Addiction, Family, Trauma, and How (Not) to Write About It
My beautiful, handsome BLANK. Blonde sun god of my rainy childhood. Creator and destroyer of some of my worlds. High school and college soccer star. Father of two blonde boys, now men. Salesman. Husband. Ex-husband. Friend. Reader. Trump hater. Hilarious like me. Like our mom and dad can be, often were, but are less so now.
This is not a eulogy.
When I visit my BLANK, we sit on the couch together. His voice has changed, and aside from his swollen stomach, the rest of his body is alarmingly thin. His skin is a yellowy tan. I wasn’t sure he’d let me visit, but I was home, staying uneasily with our mother and he called and said something like, “I’m just sitting on the couch so if you want.” I drove over. Conversation can be like this in my family—noncommittal, unenthusiastic, confusing.
Perhaps you are wondering about my use of the word BLANK. Maybe you don’t care or are one of those readers that will go anywhere as long as I keep you entertained. I am such a reader, and I’ll do my best as a writer to hold onto you sentence by sentence.
I won’t BLANK out my mother or father because I’ve already written and published difficult and unflattering essays about their parenting. I’m also interested in the word BLANK, as in, “Fill in the BLANK,” “I’m BLANKING on her name,” and “I’ll write you a BLANK check.” I want to make space for you, my reader, to imagine your BLANKS, like write-in candidates. If you were to write the thing you are most forbidden to write, who would you BLANK?
I also hope to tease out the ways in which writers self-censor, hide, forget, and play with absence and erasure. BLANK is a cover, a manhole I slide under in the action movie that is not my life, and a puppet whose strings intentionally show. I am the kid who gives away your hide and seek spot because she secretly hates the game. I am a tattle-tale, and a sneaky rat. Aren’t most personal essayists?
Lastly, in the first of many drafts of this very essay, I used the word BLANK so that I could get away with what feels like my worst betrayal. “Don’t write about me,” MY BLANK commanded a few years ago, and in response, I could offer the paltry but true, “Well, I never named you.”
Now back to my BLANK. When I get to his house, I begin with a dumb joke, “Looks like you’re taking as many pills as I am.” His bottles are lined up on the coffee table, and he’s watching an HGTV show about fixing up abandoned cabins in Maine. The hosts are cute, late 30s, reality-TV types, and he likes their banter and fake sparring.
When we were very little, we visited Maine. The shores were jagged and rocky, and we stayed in a tiny pine-colored cabin. My mother called to me from the door of the cabin to come inside, but I felt stuck. Because all possible routes were treacherous, which one to choose? Or maybe this was an early sign of my movement disorder. My brain issuing a command, and my legs refusing to follow it. A body at war with itself. Did she come down to help me, my BLANK, a baby then, perched on her hip? Or was I left to struggle alone? My parents often pushed me to do the physical things I couldn’t do, so that I would learn to be independent. Maybe they had the right instinct, but what I sometimes felt instead was that I was alone and without help.
When I envision my small body out there on the rocky shore, trying to navigate the twenty-odd feet to my mother, I picture a woodcut in an old book of fairy tales. The caption reads, “Girl at the Edge of the World,” or “Girl at Sea.”
My father was there too, but I have no memorable imagery of him to recreate for you. I’ve been to Maine many times as an adult, and I haven’t felt that scary, falling over the edge of a cliff feeling. Was that feeling real? I was sick then, but now I’m better. Two realities reside in me always: sick little girl, better woman.
In the experimental movie My Father that plays in my head, he’s in his underwear and undershirt, reading a magazine in his favorite green leather recliner chair or walking ahead of me in the woods of the Audubon Society. When we get to a certain bird stand, he will break apart a Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Almond bar and give us the bigger pieces. Sometimes he’s tucking me in and reminding me how to breathe so that my muscles can relax, or playing a game called Hot Dog Head, where he shakes our pillows, our heads sandwiched inside. We loved that game and begged for it every night. There are more images, but I’m editing for clarity, readability, and yes entertainment. I’m omitting too. Pulling a curtain over what I don’t feel like sharing.
Photographs converge with memories too. A new one, I hadn’t seen until this last visit. My father looking Cuban, angry, sexy, holding tiny-baby-me on his T-shirted chest. Did I feel safe there? Did my little baby body already know it wasn’t working quite right? Could I intuit what was to come? It is hard to imagine I could have ever felt safe in that sick body. For some of us—the disabled, the traumatized, the marginalized—safety is like that rocky shore.
