The terror pushed through me from my core—not in thought, not in sequence or data, but as a fiery heat in the center of me, rushing out into my arms and feet. My voice rose steady and calm, with all the power I had behind it: “Ava. Walk to me now.” I smiled desperately to pull her to me. Oh child, my dearest baby, please God come here.
She walked immediately to me. As soon as she was within my reach I grabbed her, pulled her through the railing, and held her to me as my eyes burned. I rushed down the stairs and out the side door so nobody would see my face.
Back in the car, I didn’t speak of it. If someone would have tried, I would have flatly refused to address it. But I knew I had almost lost my whole life, right there, and my child had nearly lost hers, and it was my fault. Again. I was drinking. I was not paying attention. I was chatting with strangers in the buzz of the day and sunlight.
Recalling that moment, of her little body hovering in the sun above an angry river, and me in my flip-flops, tan and half drunk, pulling her to me in burning desperation, I squeezed my eyes shut and flinched, noticeably. I knew I must have looked freakish sitting on a park bench, shaking my head with my eyes shut. But it was involuntary.
I drew a deep, quick breath at the crack of the image against my heart. When those memories came, they started like knives in my mind, and then sat like boulders on my chest. Like a thousand pounds of granite grief. It seemed they would crush me, so I called Good News Jack, my only source of new ideas.
“How do I live with the memories of what I’ve done to my kids, Jack? The images. How do I fucking live with the images?” I told him how twenty times a day they jumped in and out of my mind to thrash and stab and mutilate, and I told him how at night they moved in and set up camp. And how with them came a tidal wave of shame, of agonizing regret, of holy time lost, to never be regained, sweet innocence doused in kerosene—ignored, unrecognized, and by my very own hand. How fucking could I. That was the part I could not face. That I, I was that person. And I didn’t see, but then I did, and then I could not look away.
“We call those nightmare memories. All sober alcoholics have them. Lot of people drink again over them.” He spoke calmly, and I imagined he was out on his front porch, smoking a cigarette and watching his kids ride their bikes.
“I can’t live knowing what I did,” I said. “I can’t.”
“I know you can’t. That’s why we’re not relying on you anymore. Remember what I said? If God only gave you things you could handle, what the fuck would you need God for? You can’t handle anything. Look at yourself.” His words were irritatingly factual.
“Why are you always so full of good news?”
“Janelle, the way you will survive is by using your experience to help other alcoholic mothers who did the same shit to their kids. That’s your job now. We don’t care what YOU think about your past. If you really feel bad, stick around and repair it, with your children and the world.”
“But I’m a terrible mother.”
“Of course you’re a terrible mother,” and he cackled in a way that reminded me what a long and insane road he too had walked.
“But you aren’t gonna get any better by talking to me,” and then he hung up.
I replayed Jack’s words as I kicked a sheet of sand over the concrete, watching my foot slide around, making little mounds and knocking them over again. From that moment forward, every time one of those memories arose, I clung with all my strength to the idea that I might help another alcoholic someday with what otherwise seemed entirely meaningless destruction.
This was my version of “positive self-talk.” It didn’t erase the self-loathing. It didn’t melt the regret. It didn’t soften the blow of revulsion, the terror I felt at the mere idea of what could have happened or who could have been hurt, but it brought a microscopic surrender, another tiny letting go of my need to understand, control, and find relief—it gave me just enough to trust that someday, something will make those years worth living.
Jack’s voice ran through my mind a hundred times a day. “We don’t hang out in morbid self-reflection. It’s self-pity with a better polish. Remember the duck and the fire hydrant? Fuck your beliefs. Focus on what’s in front of you.”
So I looked up at Rocket and watched as he balanced with his arms stretched out. He was concentrating on his feet and teetering on the corner of the monkey bars, and I wanted to tell him, “Be careful, son,” but I didn’t, for fear it would distract him, knock him off course. Plus, I knew he was alright, so I smiled, and nodded at that lady too, because my son was safe, and she would never know what that means.
