Growing Toward Light
A Twelve-Step Journey
by Maureen Middlefield
Contents
Copyright © 2011 Sturdy Grace Press
Smashwords Edition
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If you're familiar with recovering alcoholics and addicts, you know they sometimes speak of their "bottom," meaning the point in their lives when they had sunk as low as they were willing to go and started looking for a way out of their pain. Those of us who happen to share our lives with alcoholics and addicts sometimes refer to ourselves as "codependents," meaning that in many ways, we have learned to share the our loved one's disease. The disease of the codependent can be every bit as deadly as that of the addict. As a codependent, I had a very low bottom. I was diagnosed as a psychotic, lost my rights to vote and handle my own finances, and was incarcerated. I knew I was insane.
My life started out happily enough, and my memories of my childhood are mostly cheerful ones. The sixth of my parents' eight children, I remember lots of lively times with my brothers and sisters, my loving parents, and a warm extended family that included plenty of close relatives on both my mother's and my father's sides. Our parents surrounded us with books and activities and even arranged for music lessons for all us kids, even though my father, a police officer, was the sole provider and did not earn a lavish living.
In the summertime, our boisterous family would descend upon my grandmother, my father's mother, who lived alone in a secluded cabin nestled in the redwoods of Butano Canyon, near Pescadero, California. These times were no vacation at all for my mother, of course, with all those children to keep track of, even though some of the cooking and household chores were divvied up among my siblings and me. We kids, though, were mostly free to play and hike in the woods and go swimming in the nearby community pool.
Pescadero Creek splashed thirty feet down over Butano Falls before it ran right through my grandmother's backyard. Its clear stream held rainbow trout and orange crayfish, and its banks were lush with riparian trees, bushes, wildflowers, and ferns. I particularly loved the ladyfinger ferns, with their pitch-black stems and their bright leaves sparkling in the breeze like emeralds. On Sundays, the priest from the nearby town of Pescadero would drive out to say Mass in a local redwood grove. Families in the canyon would come together, bringing remnants of thick carpet to kneel on as the Holy Spirit filled that grove and surrounded us all.
In the evenings after dinner in my grandmother's cabin, my brothers and sisters and I would take plates of leftover food outside into the backyard for the family of wild raccoons who appeared there every evening. The raccoons had gotten so tame that they would come right up to us when we offered them food. One evening my brother Randy lured a raccoon into the cabin and shut the door. The raccoon panicked and jumped right through a glass window pane to get out. The raccoon was fine, but Randy had to replace the window.
I began music lessons when I was only four years old, trooping with my brothers and sisters–six of us at the time–to the local music school. I loved it. One of my fondest memories is of sitting on my father's lap at the piano as he taught me how to read music and count out sixteenth notes. I learned to play flute in the third grade and continued through high school, joining the high school band and orchestra. When Gerald Ford assumed the United States presidency in August, 1974, my high school band represented California in the presidential inaugural parade. My band mates and I got to spend a week in Washington, DC, a highlight of my high school career.
My first serious crush swept over me when I heard an exquisite solo performance of "Night Soliloquy" by a handsome and gifted flute player, the experience of which led me to begin spending hours in the practice room myself, drilling on etudes and solo pieces, learning all the major and minor keys. I convinced my parents to let me further my studies on the flute with Yada Weber at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and when I was a high school senior took a class on harmony and musicianship at the local community college, riding my bike up a steep hill in the early mornings to get there.
Both of my parents loved to sing, my mother as she did the housework, and my father exuberantly at the piano while he drank. I remember as a child sitting under the piano as Dad played and sang, and those memories are happy ones for me. For most of my childhood I was shielded from my father's drinking–and his occasional blackouts–by my older siblings, but as they grew up and moved away, I was eventually the oldest left at home, and my father's drinking started to trouble me.
Back then, we did not think of our father as an alcoholic, and my older siblings still disagree with me that he was ever that. Alcoholics were destitute and lived under bridges; our father was not like that at all. He was highly functional, a cheerful drunk. However, my mother, burdened with all the household and childrearing duties, began to feel unappreciated and neglected by my dad. Eventually, she instituted a household rule: If your father is drinking, she warned us, don't engage him. He could become belligerent and even dangerous.
A revealing incident that upset me at the time I find funny now. My father would chain the axel of his truck to the garage door so no one could steal his truck. One day when he was in a blackout he neglected to detach the chain and drove off with the garage door. A series of similar events led me to confide in a school counselor that I was concerned about my dad's drinking, and he promptly called my mom. When I got home that day my mother scolded me for "telling lies" about my dad; she accused me of making up stories so I wouldn't have to do my schoolwork. Her attack left me confused and hurt, as I had never neglected my studies and ended up graduating from high school with an almost four-point grade average. I stopped looking for help at school or at home after that experience, however, and I started feeling hopeless and depressed.