“Can I hug you?” I eventually ask my BLANK, and he lets me. It’s a loose, weak hug, but I try to stay close. I ask as much as I can, because I need information. What does this doctor say? How is his liver? How does he feel? I want to have as much time with him as I can because I fear I might not see him again.
My BLANK says he wishes he could just have some help around the house, someone to bring him meals and clean while he gets better. We’d been talking about our disastrous dating lives, and our exhaustion. Mine from disability and overwork. His from drinking, and likely overwork too.
“You know that’s what they do for you in rehab so you can get better. They make your meals, you don’t have to clean,” I say. “If I had the money, I’d pay for you to go.” I’m thinking of the research I’ve done about getting addicts to go to rehab, and it often helps if family and friends have secured a spot in a facility and paid for it. Recently, I’d watched John Mulaney’s new comedy special Baby J, which is something of a crash course in getting someone into rehab, and what happens once you’re there. The intervention he describes with his closest friends and a counselor gives him no choice but to go. From his time there, Mulaney emerges into a shaky recovery. I want this for my BLANK.
During that visit and many times before, I’ve pushed our mother to help me organize an intervention. She won’t do it, and doesn’t want me to be in contact with anyone to arrange it. My attempts to connect with my ex-sister-in-law, nephews, and father have failed. The massive unexamined collected trauma of this group of people makes an intervention feel next to impossible. Or maybe nobody wants my help. Still, even as I write this essay, I wonder if I’ve tried hard enough.
“Nibbs.” My BLANK’S nickname for me. Maybe he shakes his head no. Maybe he says, “Not going to happen.” He doesn’t want to go, and wouldn’t let me pay even if I had the money.
We move on to our unhappy childhoods, his friends, and his youngest who is off to college in a week. It’s easy for us to talk, it always is, though we hardly ever do anymore. Three hours pass quickly and my kid texts to ask me if I am coming back soon. “Leaving in a minute.”
The road home is dark and empty. Once I was out of this town, this road, those woods, and found some comfort in the darkness and emptiness, but now it numbs me.
“Pretty in the summer.”
“The home of Lucille Ball.”
“A dying Rust Belt town.”
“South of Buffalo.”
These are some sentences I have said about my hometown. I blame it for a lot of what has happened. I blame my parents too. I don’t really blame my BLANK. It’s a disease after all.
A few days later, in the morning I’m flying back to New York City, I’ll fight with my mother about her inaction, her and my father’s refusal to pay for rehab, how long she has ignored my BLANK’s addiction, the family’s rot and decay, and my abuse. I return to my wounded, angry little girl self. “I hate you. Why are you so mean?”
I yell at her in the sunroom where she grows her beautiful plants and reads the morning paper. I am a disturbance in the quiet life she lives. I am a rageful, vengeful creature, who has come to rip apart the house.
The way we’re fighting about all of the wrong things when what we should be doing is saving my BLANK’s life, enrages me, and makes me feel out of control. The last time we saw each other in person, we fought like this too, not about my BLANK, but about me, how crazy and belligerent she finds me to be. I was so stressed out and dysregulated from her visit that I fell on the street and broke my arm.
In my family, money is for withholding. My father still boasts of paying for one year of my state school tuition—$1000 in 1990. In my twenties, after I’d been mugged and had my apartment broken into, I called my father and asked for $500 so I could move. He wouldn’t give it to me. The daughter in me died that day, as I sat in the back of a police car refusing to identify any of the Black men on the street that the police officers kept randomly pointing to, and saying “Him? What about that guy?”
Perhaps I’m keeping a ledger too. Denial is worth more than life. Comfort is of equal or greater value than conflict. What is money for anyway? I’ve squandered some of it, and also never quite had enough of it.
I understand that my BLANK and I are entitled to nothing. Perhaps no adult children are entitled to anything their parents have, but as a parent myself, it’s hard to imagine saying no to my daughter when she needs help.
Should I teach through all of my breaks for two years to make the money to send him to rehab? Should I parent him because my own parents refuse? Should I take the money I need for my kid and give it to him? Yes, the answer is maybe yes. And also it’s too late. In the two years it will take me to make $20,000 extra, I fear my BLANK will be dead.
My daughter, fifteen and raised far from the chaos of my hometown, asleep (I thought) in another room of my mother’s house while she and I fought, later says to me, “I’ve never heard you yell like that,” and I’m relieved I haven’t done that to her, and ashamed she heard it.
