Infactorium

Yesterday and today I attended Gabriel’s visitation and funeral. It was good to be with family. It was good to be of service. I had an uncle staying with me. I drove to and from the airport three times in three days. My family was strong and still vulnerable. I have much to learn from them.

It was a beautiful ceremony. Catholic, but without pretense to preach dogma. Simple ceremony, simple words. When we reached the grace itself, it was in a field of children’s graves. It never occurred to me that I’d see a field of stones with only one date on them. It is among the most desolate things I can ever remember seeing.

I am tired of all of this dying; too many loved ones have gone recently. I look for something regenerative. Someone I’ve been talking to about the program is making wonderful progress, though they cannot necessarily see it yet. It is so hard to see the forward steps we make at the beginning. Sometimes our most meaningful steps forward feel like retreating: admitting failure; honest defeat; accepting that we haven’t lived up to our own expectations. I wish I knew how to convey what illimitable triumphs these are.

I hope I learn from these tremendous people in my life. From leveled, ashen-faced parents and grandparents, burying their own. From a lost and weary new traveler on the road to sobriety.

Part of me wants to rage. Part to laugh. Part to weep. Each part has had its hour. And hours will turn to days. Wounds scab and slough and scar. I share in the strange majesty of each signpost passed with a friend new to the road I’ve been walking. A head bowed by grief rises with resolve.  And I take another step. And it’s easier than the last one. I am not alone.

Some of the signature conditions of the alcoholic are defensiveness, self-righteousness, deflection and projection. Obviously, it’s not only alcoholics who feel and behave this way, and equally obviously, each alcoholic is an individual, and expresses things a bit differently. However, my experience is tha nearly every alcoholic exhibits those behaviors in ways that are troubling to themselves and the people around them. Troubling is a vast understatement. These behaviors, while present in every person to small degrees, rise to truly toxic and destructive levels in alcoholics.

And, like most of the difficulties we alcoholics get ourselves into, they don’t go away just because we stop drinking. Our relationships don’t get magically repaired. Our debts don’t get magically paid. Our bodies don’t magically recover from the abuse we inflicted upon them. Each of these things takes time, patience, perseverance, and slow, deliberate toil. The sort of thing that humans everywhere do to negotiate their way through the world. The hardest of these things, for me, has been to learn how to manage my emotions in a new way. A manner that is of service to me, still honors the emotions themselves, and the circumstances that gave rise to them, and doesn’t alienate people I care about.

Yesterday was one of those days. I went and spent the afternoon in the hospital with my cousins, my aunt and uncle, and the two-day-old corpse of their infant son. Gabriel is a tiny, blue ragdoll. They were making casts of his hands and feet. Everyone was numb. My cousin held this tiny corpse to her body like a living child. A nurse was there. This is a new method of grieving, I was informed. It’s supposed to alleviate trauma in the parents, I suppose. I found it deeply unsettling.

I spoke to my sponsor, and to another friend. I cried. I shuddered. I took a walk and then a bath. I ate. All things appropriate for the circumstance. Then I got into a stupid debate about flirting on twitter. A debate I had no business being in. No one was looking for my opinion. No one asked for it. I was the only man in a conversation with several women. I was polite, but frustrated. After about a half an hour, I gave up. I apologized for making any comments at all.

Not because I have nothing to say on the matter. Not because I have no right to talk there. I do, and I do. But yesterday wasn’t the time. I wasn’t ably separating the spheres of my emotions. Normally, I can. I have learned to. Frustrations from work do not get taken out on people in my personal life. Personal difficulties don’t get dragged to work. Learning to appropriately manage my emotions was complicated and difficult, but for the most part I learned to do it pretty well.

I stop and think before I speak, most of the time. I don’t make blanket assertions that I don’t have evidence for, unless they’re plainly opinion. And when I am upset, I look inward rather than outward. One of the things you will hear, if you sit around the tables of Alcoholics Anonymous long enough, is, “When I am upset about something, there is something wrong with me.”

Now, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t also something wrong outside of me. All too often there is. Like a dead infant. I can’t begin to tell you how wrong that is. But what it does mean, which I think normal people learned a long time ago, is that I am, in a very important way, responsible for my emotions. I’ve been told many times “you can’t help how you feel.” But I don’t think that’s true. I can, through careful reflection, help how I feel. And I can certainly manage how I react to my feelings. I can examine the disquiet within me and slow and settle myself and look for the good in every situation.

In that conversation I had with my friend, the person so new to sobriety, I was asked a critical question. “Aren’t you glad you get to be present for all this?” I’ve made that point myself, and it’s one that my sponsor often makes. And it’s one of the core principles that good sobriety is based on: being useful to others. Being of service. Even when that is uncomfortable and confusing.