• • •
One hour after my serene epiphany in the park and deep gratitude for my sobriety, I walked into my house with a screaming baby on my hip, two bickering children, and approximately nine bags of unknown origin hanging from my body. I set it all down in the entryway, shut the door, and read a text from Mac letting me know he was stuck in traffic and wouldn’t be home for another hour, at which time I remembered there was some sort of tee-ball nonsense that night.
Of course he’s not here, I thought, feeling the weight of our offspring, a vague loneliness, and resentment as I walked into the kitchen and saw a day’s worth of dishes strewn across the counters and toys throughout the living room.
Good God.
My actual face ached from exhaustion. My cheekbones throbbed and my eyes stung. The dog scratched at the back door. Georgia was hungry and had just pooped. Ava and Rocket had ignored me again, and I was alone in the maelstrom of kids at dinnertime. As I looked around at the laundry on the couch, the smear of jam on the floor, and the pile of Mac’s tools on the kitchen table, I felt that old familiar rush, the frantic sense of being out of control—and that if I didn’t fix it, it would all collapse.
The next thing I knew, I was yelling in my children’s faces, “What is wrong with you? Why can’t anyone HELP ME?!”
I saw red, as if a veil had fallen over me, casting the whole room in shades of fury. As I screamed, my mind’s eye hovered in the corner of the room, staring down at the woman who was so mad she was spitting. “Stop, Janelle, this is wrong.” The voice nudged, poked me in the ribs from a place that knew better, and I knew the voice was right, but I could not stop. The more I yelled, the more I wanted to yell, as if the words weren’t doing a damn thing, so I grew madder and louder, and the words seemed to get closer to exhausting the anger in me, but they never quite worked.
They did nothing but explode in quick, useless bursts.
Still, I thought I was going to get through to them, that my anger would change something. I thought I’d get some power and convince them to improve. I stormed around the house in a tantrum, barking orders. In glances, I noticed my children avoiding my eyes. I noticed their silence.
But I was committed. I was angry.
Or I simply could not find my way back.
The moment Mac stepped across the threshold in his five-year-old canvas beige overalls, patched with denim blue squares at the knees, all three children were squealing in delight and hanging from his arms in unchecked celebration of their real parent. I watched as they rejoiced in his arrival, while, I imagined, lamenting mine. Well what do you expect, Janelle? You’re such a goddamn yeller. But that motherfucker, he’s never here. If he were here like me, he’d yell too. But I knew our children would never see that. I felt wildly unappreciated and unseen, as if I were doing the grunt work while he stole all the glory.
Now I suppose he’s going to want to shower, as opposed to taking over parenting so I can lie on my bed with the bedroom door shut.
Sure enough, off he went to the shower after giving me a kiss and eating something infuriatingly healthy, like an apple or raw almonds. While I turned the taco meat in the pan for dinner, I wondered why raw almonds were about the last food I’d reach for after a long day, and determined that if I incorporated more Mac-style food choices into my diet, I too would stand lean and muscular before the bathroom mirror.
�
��Hey, Janelle! Come here!” He appeared to be hollering from the shower, and the playfulness in his voice gave me a rush of desire and dread, because damn he’s attractive but also, No way in hell am I having shower sex right now.
“What’s up?” I asked, leaning against the bathroom door, thinking there was nothing I wanted more in that moment than for one more person to need something from me.
“So,” he declared, “I bought some go-kart frames from Phil.”
“You did what now?”
Assuming I didn’t understand the actual sentence as opposed to the content, he repeated himself, explaining that he had spent $600 on metal frames, which he and Phil would equip with lawnmower engines, and then the kids would ride them around in circles on dirt tracks. For fun, apparently.