In my family it’s shameful to want, ask for, or need help. It’s why my BLANK won’t go to rehab. It’s why we have so many fights. It’s why we battle over money. It’s why we are not to speak of our secrets, our pasts, and all of our mistakes. Ultimately, it’s the reason for the BLANKsS. If I BLANK, I redact and cover my tracks. If the government can do it for nefarious reasons, then I can employ it for literary ones. Many writers, mostly poets, have played with erasures, cross-outs, and empty spaces. I don’t know any BLANK(ers), but I doubt I’m the first.
There’s Taylor Swift’s hit, “Blank Space,” about starting a fling with a new man and playing with all of the rumors that she’s an insane girlfriend. She sings, “I’ve got a BLANK space, baby, and I’ll write your name.” I’m not a Swiftie, but my kid is, and one thing I know that resonates with fans of this song is the reclamation of the ways in which girls and women are told over and over that they’re insane—by the mainstream media, ex-boyfriends and lovers, and family. Swift revels in her so-called insanity. She’s in on the joke this time, and her BLANK space is a taunt to all of her haters. In my best moments as an essayist I’d like to think I’m pulling a Swift, taking the secret, not-so-secret things about my family, and telling them on my own terms, BLANKS and all. Swift, among her many talents, is adept at playing with her persona, evolving and presenting different versions of herself, while remaining wholly true to a core Taylorness. Personal essayists do this too—each essay I write is a different version or evolution of me, and my thinking. Carley(s) upon Carley(s).
A family at war cannot abide more rupture, nor can it abide problem solving. We can’t hold an intervention or agree on care. A house at war cannot hold itself together. Nails loosen. Beams fall. The outside pushes in, and the insides fall out. On HGTV they are fixing all of the abandoned, run-down cabins, making them habitable and beautiful again. Does my BLANK like this show because it’s about repair and possibility, things we have all long since given up?
After that visit, my mother stops speaking to me. She blocks my calls and texts. We’ve taken breaks before, though always initiated by me. I adjust to life without a mother. I’ve been on my own for so long, it doesn’t feel that different, but then there are holes in the day, a minute or two when I want to tell her about a book, or complain about Republicans, or think “I haven’t called my mother this week.” In these moments, I sink a little into the sidewalk or couch, and examine my solitude, pulling at it like a recalcitrant knot.
Maybe none of this happened, and this is a short story and not a personal essay. In Several Short Sentences About Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg reminds us, “For our purposes, genre is meaningless. It’s a method for shelving books and awarding prizes. Every form of writing turns the world into language. Fiction and nonfiction resemble each other far more closely than they do any actual event.”
I write and publish essays, novels, and poetry, so in some sense Klinkenborg is right. Genre is meaningless to me. No, that’s not quite right. All genres manipulate, each in their own wonderfully unique way. The writer, at her most powerful, makes the world of the poem, essay, or novel. The sentence is a cudgel, a silken-furred rabbit, or a rocky coastline. The sentence is a million metaphors. All truth(s). I’m not arguing for a factless, dystopian world. But writing about one’s life can be a slippery violation, crafty magic, and a desire to set the record straight, or make it less crooked. BLANK spaces abound. Every writer must decide what to leave out and what to include. The writing itself is a body (of work) rife with abscesses, incisions, and wounds, held together by gambit and nerve. In going meta about the work of writing, am I cheating the reader somehow? Am I breaking the fourth wall and showing you that the structures of this piece—a cabin and a house—are elaborate sets, propped up with daydreams, memories, and words?
Ultimately, Klinkenborg wants all writers, from student to professional, to care about and craft short sentences. He advises, “At first it will help to make short sentences / Short enough to feel the variations in length. / Leave space between them for the things that words / can’t really say.” Language and the absence of it twin to make meaning. What writers leave empty, out, or BLANK fulfills its own unique destiny in the reader’s brain.
Meta-cognitive writing or writing about writing fills in some of the BLANKS, and ignores others. Meta is anti-BLANK.
I often tell my students, when you go meta, there is no wrong answer. It’s anything you feel or any thoughts you have about the thing you’ve just done.
In that case, working on this essay for several months has hurt my brain a little or maybe it’s time to make dinner. Publishing it will likely make me feel alternately anxious, disgusted, relieved, and elated.
Here’s a fill in the BLANK for you. Reading this essay makes me feel _____________________________________________________________________________.