I’m grateful today. Grateful that I have a shoulder for people who are in mourning. Grateful that I can feel sick with grief. That I am not numb to the experience of living, because I am inebriated and altered. I am grateful that I can be circumspect in sadness. That while I am often distressed, I am rarely distraught. That when I do find my defensiveness, self-righteousness, deflection and projection welling up within me, I can look at it honestly, and recognize that these are emotions designed to prevent me from taking responsibility. Emotions that will lead me to selfishness and fear and isolation.

And I can forestall them. Apologize to those I’ve inflicted them upon. Correct my actions. Explore my motivation. And find the core of it.

I am incredibly sad. I am angry. I feel a sense of injustice. I am grieving.

And I am so grateful that I can be present in these feelings. That I can sensate and persist among the sloughs of this human burden. Because I am. And I am sober. And that is good.

I was talking with a friend last night about masculinity and – without saying the word – maturity, and how they relate to sobriety. For the duration of this post, I’m going to be writing about my experience, and the experience as I understand it relating to men. I can’t speak for all men, of course, but I can most assuredly not speak for women. So, to my female readers, please don’t construe anything here to suggest that I’m describing how women can/do/should experience anything. I can’t speak to that.  I’m doing the best I can to describe what I see as a common phenomenon among men in the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, but primarily only my own experience.

 In some respects, because I didn’t begin daily drinking until I was about 21, perhaps a little older, I was very fortunate. In the program, we tend to say that we stop maturing, emotionally, when we “take our first drink”, meaning, when we begin alcoholic consumption. I’ve seen this over and over and over. Grown men, physically, who are children emotionally. They throw tantrums, and have little or no control over their actions and reactions when it comes to dealing with issues that all adults have to face. So many men, when they come in to the program, have to be taught how to do things like pay bills, show up to work on time, and treat other people with basic respect. And they have to be taught to accept that when they don’t do these things, the consequences are their own faults.

Now, everyone has a different experience, but one of the things that I have seen is very, very common among men in the program, and indeed present in my own psyche, is a condition I have come to call “father hunger”. It is a basic fact of American demography that a huge number of children grew up without fathers. Wikipedia says that only 16% of single-parent households are headed by a father. Now, I’m not denigrating the efforts of single mothers. My own mother raised me and my siblings as a single mother for much of my childhood, and she did a frankly astonishing job of it considering all of the challenges in front of her. And she had absolutely no tangible support in that from my father.

And I missed having a father. Don’t get me wrong, I saw my father reasonably often. He was kind and caring. Emotionally supportive. But he was not a role model. He never held a job long. He didn’t show up for things very much. When I was sixteen and broke my arm, and needed surgery on the fourth of July, my father told me, while I was in the hospital bed, that he was glad to be there, because he really felt like a father that day. It didn’t sit well then, and it doesn’t sit well now. I shouldn’t have had to fracture a limb to help him feel paternal. It shouldn’t have been my job at all. But I don’t blame my father for these things. Not anymore. He walked his own path, beset by his own devils. I can’t grudge him his journey.

My story is not atypical. Nearly every man in the program I know has, or had, a broken relationship with his father. Some missing, some dead, some abusive, so many alcoholic. Some of these relationships, like mine, have been repaired and reconciled. So many have not. There is an unfathomably deep hunger for good fathers in this program. We seek, blindly and often enraged, someone, anyone, to teach us how to be men.

And if we do the work, if we have the willingness, we will find that. My Wednesday night men’s meeting is full of men, many of them in their mid-sixties with a few decades of sobriety behind them, who have much to offer about masculinity. Men who can teach me how to interact with the world. Men who can, as fathers should, lead by example. The process of finding myself a physical  adult – an autonomous unit out in the world – and realizing that emotionally I was still a boy, was excoriating. I was deeply ashamed to not know the things that I thought I should know. The things that seemed natural to other men. Men with fathers.

Now, a lot of the work I did to understand what masculinity is I actually did while still an active drunk. I had a wonderful therapist, a woman, who helped me experience the pain of the things I missed, and taught me how to conduct introspection. But even that professional assistance couldn’t replace what was truly missing. And maybe nothing can. Obviously, I will never know who I might have been had I had a stable home, two united parents, and an effective and robust father in my life.

But I have learned many things in sobriety, from the men who preceded me into this program. I have learned so much about being male, and what’s acceptable and not acceptable. What aspects of masculinity are challenges to control, and which are intrinsic characteristics that I don’t need to apologize for. I have learned how to stand my ground without feeling the need to stake and defend a claim. I have learned how to accept an apology, and forgive, without diminishing or negating any wrong that was done. I have learned how to make amends, how to apologize gracefully and sincerely when it’s called for. I have learned how to be grateful. I have learned how to grieve and to mourn.

I hope it’s obvious that I know and agree that women do all of these things too. I can only speak to my experience. And I experience something which I can only describe as ‘male’ about the way I have learned to do these things. By being taught by other men in the program. By being among men who have figured out how to be men in the world. I still have an enormous deficit within me. A missing piece where an effective father would go. But I have the chance, through my participation in a program of honesty, self-inspection and action, to be the man I wish my father had been.