Phil was a man who lived down the street and looked like a garden gnome. He was hands-down my least favorite garden gnome because he evidently had very little going on, and would invite Mac over every few days to stand in his garage and stare at things while discussing, I now knew, lawnmower ride-along toys.
“You fucking did what?” I understood the words coming out of his mouth, but I could not comprehend his decision to voluntarily add “build go-karts” to the never-ending task list of our lives.
I uttered confused bursts of total derision, then walked out of the bathroom, because he had turned off the shower and I couldn’t bear the sight of his face.
I questioned how bare metal frames that might someday turn into “karts” (with a “k”)—which, by the way, would never happen, because we could hardly manage to pick up the dog shit from the backyard, let alone complete arbitrary entertainment projects—became his area of focus while I contemplated my recent re-enrollment in graduate school, work, nursing a baby, driving two kids around the county a few times a day, bills, the house, the growing clarity of Rocket’s dyslexia, the outgrown clothes in the kids’ dressers, the dog’s training, and the emotional and psychological well-being of our almost-tween daughter.
I dropped onto our bed and closed my eyes, leaving the ground beef simmering on the stove unattended, thinking, Maybe, just maybe, if all goes well, the fucking house will burn down.
I was two years sober, and while Mac and I worked to build a home, a chasm carved itself between us, growing more massive as my head cleared, as I got to know him, and myself, as sober humans. Life was opening for me in a thousand directions just as my marriage contracted into thankless redundancy.
I had barely known Mac without the dizzying balm of evening cocktails, and I certainly had never tried raising a family in such aridity. What did it matter if we were horrible together before? I was drunk anyway.
But now, sober, I felt the rift completely. The way his interests and sense of humor were not necessarily mine, the way his ambition and concerns were in conflict with mine, and the way he spent money, money I assumed he had stashed away. The way we made love, the way he glared at me on Saturday mornings when I suggested we do chores, as if I were a nagging mother.
I felt a deep and terrifying loneliness in our marriage, a descending awareness that I was becoming a servant to my family and nothing else, and I would spend the next twenty years in that condition.
I often thought of our “wedding” on the courthouse grass on that cold, gray day. I thought of the wedding dress picture I had clipped from a magazine when I was eight years old, and I thought of my friends’ marriages, the way their husbands surely discussed monetary decisions with them and acted like grown-ups, investing in stocks and buying property and getting medical degrees. I assumed they made all kinds of choices together and were honest and clear with one another, and the thought made me think back to Mac talking behind my back to his mother and sisters (they were, for a time, understandably not elated about my existence), and the times he lied to me by omission—You know, if I just don’t tell her, she can’t accuse me of lying.
I felt a panic come over me, of distance, of not-real love, of un-love, even, of lies, of being left alone, of getting sober for what? This? I thought of the marriage that began on that dreary day—we were just kids—had there ever been real love? Nah, we simply had a kid together and got stuck. We didn’t begin correctly. We wouldn’t finish correctly. I mentally sorted through the freedom he had—to drive to work alone each day, to sleep while the baby cries, to not think about the things I thought about, to simply not be the mother.
Within moments, he morphed into a stranger.
Is this what marriage is? I want nothing of this.
I roared again, this time at Mac, and more unchecked than before, because he was an adult. He stood silently, leaning against a doorframe, still wrapped in his bath towel, for my thoughts had progressed from go-kart to divorce before he even had time to get dressed.
“Do you think it’s your money and my money?” I shouted.
“No.” His head was still slightly down.
“Well, obviously you do, since you think it’s fine to spend that kind of money on useless fucking metal! I would never do that!”
He shifted his weight against the doorway, looking at me from under a furrowed brow. I knew the look. He was waiting it out.
“Do you have any idea how much I do every day while you are at work, Mac?” I reported in long form the play-by-play of each of my days, my voice growing hoarse from the yelling, my body intoxicated with rage. When I erupted at Mac, it only ended when he or I physically left the house, or a stranger came over, forcing me to behave on account of my pride. Occasionally Mac roared back. But mostly, he waited.