Even my hopes for higher education were dashed when my parents reluctantly informed me they had no money to send me to college. I panicked. What was I to do? All my friends were getting ready to go to college, and I wanted to be among them. When my application for financial aid for college was turned down, too, I lost all hope in my own future. I felt desperate about how I might take care of myself once I was unable to depend on my parents financially. So I decided to get married.
About that time I met Michael, a courier for an overnight delivery company, and Michael fell in love with me. We were married as soon as I turned eighteen. Two years later, I met Kenneth, a mathematician with a ten-year-old son, and decided I had never been in love with Michael. I left Michael and moved in with Kenneth and Little Kennie. You have to understand that this all happened when free love was in the air. Women as well as men were supposed to be liberated from all their old-fashioned sexual inhibitions. Everyone was encouraged just to do their "thing." My parents were upset with me, of course, but they were behind the times; they simply didn't understand. I was an adult. I was "free."
To tell the truth, though, deep down I knew I was looking for someone or something to fill the emptiness inside me. Plus, I needed a man to take care of me, as I felt helpless and unable to take care of myself on my own. I had completely given up on my own education by this time, had even given up playing my beloved flute. Of course, things didn't work out with Kenneth, either, any more than they had with Michael, and after a few months I moved in with my brother to try to sort things out.
About this time, I was physically assaulted, and I blamed myself for that incident. Full of self-loathing and confusion, I was unable to sleep for a full five or six days afterward. I ran to my parents and told them what had happened, but my strictly Roman Catholic parents were upset with me for the way I was living, and I found no comfort there. I sank into despair and slipped into psychosis. I left my parents' house and wound up running through the hills of an affluent neighborhood, eventually flinging myself to the ground in a full-on out-of-body episode, an experience in which I felt at peace, at one with all eternity. However, reality returned hard and fast, and I came to in a short time, dazed and delusional, back in my body. A young man on a motorcycle found me wandering the streets and took me to the county hospital.
The hospital staff put me in a padded cell where I pulled myself tightly into the fetal position and remained that way for hours. After a while the staff came into the room, held me down, and injected me with Haldol, a powerful antipsychotic drug, and I blacked out. I came to in the psychiatric ward at the hospital, still heavily sedated. I have sketchy memories of this period, but I remember my mother coming to visit me. I was there several weeks, heavily medicated and diagnosed with an acute psychosis.
When I was released I went back to my parents' house. My former husband Michael was there when I arrived. In my weakened psychological state I was hardly in a position to be aware of, much less articulate, my opinion about his being there. So Michael stayed with me, and I wound up in and out of psychosis, filled with shame and guilt. My hallucinations were intense, and Michael would hold me in his arms while I hallucinated. My parents and I went together to family therapy, but the focus of our sessions soon came off my psychotic episode and shifted to my parents' problems with their marriage, especially my mother's frustration over my father's lack of support for her. Even so, my father's drinking and its effects on all of us were never addressed in any of these sessions, an omission that still puzzles me to this day. Our therapist never once suggested that one or more of the twelve-step programs might provide some of the answers we were all so desperately seeking.
My parents were distant and unsupportive, and I knew I no longer loved Michael, if I ever had, so when I felt stronger, I left Michael and my parents and moved back in with Kenneth. It simply seemed to me to be the only option open to me. I felt, deep down, that I was incapable of caring for myself and therefore needed someone to take care of and support me, and Kenneth still wanted me to be with him, even after all that had happened between us.
I had been diagnosed with manic depression by this time and was taking the lithium that was prescribed for me. Surprisingly, the next few months were an idyllic time. Maybe it was the prescription medications I was taking, and maybe it was all the hiking and camping we did. We camped in the Rockies, skied cross-country in the snowy Sierras, and spent a magical time in Wyoming's Wind River Range. I learned to cook French cuisine and studied calculus at the local junior college. Since Kenneth played the recorder, I learned to play one, too, and we played duets together.
We also used cocaine together, until I became pregnant. Determined to keep the baby, I quit using all drugs, including those prescribed for me by my psychiatrist. Fortunately, my son Paul was born healthy, but a tumultuous time for me soon followed. The old emptiness caught up with me again, but instead of looking inward, I blamed Kenneth for not being able to fill me up. When I found myself attracted to another man in my calculus class, I thought I saw my escape route, but found myself in a dead-end maze instead.
