For several months thereafter, Don was prohibited by cas from being in the house. By the end of that time, he had rented a condo in the city and started moving his stuff. He became what he wanted to be all along: a grandparent. In a way, I was relieved — no more bickering, or worse, over what to do about Boop. But the peace was short lived. One night soon after, I found myself barricaded in the bedroom while a thirteen-year-old Andrew stood outside, gouging holes in the door with his skateboard and calling me a fucking bitch. Apparently, my efforts to improve his gross motor skills had paid off; mine were failing me as I fumbled for my cell to call the police. Another night, he backed me into a corner in the kitchen as he menaced me with one of the biggest kitchen knives. He shrieked abuse; I sobbed. Often, in the later evening, I would sob some more to the anonymous voice at the end of a distress line, fortified by yet another glass of cabernet.
My friends had some sense of what was going on, but to me, at least, my story was boring. Besides, what could they do? It was harder to see them anyway, because I was leery of leaving Andrew alone. Hosting a dinner party seemed as achievable as scaling Everest. My social life consisted largely of meetings with counsellors, therapists, and other social service types, sometimes two or three a week. I was increasingly isolated and deeply lonely — not for the marriage that had ceased to provide solace, but for normal, non-therapeutic conversation. I recall bursting into tears one evening after some friends who had planned to stop by for a visit called to cancel.
The first time a worker suggested placing Andrew somewhere else, I was aghast. His mom hadn’t been dead that long, his “Papa” had recently moved out — one more loss would be insupportable. But as the violent incidents continued, my resistance waned. I knew it was common for fas kids to start seriously derailing in puberty. In their early teens, a lot of them end up on the streets; by their late teens, they may very well be in the slammer. Plus, I knew I was on the edge.
The social worker was proposing a foster home. What I had in mind was a widely touted two-year residential program for teens with mental health issues at Toronto’s Hincks-Dellcrest Treatment Centre. Because I didn’t think I could hold myself together for the three or four months the wait for a “community” bed would take, in the end I decided to sign over temporary custody to a children’s aid service so as to have him admitted quickly via an “agency” bed. Now Andrew could look forward to a lot of new routines, a roomie, and dish duty. I could look forward to having my parenting micromanaged by twenty-five-year-old, childless social workers.
“My name is Lynn, and I’m an alcoholic.” The roughly fifty women in the room — well-groomed professionals, young women who look as if they belong at a dorm gossipfest, and the dozen or so denizens of a local rehab program, many a little the worse for wear — chorus back, “Hi, Lynn.”
I call AA “Booze Church,” not just because the meeting I attend is on Sunday morning, but also because the hour-long gathering is as choreographed as any religious service I’ve ever attended, from the opening moment of silence through the “sermon” (a member sharing her “experience, strength, and hope” for twenty minutes or so) to the closing recitation of the Serenity Prayer, with everyone in a circle, holding hands.
I’m the first in my family to join this congregation. There isn’t a dash of alcoholism in my background. My maternal grandparents were teetotalers; my mom and dad would have a glass of nasty Brights sherry before dinner on Sundays and maybe an India Pale Ale on a hot day. On my dad’s side, overdrinking was my aunts gigglingly having a second G&T before Christmas dinner.
This history, plus focusing — obsessing, actually — on Andrew’s alcoholic heritage, which was at least several generations on both sides of his family, meant it took me a long time to realize that booze had become a problem for me. After all, I wasn’t remotely like those others: prone to drunken rages, drinking anything alcoholic when desperate, screwing up in all manner of ways. No, I held a good job, sipped good wines, then maybe had a Lagavulin or two later in the evening. I virtually never drank during the day, let alone first thing “the next morning” (number eleven on one of AA’s twenty-question “Are You an Alcoholic?” quizzes). But as the need to intervene on Andrew’s behalf became more and more urgent and the emotional temperature at home got higher and higher, so did I.
Around the time Andrew seemed to be hip-hopping toward juvie, my counsellor had suggested doing an analysis of where my money was going, since I was about $50,000 in debt. I’d been horrified to see that, conservatively, I had spent $5,000 on booze the previous year. She’d also referred me to a doctor who assessed medications for those with mood disorders, since my Prozac just didn’t seem to be doing it anymore. He’d asked disingenuously, “So, how much do you drink? Case of beer a day?” Well, no, but a bottle and a half of wine wasn’t unusual.