My rage would ebb, and I would apologize, again.
My family would just look at me.
You know, Janelle, you could just jump off the crazy train before riding it all the way to the bitter end.
• • •
That night, when the house was gray and quiet and my body untouched, my day became a nightmare memory: Who are you, Janelle, thinking you can raise kids? Who are you, thinking you can be a mother and wife in a decent marriage? I saw the woman’s face while she yelled, the woman pathetically trying not to destroy it all again, and I cringed. Here I am again, hurting people. Here I am again, unable to control myself. Here I am again, the tiny psycho chasing her brother around with a kitchen knife.
I thought of my mother’s words, “You treat me like dirt.”
She was correct. She is correct.
Lying there, I recalled daydreaming at school about how my mother was going to pay for Christmas, or the heating, or visualizing the violence I wanted to inflict on the bullies who were mean to my brother on the bus. He was huge, but so gentle. I was tiny, but insane.
In junior high we had a smoke-spewing minivan with wood siding. I’d ask my mother to drop me off down the road to save me from embarrassment—and the other kids from pollution inhalation. She always obliged, and it helped until after school, when the other kids’ parents would show up, and I’d be sitting on a wall in front of the school as the sun went down and the principal left, concerned about me.
“It’s okay!” I’d say cheerfully. “My mom is coming. She’ll be here any minute.” It was a partial lie. I knew she’d come. I didn’t know if it would be any minute.
As the evening grew cooler, I no longer feared she was dead. I feared I might kill her myself. When she finally pulled up, I’d shriek at her for leaving me like that.
She’d tell me all the things she had done that day, and with a lilting sadness she’d say, “I’m doing the best I can,” but this would throw me into full fury because now I felt guilty and what kind of thing is that to say?
“You treat me like dirt,” was what she’d say after I yelled, which seemed true, but also, unfair. It seemed unfair to pick up your child late, then say “I try the best I can,” as if that were some sort of excuse, and then say I was mean to her. I wished she knew how I sat in school daydreaming about her.
She was always trying, but never changing, and at some point one gets sick of the “trying” and wants the “doing,
” and also: Why are we feeling sorry for you? You are the mother.
And so I raged, because I was tired.
I was worn out by all the talking, the worries, the desire to trust, to know when my people were going to show up, so I transformed into a ball of red, to get some power. To get some control. To get some peace.
“Tell Margaret to go home,” she’d say, and I’d hate her to my bones.
Later, though, in bed, I’d open my journal and write detailed updates of her marriage, and how much I loved her, and how much I wished she could hear me, and I’d wonder if she’d remembered to lock all our doors so we’d all be safe.
Maybe I was born without a moral compass. Maybe I’m sober, and I’m still without a moral compass.
An image I’d seen on social media by the editor of one of those eternally peaceful parenting magazines popped into my mind. It said: “Your words become the voices in your children’s heads.” My God.
The thought they would be better off without me skipped across my mind, and then, I should drink again just to relieve my children of me.
As soon as the thought came, I knew it was not true. I knew it was the sweet whisper of alcoholism, the disease getting tougher every day, and wilier as it waited for the moment I agreed to believe it again.
The next day, when I told Jack about my yelling, he said, “You’re a bully. You’re a bully and you’re trying to control everyone. You have power over those kids and you abuse it.” A bully, huh? Once again, I wanted to suggest he walk away from me at a fast pace for a very long time, but I was still desperate, perhaps more so, because I knew alcohol didn’t work, and would never work again. To drink was to die, but there would be no relief before the passing. I could die of alcoholism or learn to live sober.
Why is this fuckin’ guy always right? The bully charge was true, though nobody had ever urged the sick reality up to the surface of my brain: that I felt I owned my kids, that I could treat them how I damn well pleased. In fact, I possibly felt that way about the rest of the world as well.
I'm Just Happy to Be Here Page 19