Born to alcoholic parents and with a mother who also suffered from severe mental illness, Janet spent much of her early life in foster homes where she suffered varying degrees of physical and mental abuse. Like so many women from similar backgrounds, she ended up repeating the same behaviors as her own mother before getting sober 11 years ago. This is her story:
One of the most significant consequences of my upbringing—besides my alcoholism—was that I made terrible decisions when it came to men. Not only the relationships that I got into, typically with men who were significantly older than me, but the dangerous situations I put myself into in when I went into blackouts. Why I wasn’t chopped up into a million pieces and flushed down a toilet and never heard from again is beyond me, because I would go with anybody, anywhere. If you offered me a drink or some drugs, I was your girl.
My introduction to AA came when my best friend had called child welfare workers on me because I had been driving drunk with my daughter in the car and she was trying to try scare me straight. My mother ended up taking temporary custody of my daughter, with the stipulation that I go into detox/rehab for a few weeks. When I got there, I immediately connected with a guy. As an attractive woman in my 20s with no self-esteem, I was an easy target. So I did the detox romance with this guy who had spent 20 minutes trying to spell the word ‘and’ during our scrabble game, and I ended up with him for a short time after we left detox. But within a month, I was drinking again and then back into another detox.
By the time I was ready to leave the second time, my mother was pretty fed up with me and wouldn’t pick me up. So I left the facility and headed straight for the bar with about 10 cents in my pocket. I drank all day long, and that afternoon I met the man that was going to be a part of my life for the next three years of living hell. I always ended up with dangerous, damaged men, and Jim was no exception. He was 30 years older than me and a wealthy but non-practicing doctor. I soon learned that I was pregnant but I wasn’t sure who the father was because I had been on a bad blackout run and was with a number of men during that period, but I moved in with him, bringing my daughter with me. I soon decided I wasn’t an alcoholic anymore because I was living in a great house in a nice neighborhood and I was drinking Chardonnay. I lived with the delusion that I was “normal.”
And there was some evidence that I was. I was going to school and graduated cum laude, and I was working eight hours a day as a nurse’s aide. I started drinking more when my son was about 18 months old. I didn’t think it was a problem because, even though I was blacking out, I wasn’t ending up in strange men’s houses. Jim didn’t notice that I was getting worse because he was just as bad as me. But I was going into blackouts and would wake up with the baby in my arms, his diaper soaked through.
When I realized that drinking really was the problem, I didn’t want to go back to AA because, with my low self-esteem, I was always easy pickings for the sleazier guys. I just sat there and men would come up to me and I’d just go with them. I thought to myself, “Why would I want to go back there with all those vultures?” It’s sad that women go into AA expecting to get help and end up being preyed on. I didn’t realize that it wasn’t that way everywhere. That was my early exposure to AA so I stayed away.
What finally happened was that Jim dropped me off at the hospital again to detox, and while I was drunk I told them about some very disturbing things that I had found on his computer. The hospital contacted child welfare and they took the kids out of the house because they decided it wasn’t safe. They initially went with my mother, but after I got out of detox, child welfare did some more investigating and found out about my mother’s multiple psychiatric hospitalizations. So they put the kids in foster homes because they weren’t going to leave them with me or my mother.
I don’t really have the words for it, but it was like a really bad dream that I couldn’t wake up from. I had graduated from college but didn’t have a job, my kids were gone, and I couldn’t stop drinking. But that’s when the gift of desperation came into my life. I always had thought that my mother had chosen drinking over her kids, but here I was doing the exact same thing. So I started going back to AA and, this time, women were coming up to me and helping me. This woman introduced herself to me and asked me if I had a sponsor, and when I said no, she said, “I’m it.”
I was a complete nut job, but this woman was the walking Big Book. She was the first application of true, practical spirituality that I had ever seen, and she was giving her time to help a complete stranger. I couldn’t believe it. I would call her up and would be complaining about child welfare or Jim and she would ask me, “Did you eat?” And I would scream back, “What does that have to do with anything? Didn’t you just hear how my life is falling apart?” And she would have me come over for dinner. She was a single mother with two kids and she would make time for me and talk to me and feed me. And she started taking me through the steps, and I still can’t believe how kind she was.
After a while, I started putting my hand up at this noon meeting and I would talk about getting my kids taken away, and the women told me about this sober house just outside of Boston where female alcoholic/addicts could stay and recover with their kids.
I was able to get into the program and, even though I was completely out of my mind, I stayed sober there. The important thing was that I had a safe place to be with my kids, and they made us go to AA meetings. Even though I had a car, I had to take the bus like the rest of the girls. And I had to walk the six blocks to the laundromat with the two kids—even when it was cold and rainy. But I had to be willing to be a little uncomfortable in order to get sober. I wasn’t supposed to get into a relationship, but of course some guy snapped me up right away, because that’s all I knew how to do. But I was sober and I had my kids with me.
I graduated from that house after six months and got an apartment fairly close by, but it was tough. I was now on welfare/workfare because I had a job for eight bucks an hour at Starbucks, and the guy who 13th-stepped me had dropped me so he could move on to his next victim. I would go to meetings and bring my kids, but at some of them I would get dirty looks because my son would act up. It became harder for me to get to meetings, and the old insanity started to creep back in. Plus, I wasn’t being piss-tested anymore, so one day I just got a bottle of wine and drank it, and I immediately felt better.
There was no lightning strike, child welfare didn’t break down the door, but like I often say, sometimes the worst thing that can happen when you pick up a drink is nothing. So I rationalized that it was all just a big misunderstanding, that it was really the fault of that weirdo guy that I was with, and that I had a tough life but now I was better. Then it quickly became two bottles of wine a day. I thought I was hiding it from my now 10-year-old daughter until she said, “Hey Mom, why don’t you go back to those meetings instead of drinking tons of wine every day?”
I started drinking wine by the gallon, and I started to play chemistry set with my body, smoking pot and ordering benzos online to slow down my drinking. All that did was make me black out quicker. I ended up hanging with another girl from the halfway house who had also relapsed, and she turned me on to crack. The first time I smoked it, it was like having an orgasm in my brain. And soon after, all of the things that I said I would never do, I started doing, including driving to my crack dealer’s house with my son in the car, and if you know anything about women who smoke crack, you can fill in the blanks.
Around Christmas that year, I was visiting the friend who had called child welfare on me 10 years earlier, and I just came clean with her about everything—the drinking, the crack—and she told me that my kids would be better off in foster homes than with me. And that was my moment of truth, because I knew she was right. So she and the newest guy I was seeing helped me get into a detox. When I was there, I remember feeling like I was hanging by a thread—what the Big Book calls “pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization.” I was truly a shell of a person and there was nothing left.
But I got some hope that I could stay sober. One of the staff stopped me one day and asked, “Are you the same person who came in here two weeks ago?” And when I said I was, she told me that I “looked like a different person, because you looked haunted when you came in here.” After I got discharged, I went home to my messy apartment, and the kids were with my friends, and I just fell on my knees and started to cry. My sponsor had been telling me to get on my knees and ask for help for some time. Now I just did it.
I had to take that horrible beating to get there, but now I started taking suggestions—going to meetings, joining a group. I ended up at a meeting where I met my current sponsor and started doing some step work, and slowly I started to grow up.
I just celebrated 11 years clean and sober. I’ve had some very tough times in sobriety. But I’ve slowly gotten better—and I’m incredibly grateful.
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