somewhere they were better off without me.

  Back in bed, I told myself it would only be a couple of days.

  • • •

  Two days later, I reminded myself they would be back soon, but I told my mother, “I’m just too sick to have the kids, Mom.”

  “I agree, Janelle.” She said softly.

  “I just need some time to get better, Mom.”

  “You know I’ll do anything for you.” The sweetness in her voice was relieving this time. Her unquestioning devotion. Her acceptance. I knew I would get what I wanted that day—wide open space for addiction.

  By “sick” I meant “what my shrinks told me,” and I had seen many as I sought answers for my inability to quit drinking, as I sought answers for where exactly all my “potential” went. How does a smart, middle-class honors student with a “good head on her shoulders” end up unable to quit drinking and pumping herself full of powdered stimulants?

  That was my question for the professionals, and in response, they told me I had borderline personality disorder (which seemed accurate but is basically incurable, unfortunately for me), bipolar II (when they asked me about mood swings I said, “Um, yeah. I’m a coke addict,” but they gave me the diagnosis and anti-psychotics anyway), chronic depression (obviously), and PTSD (Oh, come the fuck on, that’s just ridiculous).

  The psychiatrist prescribed seven psychotropic medications but never explained the source of trauma that ruined me. Walking out of his office, I felt myself fully armed with the reason for my drinking, drugs, and failure.

  I’m broken, I thought. I’m a broken insane person. It’s not my fault. I’m self-medicating.

  Nobody mentioned I might just be an alcoholic.

  Lamictal. Klonopin. Seroquel. Neurontin. Effexor. Zoloft. Ambien. I took them all, mostly. I took them all, usually. I often took the Ambien and always the Klonopin. (It’s not my fault. I have mental illnesses.)

  The therapists fixated on events of my childhood, particularly those of a sexual nature. Another one spoke of my father’s absence. During our next session, we discussed how my mother and I had an “unstable” relationship that left my personhood ill-defined. I never knew I was so damaged by those things. But now that you mention it, doc, I do feel damaged. I especially felt damaged when people came at me with criticisms of the way I was living.

  If what happened to me had happened to you, you’d be living this way, too, I’d think.

  Just try to tell me to clean up my act again. Just try to fucking tell me.

  • • •

  Mac and I began frequenting a tiny, dark, terrifying hovel belonging to a man I called Cha
rlie, although that was not his name. When we arrived, he had recently spray-painted the walls of his kitchen with unrelated German words. His girlfriend was unimpressed. There was always a large selection of people there, none of whom we knew. I wasn’t even entirely sure why we were there, but we always stayed awhile, often talking to half-naked people on a bed.

  The children were still with my mother. I reiterated to Charlie and the half-naked people how very sick I was, and how beautiful and smart my children were. They listened, spellbound, warm in cocaine compassion.

  One night after returning from Charlie’s, in the kitchen of our home, I couldn’t stop shaking my head and saying strange things. I gently tapped my head against the wall. By hour one, Mac was weeping, but I couldn’t stop the tapping.

  “Janelle, please don’t stay like this. Please come back. Please be okay,” I heard him talking. His voice was slowed down and I thought I could see the sound waves. His mouth and the sound were not lining up, so I merely observed him.

  I stood by the dining table in the corner of the kitchen in the early morning light, and I saw him looking into my face. I knew he was seeing me insane, and I wanted to be better for him, but I could not.