LETTING GO
After selling our home, I attempted to maintain the standard of living that Samuel was accustomed to. But I probably went too far and overcompensated. I thought I’d hidden most of what I’d been going through because I was there for all his activities, including those with his friends. But after Samuel asked his mother if he could move in, I wondered if I’d have been deluding myself about how much Samuel knew and how it was affecting him. On the other hand, it could have simply been that he wanted to make the most of his final year of high school by being closer to his circle of friends. But I couldn’t be sure.
For most of Samuel’s life, I’d relied on Kathy for guidance, so I encouraged Samuel to spend some time with her. After eight or nine weekly sessions with Kathy, she reported that he knew and understood what he might be in for, and she felt confident he’d be able to handle his mother. I trust Kathy implicitly and perhaps it was a poor choice of words, but I don’t think that anyone can learn to handle Aida. At seventeen, Samuel was already over six feet tall and physically a fully grown man. But then again, he was only seventeen and he’d always be my baby. However, the move was maybe in Samuel’s best interest. Kathy had always been concerned that Samuel would most likely be attracted to emotionally unavailable abusive personality types and that he’d probably experience a string of painful relationships before he discovered the reason why. However, if he spent a year with his mother, he might get this devastating pattern of attraction out of his system once and for all.
As a parent, there was nothing more important to me. My mother could have easily married one violent alcoholic after another. In marrying my father, she’d managed to break free from what should have been her core relationship theme. But I hadn’t been able to do the same. The best I’d managed to achieve was to quite quickly recognise I’d once again attracted the same personality type, then tell myself that it was time to leave. It wasn’t an ideal solution, and at times I felt desperately alone. However, for thirty-two years I’d had my children to focus on and that had always been more than enough for me. I felt extraordinarily lucky to have so much time with my children and thought I possibly needed them more than they needed me. Now, it looked like my days of being a parent were about to end and I wasn’t sure how I would cope.
Even Samuel’s personal request had previously been rejected by his mother. So, just how were we going to get Aida to take Samuel for a year when she’d never shown any interest in having him before – even for a short school holiday? I decided that the only way this could possibly work would be when Aida’s parents were in town. I’d pack up Samuel’s belongings and when they asked to see him I’d send all his things along with a note thanking Aida in advance for taking care of Samuel, while clearly stating that I was temporally unable to continue. But I had to ask, just how did I fuck up so badly for it to end up like this?
I was a relapse waiting to happen when a few months later Samuel got invited for Christmas and I simply couldn’t follow through with our plan. Instead of calling my sponsor, I screamed at the heavens proclaiming, ‘I’m not fucking Abraham.’ Then I got up to join the year-end party that was happening a few feet away from Samuel’s bedroom at the complex’s swimming pool.
The next thing I knew, I was being shaken awake by Samuel who happened to have Aida with him. Aida – who’d never been to our apartment before – walked into the remnants of the previous night’s party which happened to include a few half-naked bodies who hadn’t made it back to their own apartments. Fragmented, I couldn’t work out what Aida was doing there. She must have called for me to collect Samuel, and then decided to return him herself. Aida must have been shocked by what she walked into because she uncharacteristically offered to take care of Samuel for another two days if I returned him later that day. I’m not sure why she chose to leave him, but it did give me another opportunity to ask Samuel if he really wanted to spend a year with his mother and whether I should proceed with our plan. In my disoriented state, I heard Samuel tell his mother something along the lines of ‘This is how I had to live.’ In the fourteen years that he’d lived with me I’d never had a party at home, and I’d seldom brought someone home. But since we’d sold our house, I had been drinking a lot more than I was willing to admit. And I had to wonder if I’d been living in denial and was that really how Samuel felt?