When Paul was about eighteen months old, I left Kenneth, spiraling quickly downward and winding up in and out of mental hospitals. A series of short-term affairs with drug addicts and other mental health clients during this period led to another pregnancy. I decided to have an abortion but afterward cried for a solid five days, overcome with grief and confusion. Kenneth remarried and moved to France, taking our son with him, with my permission. After he was gone, I longed for Paul, missed my son terribly, but I felt my motives for letting him go were noble ones. Kenneth wanted to see the world and learn to speak French, and Paul could be exposed to those adventures, too.
Despite all my turmoil, I continued with my studies, at one point even learning to play the saxophone and joining the jazz band at the junior college. I met Sam in one of my classes, and he asked me out. On our first date, I asked him if he would like to get some wine and go to dinner. His response took me completely by surprise. "I can't have any alcohol," he told me. "I'm an alcoholic." It was the first time I had ever heard anyone say those words aloud, and his honesty struck some note deep within me. My own recovery, from the diseases of mental illness and codependency, began in that moment.
Sam suggested to me that since I was mentally ill I should go to Emotions Anonymous, a twelve-step program for the mentally ill, and I took his advice. The reverberation of a single tone within me that had begun with Sam's honesty swelled to orchestral heights when I was introduced to the Twelve Steps, and I started finding solutions in them to symptom management and emotional recovery.
After a few months Sam and I got married. I was deeply in love, but a short time after our wedding, Sam had an alcoholic relapse and wound up in the hospital. The nurses at the hospital told me I needed to go to Al-Anon, a twelve-step program for families of alcoholics, if I wanted to visit him. And so it was that I went to my first Al-Anon meeting and started to learn about the family disease of alcoholism. In Al-Anon I learned that I was addicted, too, but my addiction was to addicts and alcoholics. As we say in Al-Anon, my "picker" was broken. I expected the men in my life to fill me up, but they were not able to do that.
Eventually, I realized that my dad was an alcoholic, and I started attending open Alcoholics Anonymous meetings so I could learn more. Someone at one of the meetings gave me a copy of AA's "Big Book," Alcoholics Anonymous. When I read the chapter to the agnostic, I began to understand that I, too, was spiritually ill. If I wanted to heal, I realized, I would need to open my heart to God. Filling me up was God’s job, and in order for me to recover I needed to turn to God.
Sam had a deep relationship with God, and I admired that in him. He prayed and invited God into his life, but he had a terrible temper. It angered him, for instance, to know that my son was with Kenneth in France. Because he became angry and even belligerent when I visited with my friends and family, I began to isolate myself to accommodate his anger. My whole world came to be Sam alone.
But when Paul came from France to visit, Sam and Paul hit it off immediately, and Paul became attached to Sam and me as a couple. Sam decided he wanted to get custody of Paul. Outwardly I agreed, but a small voice within me whispered that doing so might not be the best thing for everyone concerned. Paul had been in France with his dad and stepmom for quite a while by this time. Would such a major disruption harm my son? I was also quite certain that Kenneth would surely be devastated if custody of Paul were to be returned to me. I just wasn’t sure that trying to obtain custody of my son at that time was the right thing to do. I was still learning about my own codependency and the fact that I was powerless over all the addicts and alcoholics in my life. And I had no inkling that I had the right to say no to any of the men in my life.
A custody hearing was scheduled, and as our court date approached, Sam coached me to tell the judge that Kenneth had attacked me and caused my subsequent descent into mental illness. I was to tell the judge that Kenneth was violent. I knew all along, however, that I had had problems before I met Kenneth, and that my problems were not entirely Kenneth's fault. Once I was on the witness stand, I simply could not say the things Sam wanted me to say.
Afterward, Sam was livid. When we got home that day he raged at me, dragged me into the bedroom and hit me in the stomach with all his strength. I collapsed, and my world collapsed around me. Paul insisted he didn’t want to go back to France, but at this point he had no choice. When Kenneth came to pick up Paul a few days later, Paul was hysterical and Sam was spoiling for a fight.
In the days after Paul left, Sam began drinking heavily, and when he was drunk he would rage at me, throwing things and at one point even giving me a black eye. He moved back to his mother’s house and chased me away, saying he didn’t want anything more to do with me. I was attached to him, though, and kept trying to see him and talk with him. I went to my brother for help, but I found no sympathy there. My brother insisted my problems were of my own making. He told me I was hopelessly mentally ill and needed treatment and arranged to have me placed in a long-term mental health center.