In 2018, I visited a friend in Mexico City. Five days of street tacos, tamarind juices and sodas, and wandering. Five days where I somehow returned to my nearly fluent undergraduate Spanish, and finally visited Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s famous home, La Casa Azul. Frida, my bisexual, disabled hero, who made herself the central figure of her paintings. Her bright yellow kitchen, her bed with a mirror affixed to the canopy so she could paint lying down, and her wheelchair outfitted with her paints.
She made her pain the center of her work. What a thing to do! I thought when I first saw her paintings in an art book when I was nineteen. My roommate, a painter, and I, pored over the book, not turning the page, until each of us had seen enough. Then we started over and looked at every painting again. I was trying to train my brain then, to linger, to really look, to somehow see my way to understanding. I chased the feeling of art washing over me, subsuming me with emotion.
For that hour or so, sitting on a broken couch in a dying upstate New York town with my best artist friend, searing Kahlo’s work into and onto ourselves I was transmogrified. Beauty and pain were no longer a binary, one to be flaunted and the other hidden. Together, along with the grotesque, the whorish, the excessive, and the crazy, all of the qualities in me that people called too much, they could be transformed into art.
I haven’t been writing essays lately, but novels and messy blog posts on Substack. I’ve also been doing stand-up comedy. On days I would like to be dead, joke writing soothes me. Getting up on stage is terrifying, and then it’s over. I want to make the audience laugh and lose control. I’ll say almost anything to make it happen. What a fun game! I almost can’t explain its power over me. Stand-up is a place where I can say astonishingly shocking truths and get instant praise for it. Because they are live and unrecorded for the most part, I BLANK nothing.
Essays don’t work this way, for me anyway. Novels either. I may elicit shock, but there is no instant praise, no delight in making the audience lose control. In writing I have readers, who generously offer their own rewards—time, deep attention, and if I’m lucky, community. I have missed publishing essays, and I want to have one out in the world again, bumping up against other essays, essayists, and readers, and part of a more public conversation.
Kahlo was the first disabled artist I encountered who wasn’t hiding her tortured, beautiful body. In “The Wounded Deer,” Kahlo—after a failed spinal surgery—paints her head atop a deer’s body, shot through with arrows, in a murky forest. In “The Broken Column,” another self-portrait, Kahlo, portrays herself naked from the waist up, her torso split apart as if after an earthquake, a broken Romanesque column replacing her organs. Nails cover her body, pinning it to a canvas of cracked earth.
She made her pain the center of her work.
And so I ask myself, is this essay bloody enough? Did it hurt me to write it? Is it made out of my body? Do I implicate myself as much as I do my family? What have I learned in writing it?
Like women’s contested bodies, Kahlo’s paintings, and my favorite writers’ works, sutures are still visible, threads hang loose, and wounds gape. Essaying (from the French to try) can feel like grafting, stitching with rusty needles, and trying to make a passable monster.
Oh, what I have BLANKED to get this essay to you!
When we were little my BLANK and I had screaming fights, ones that sometimes turned violent. We had only our parents as models, so what else could we know? Most kids I knew had violence in their homes. Some houses were far more violent than ours. My childhood is endlessly confusing. Was it really that bad? Sometimes it was okay. It had a miracle in the middle of it, made possible by my parents.
I was very sick and often unable to walk until I was eleven, and then one day I was mostly better because of a brilliant neurologist and a powerful pink pill. How many people have a story like that? And still, I’ve never really written about it. The before and the after, but not the moment of everything changing for me. The four-hour drive to Toronto, where the neurologist hooked me up to a machine (to measure brain waves? I have no idea), and told my parents he was pretty sure he knew what was wrong with me. No one had ever said that before. We waited to fill the prescription in the hospital, and within a week, I could walk again. My balance returned, my muscles stopped painfully cramping, and when my brain issued a command, the part of my body it was sent to obeyed. Eventually, these commands were no longer conscious. I could walk, run, ride my bike, and swim! Actions that were once severely limited to me, became normal and unthinking.
Healed, I knew I would leave that house and my hometown, but still, for a long time, well into my early thirties, I was a good daughter and did what my family asked of me. I talked to my mother on the phone every day, I attempted to normalize my relationship with my father and to make him a part of my life, and I visited my BLANK when my nephews were born and into their teens. I tried to be a present aunt in their lives.
My BLANK and I were also very close. Who else can understand what we went through? In one of our pretend games, we were a wealthy mother and son traveling together on an expensive cruise ship. Playing drunk and falling down, we propped each other up. I screamed in a posh voice, “Reginald, do stand up!” In another game we called Kung Fu Master, I devised elaborate jumps for him to execute off of the modular furniture in our family room, and then I scored him as if it were the Olympics. On Christmas Eve we stalked Santa Claus, believing we could catch him if we were quiet enough. My BLANK taught me to love hip hop. The opening dialogue and eventually every track on 3 Feet High and Rising is seared into my brain because he played it so much.