However, Aida had never visited our home before so she wouldn’t know if I behaved like that regularly or not. Still, what she’d walked into, along with Samuel’s comment, could only add weight to the letter I’d prepared – it might even help convince Aida that I was unable to continue on my own. Which from my perspective now looked decidedly closer to the truth. I contacted a friend who helped me pack, and the next day I sent Samuel’s things together with the letter I’d written. But her parents must have already left, and Aida refused to allow the transport company to offload and threatened to call the police. Ultimately I had to involve Aida’s parents, and after discussing my situation with her father Aida agreed to take delivery of Samuel’s things. Despite knowing that I’d have to revisit my part in what happened and just how much my drinking may have affected Samuel, I felt was sure I’d acted in Samuel’s best interests. I knew it would be difficult for both of us, but I had no idea just how much I’d struggle to live with the decision that I made that day.
FINAL SESSION WITH KATHY
I’d relied on Kathy for most of Samuel’s life. Most of our weekly sessions had been about Aida and Samuel. But she’d also had helped me to work through my childhood memories, and she’d been there for me when I thought I was losing my mind. And wherever the opportunity presented itself, she did try to encourage me to open up about my mum. I was meant to take two years to recover, but two years had turned into four and instead of recovering I’d only gotten worse. I viewed the migraines, and the depression that followed, as part of a spiritual war being waged against me to stop me from completing what I’d been asked to do. I hadn’t got that job done yet and it’s not that I didn’t try. I invested a lot of time, money, and energy on an expensive ghost-writer before I realized that the story was far too personal and if it was ever going to be written, I’d have to learn how to do it myself. So no matter how I was feeling, I committed myself to a minimum of six hours a day researching, planning, and doing my best to write. As much as it hurt losing Samuel, I thought I was walking in faith. I thought that if I was ever going to get there, I’d have to substantially reduce my costs. With that in mind, I made a final appointment with Kathy.
After letting Kathy know I was going to have to stop seeing her for a while, the rest of our last session together consisted primarily of her reassuring me Samuel would be okay. He had a solid foundation, and he clearly understood what he was getting into. Then, when my time was up and we were busy saying our goodbyes, I blurted out, ‘I went back.’ seemingly out of nowhere. I’m not sure what possessed me, but to date I’d simply never been able to share what I suspect was the real source of my unwarranted shame. In all the years we’d spent together, I hadn’t said a word about it to Kathy. Nor had I included this crucial bit of information in any of my Step Fours or shared it with my sponsor. This session probably felt like my last chance to off-load in a safe environment, or possibly I was simply more comfortable with bumping the information and running.
So I finished what I’d started: ‘I went back, and it was only when Juno, Emilio’s younger brother who must have been seven at the time, asked me to have sex with him, that I never went back.’
It was my final session with Kathy and she wouldn’t get a chance to work with me on what I’d finally decided to reveal, so she emailed me her thoughts:
‘Desire is usually understood in an erotic sense. But desire, as an emotion, is a powerful force that spans our emotional landscape. We desire a home, we desire to be touched, to be acknowledged, to be loved; we desire to love. Perhaps the most powerful desire is the desire of the parent for the child. The mother’s desire for the child could be seen as the driving life force: to hold the child, to hear the child’s voice, to watch the child, to hold the child’s hand; to stroke the child, to carry the child.
‘That desire is so strong that the mother very often turns away from everyone else in her life. Many husbands speak of being bereft, abandoned: knowing and feeling that the mother is not wife or lover or even friend anymore, all her desire is directed towards her child. The child knows/feels it is desired. The child desires the desire and desires the mother. Much later it desires the father, but in a different way – it desires the father’s approval, teaching, and support. The father’s physical strength and touch.
‘The child who has not been desired seeks desire his/her whole life long. So often, the undesired child becomes the victim of sexual abuse – willingly so, returning to the abuser because however unpleasant the experience may be, at that moment he/she is desired. As desire is the force that keeps a child alive in an emotional, and very often physical sense, it is completely understandable that the child is compelled to return and seek out the one who desires him/her – even though that desire may be dangerous. The child is not able to distinguish between dangerous/inappropriate desire and the desire of appropriate love. Desire is a life force – the child, therefore seeks that life force.