That revelation had effectively ended our meeting. He’d explained that until I quit drinking, there was little he could do about medications, since the two interacted in such a way as to render most drugs useless or unpredictable; I’d filed away “get sober” on the to-do list, well after “find some treatment for Andrew.”
More than a year later, in the spring of 2004, with Andrew ensconced in the Hincks program and actually learning something again at the in-house school, sobriety finally made it to the top of the list, along with completing the last two courses of my Ph.D. I figured quitting drinking would at least free up some dough to pay down my debt and help with the many hundreds of dollars’ worth of required reading. Besides, Andrew was already smoking dope; booze — about as healthy as heroin for fas kids — would doubtless follow, but it’s hard to lecture about why drinking is dangerous with a third glass of wine in your hand.
Getting sober was anticlimactic. It was summer, and I had just arrived, jet-lagged, in Vancouver to run a workshop, and only wanted to go to bed, even though I had made sure to have a stash of two bottles of wine with me. The next evening, I thought, “Let’s try that again,” and went to a movie instead of drinking in my room. The third day, feeling rather nauseated due to withdrawal, I went to my first AA meeting. What I principally recall is an attendee going on at length about the great breakfast he had had that morning: bacon and eggs and toast and sausages... at that point, I bolted for the bathroom.
Except for the throwing-up part, the rest of the week passed the same way: work during the day, AA at night. One day, I called the local AA office to find a nearby meeting and was told the Hobbit group met at 7 p.m. Hobbit group? “Do I have to dress up?” I joked. “Oh no, ma’am,” the ultra-serious volunteer responded. “AA is very informal.” The day the course ended, I headed out to visit a friend who lived in town. When I walked through the door, he asked if I wanted a drink and I said yes. That gin and tonic and the glass of wine I had at dinner were the last alcohol I’ve consumed in more than five years. The next day, I went to two AA meetings as expiation.
On the occasions I’ve spoken at these gatherings about the challenges and irony of an alcoholic raising an fas child, there’s been no indication that the listeners see themselves in my story. It seems improbable that none of their kids have been affected; maybe it’s that the devastating knowledge that one has permanently harmed one’s child is too hard to concede. Kira was certainly unwilling to admit there was anything wrong with Andrew, and as far as I know she held on to this illusion until her death. And Andrew’s perspective? When I told him I was quitting drinking, his response was a desultory “Cool.” Not surprisingly, he wants to be considered a normal kid and won’t tolerate any discussion of fas; my small cache of books on the subject has always annoyed him (“You’re researching me!”). He knows his mom had an alcohol problem, and he knows the cause of fas, but I suspect it’s no easier for him to imagine that her drinking was the reason for his hated label.
After I got sober, and with Andrew gone five days a week, it became apparent that booze had not been the primary reason I was either lying in bed until mid-afternoon, flattened by the effort required to shower, or sounding like a participant in a speed-talking contest. So I had hit upon a new plan: hard-core psychiatric treatment. I had in mind something evocative of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” — “Stroll around the grounds until you feel at home.” The eight-week Integrated Mood and Anxiety Program, offered at the Homewood Health Centre in Guelph, seemed adequately retro.
Homewood’s gracious red-brick facility dates from late Victorian times, and covers fifty-five well-groomed acres with amenities such as tennis courts, gym, whirlpool, greenhouse, massage services, and — yes! — walking trails. In a horror flick, the genteel facade would have disguised a site of devilish experiments carried out by sadistic staff. True, there were some zombie-like residents who were undergoing electro-convulsive therapy, but for me about the cruellest practice was having to finish dinner by 6 p.m.
Bed checks, mandatory morning exercise, meds lineups, ID bracelets, random urine tests, 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. lockdown — they were all surprisingly easy to adjust to, and gave us something to carp about when we got tired of discussing medications or suicide methods. The myriad forms of therapy, individual and group, as well as the “classes” (Know Your Meds, The Perils of Codependency, or along those lines anyway) kept us engaged during the day, and we got to go home on weekends. So did Andrew, which provided us a chance to bond over our respective restorative environments: “Don’t you hate it when they shine the light in your eyes when you’re in bed?”