Now when I stay in that house, I become paranoid. The house is a trigger for me. When I step into the kitchen from the garage or into the front hallway, it’s as if a switch flips on, and I am back in my kid brain. There’s a whirring ceiling fan like the one in Twin Peaks and it sounds like “Danger, danger, danger.”
On that last visit, when my daughter and I finally got to the airport, I texted my BLANK, “Mom wants us dead,” and “Watch out for mom.”
I was panicked, in fight-or-flight mode, and I see now how that looks. Not great. But I’d gone numb for three days, aside from my visit with my BLANK, and then I was desperate to leave, to get out of that house where my BLANK and I did the best we could. What I want is for my parents to acknowledge the past and what happened to each of us. I know I won’t get that.
But I can write about it, and for me that matters. I don’t know why, but it does.
I visited my family because I wanted to know for myself that I did everything in my power to help my BLANK.
I don’t know that I did, but I tried to do something. I did what I could, and then I had to take care of myself and my kid.
Once I’m back in New York, my BLANK blocks me too, in solidarity with our mother. His absences are more familiar to me, but they still hurt. His blocking usually comes with insults, and though I’m pretty tough at this point, they rattle around in my head and become part of the mean voices I struggle to ignore. Look at your life. Is this what you want? You have no partner. You’re broke and crazy. You pick fights. No one will ever love you.
I chew on this for a weekend, when daylight savings time has kicked us all into darkness at 4:30 pm. Is it true? It’s ridiculous. Do I misunderstand myself? Lately, a combination of exhaustion, the years of pointless, and a few times, dangerous, online dating, menopause, and strong SSRIs have left me feeling numb to romantic love, incapable of getting it up for anyone, really. That this is a relief surprises me.
Like most women, I have built, or been made to build, my life around romantic love. I have loved until there is no love left in me, and still I love my kid, my friends, my cats, and my family, from afar now. I love my BLANK fiercely, from a distance. “I’m all out of love,” goes the Air Supply song from the 1980s, and I finally understand what they mean.
Sometimes I miss the joyous mania of falling in love so much that I consider quitting Lexapro and Wellbutrin. I have been in love several times. It was wonderful and terrifying. I never truly felt safe in it, but given my childhood, am I capable of such a feat? It’s also possible that love was mania for me, or that I’ve never experienced a kind of love where I felt secure.
I still want to figure out how to help my BLANK, though I’ve grown more resigned to what I can and can’t do. In Al-Anon, there’s a practice called “detaching with love,” which means the family has to let go of their loved-one’s problems. According to the Al-Anon literature, “It is simply a means that allows us to separate ourselves from the adverse effects that another person’s alcoholism can have upon our lives.” Is this what I’m doing?
I “Yes,” my BLANK on most of what he texts me. I ignore the stuff about me, though reflect now as I work on finishing this essay. I believe my family means that I don’t love them the way they want to be loved, unconditionally and without question. I protect myself, I have boundaries, I say no, and I fight back. I am not the daughter they want, but the daughter they fear. As I read over this paragraph, I’m tempted to delete it. At some point doesn’t every writer want to delete the whole damn poem, essay, short story, and novel? Because writing, like living, is failing.
Maybe I’ll start going to Al-Anon meetings again. I’ve worked on this essay for months now. I want it to be over. I push myself to finish it. I go back in. Detach, I command myself. Drop this very particular bone.
My BLANK sends a photo in which he still looks like he’s dying. We text about all of the ways in which our parents have refused to parent us. Cheapskates, we call them. Big babies. That we can return to each other, in spite of all our parents have done to divide us, in a comfort.
Aside from my BLANK’s friends, I was the first one to see that he had a drinking problem. I first noticed it when he was eleven. He came home drunk and bleeding from a fight, incoherent and crying. “Don’t tell mom and dad, don’t tell mom and dad.”
I hugged him and talked to him until he fell asleep. I didn’t tell because I knew it would mean more violence from my father, and I wanted to protect him.
We have each stumbled to find our footing on the rocky shores of our childhoods. Our cabin has never been refurbished and made new. We just had that one dream house and all that happened there. I sort and sift through the wreckage, trying to get it all down in writing for whom I’m not sure. Maybe my BLANK, maybe some reader, maybe just me.
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