‘Most children know instinctively that the erotic desire and the sexual abuse that accompanies it is wrong. The child, however, does not judge the abuser as wrong but only him/herself. The shame felt is directed at the self, and as the child grows older the blame is directed toward the self. The child struggles to understand why he/she returned – not understanding the pull of the emotion that was denied to them in babyhood, and therefore directing the anger to the self instead of the abuser.’
I don’t know why it took me so long. Intellectually I already knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that no child is ever to blame – and I was only eight years old at the time. But emotionally, that shameful feeling that I’d somehow been complicit just wouldn’t go away.
BACK TO WORKING THE PROGRAM
Unable to face the consequences of the mess I’d created, for the next two months I totally trashed myself. I found a using friend that I was supposedly taking care of, and in a way I was. But when she started experiencing bouts of psychosis, I knew that instead of helping I’d actually been enabling her addiction to spiral out of control. When I was first introduced to Narcotics Anonymous it was my confusion over how quickly I’d become addicted that kept me going back to meetings. In Kathy’s professional opinion, my unmanageable experience with drugs had been purely circumstantial and a part of me wanted to know if that was true. Though after another two months of suicidal binging I still didn’t know whether I was an addict or not, mostly because I can’t relate to whenever someone shares about finding some form of utopia the first time they were introduced to their drug of choice. Yes, I’m initially a lot more talkative, but I almost immediately feel so self-conscious that all I want to do is run and hide. But I can relate to part of the preamble that says, ‘We could not live and enjoy life as other people do,’ and that’s always been good enough for me.
Perhaps it was my ego, but I first cleaned up at home. Then after thirty days, it was back to doing ninety meetings in ninety days. I did my best to get up, show up, and shut up while listening to anything that I could relate to. I found a new sponsor who was passionate about the history of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I’d already re-worked Steps Four and Five with my new sponsor when I started having panic attacks. At first, I wasn’t sure what the hell was happening until I intuitively reached for a bag. I was taking it a day at a time and still managing to stay afloat. By working with freelance designers I was still securing the odd small deal and employing a crew from a halfway house for recovering addicts, and somehow we were able to deliver. I’m not an expert and I no longer had Kathy to ask, so I simply had to accept the panic attacks were a part of the consequences of either the pharmaceuticals I’d been prescribed, the illegal drugs I’d taken, or both.
SAMUEL’S FIRST YEAR AWAY
I hadn’t been able to get hold of Samuel for months. I’d emailed Aida and her husband separately to ask them if they could please encourage Samuel to make contact, to which Aida responded with a monstrously cruel, ‘He doesn’t want to see you.’
I’d been dealing with Aida for close to twenty years and I’d been through this before. I had been lucky enough to get Samuel back after six months, but I had to wait till Grant and Aida were in the honeymoon phase of their relationship before I briefly got to reconnect with Ellen. Still, I had hoped beyond reason they’d come to their senses and realise it’s seldom in a child’s best interest to be alienated from either one of their parents.
A few months later, I would get an opportunity to see Samuel, but not under the best of circumstances. I’d just finished an appointment at the dentist when I received a call from a sheriff who’d been asked to see if he could get hold of me before the court issued a warrant for my arrest. Aida had used a different court that I didn’t even know existed, but as it turned out I wasn’t too far away. When I arrived, I was surprised to see that Aida had brought Samuel with her, and as uncomfortable as it must have been for him it did give me an opportunity to ask him how he was doing and if he was okay.
Thankfully they contacted me because, unbeknown to me, Aida had been up to her old tricks. I knew from past experience that if it was possible, Aida wouldn’t hesitate to have me thrown in jail. And I guess she was also hoping for another default judgement that would once again entitle her to attack whatever assets I had. Surprisingly, the magistrate assigned our case wasn’t too impressed to discover that Aida had fraudulently used our original divorce order as the basis for claiming unpaid child support. Even though I knew I had the law on my side I couldn’t help feeling like a delinquent, so I asked if I could quickly collect my file from home. I wanted to prove to the court, and Samuel, that while there wasn’t an order in place to compel me, I was effectively continuing to financially support Samuel by not pestering Aida for the money she still legally owed me. But I didn’t have to, because it only took another two questions – which Aida struggled to answer – for the magistrate to realise what Aida had tried to get away with and what she very nearly did. She’d once again attempted to have me arrested or to have my assets attached, or both. The courts don’t appreciate being lied to and judging by the magistrate’s reaction, I suspect that if Aida hadn’t decided to drag Samuel along, she could have been the one they arrested instead of me.
I felt awful for Samuel. It must have been incredibly uncomfortable for him. I would have loved Samuel to know that when I hadn’t had to, I’d paid to support Jeremy when he spent time with his mum. And even though that hadn’t worked out so well, if I thought it might help Samuel, I would’ve given Aida anything she wanted. But she’d already gotten away with more than a million from me and I knew that whatever I gave her, it would simply never be enough.
I missed Samuel terribly and I hadn’t yet come to terms with the fact that I’d allowed this to happen. Because of Ellen, long before I made my decision, I knew that a simple carving knife could be viewed as an act of unforgivable disloyalty. I’d also been told by Kathy that after years of painful neglect by his mother, Samuel would be willing to do almost anything to win Aida’s affection. That could include believing anything she said and having to reject me. Still, I had hoped that because Samuel was a lot older, and because I’d taught him to always remember his mother’s birthday and every other special occasion, he might find a way to remember me the same.
MUM PASSES
Not knowing what to do, I threw myself back into Twelve Step programs, and around the anniversary of Samuel’s first year away I had the opportunity to be with my mother for her final few months. After a lifetime of smoking she was suffering from emphysema, and it had taken its toll. Abigail was keeping an eye on her at night, and I’d take over when she had to leave for work. We’d take gentle walks around the garden, stopping often to appreciate the flowers and shrubbery, and I’d get to assure her that as far as I was concerned, she’d done well. With her childhood, she should have repetitively married violent men just like her father. But she hadn’t. Mum had married the gentlest person. Dad was pretty much the very opposite of the deranged alcoholic father who she had survived. She may or may not have been able to love him, but in choosing and sticking with Dad she had essentially broken what could easily have been a lifetime relationship pattern – and what a difference that made for all of us. As an adult, she’d never asked anyone for help. With only a primary school education, she’d managed the family’s limited income and I never felt like I’d gone without. She’d saved all her life to ensure we were all provided for, and she still had enough to cover frail-care should it ever come down to that.
On one of our walks, Mum once again apologised for neglecting me for my first two years as a child. Her previous admission had already been enough for me – enough for me to begin the process of accepting my vulnerable child state and to start identifying its lasting effects. But that wasn’t the mother who I remembered. She’d made sure that my sister and I were provided for, and while she didn’t believe that she knew how to love or be loved, she’d spent the majority of her life caring for others. She took care of Dad, her siblings, and her grandchildren, and she was always available to all her extended family for doctor, hospital, and even their hair appointments. Even so, she’d never forgiven herself – and I’d much rather she did that. Her condition deteriorated until she couldn’t or didn’t want to eat. Then one day, as she slipped in and out of a morphine-induced haze prescribed to keep her comfortable, holding my hand she turned and said ‘Daniel, you do know that your father couldn’t afford his children.’ I was kneeling next to her attempting to hide my sobbing in the woven linen I’d purchased when I was still expected to see Samuel on weekends. I couldn’t have been distracted for more than a minute or two hoping and praying to see Samuel again, but when I looked up, mum was gone.
Leave a Reply