Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls
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While she read or checked out books, my sisters and I played hushed games of hide-and-seek among the Rutgers library carrels and went on group excursions to the hallway water fountain, dragging our Velcro sneakers along the carpet to make static electricity to administer little shocks. Mommy shot us a serious look if we were getting too noisy, and we fell in line, shushing one another. Sometimes at night after dinner, we were enlisted to quiz her for exams from a giant stack of index cards on which she’d written the names of painters on one side and paintings on the other, in her pretty, efficient, semi-script handwriting. In my memory, the stack of index cards was as high as my knees, but it couldn’t have actually been that tall. Some of the images in her textbooks were the same ones I knew she’d been talking about when we’d discussed religion. All those beautiful pictures and stories: angels and fire and breasts.
My mother wrote her thesis about representations of women during Westward Expansion, and for half a year there were books scattered around the house or stacked on the dining room table depicting these embattled souls. Women’s struggles and women’s dreams were a theme in our home. There were three of us girls—ducklings toddling in a row—and our mother and her index cards, and we all wanted so much. In her master’s thesis, plucked from a box during one of her post-divorce moves, my mother sought to grant interiority and depth to women who’d been painted out of their complexity, their humanity. The hardy pioneer family was the primary “civilizing” agent at the center of the violent, racist doctrine of Manifest Destiny, but the women at the helm of these families were rendered (by men) without agency. Many were small and peripheral—specks of femininity—representing something without actually being anything. The frontier painters drew on Christian iconography, and my mother catalogued the female figures they painted as “frontier Madonnas,” “happy nesters,” and “captives.” Then she used the accounts in pioneer women’s diaries to demonstrate how rich and how difficult their experiences actually were. To their blurred faces and windswept skirts, she added the details of their exhaustion, determination, fear, and hope. She asserted that they had as much expertise as their intrepid hunter-husbands who, along with their horses, were always depicted in action—upright, dynamic, and strong. It was an admirable act of recuperation.
I grew up believing there is always more to the story. I was primed to be interested in women’s history and particularly in the spaces where it seemed there ought to be a women’s history, yet there was nothing. I suppose I was trained by my mother to remember that other worlds exist, to always look at the woman frozen in the window and wonder what her life was like. I grew up in love with women’s stories, with the ways their labor made itself visible everywhere, even when men would prefer to pretend that it wasn’t the scaffolding of their very existence. I was especially taken with their anger.
At thirteen, my friends and I became riot grrrls. We were hormonal, stewing in new bodily shames, processing the experiences of sexual assault we’d already had by the handful. We embarked on an ambitious regimen of at-home piercing, bleaching, head-shaving. I was reading nightly from a hardbound, secondhand copy of Sisterhood Is Powerful and having my mind blown. And then I ordered the first Bikini Kill LP from Kill Rock Stars and we listened to it on my parent’s record player, draped on the den futon, and our lives changed forever.
Radicalized by mail order, our baby claws came out. We made zines and traded them with other girls around the country who became our pen pals and our friends. In sparkly homemade envelopes, we sent one another candy and toys and stickers and long letters, sharing our secrets, trying to build a movement. We wheat-pasted flyers around town with messages that made our fathers raise their eyebrows. (“Hi, I just wanted to let you know that I am not going to smile, act dumb, hide my body, pretend, lie, or act silent for you,” read one flyer made by Omaha riot grrrl Ann Carroll that we plastered everywhere. “I’m not going to let you laugh at me, harass me, abuse me, or rape me anymore. Because I am a girl and me and my girlfriends are not afraid of you!”) We went to punk rock shows and eventually started our own pissed-off, three-piece band. We got other bands to play shows at the local arts council or the basement of the Unitarian church. When the first of us got a license, we drove to New York and Philadelphia to go to house shows and vegetarian Chinese restaurants, to run around. We let our leg hair grow. It was before we knew sugar was toxic, before anyone thought to eschew gluten. Junk food was a rebellion. Riot don’t diet, I scrawled in lavender paint marker on the locker-room mirror. We slept over at the houses where parents were the most permissive, and sat talking and listening to music, gorging ourselves on candy and soda and chips, grouping jelly beans by color, making straws out of Twizzlers to drink our Dr Pepper through. In the darkness of 2:00 or 3:00 A.M., we snuck out and walked around town, stealing a taste of freedom, listening for boys on skateboards, watching the streetlights cast our shadows and taking ourselves in, our forms suddenly tall and forbidding, with power in numbers. A proper girl gang.
We became foot soldiers of a feminism that, like my mother’s, began with an impulse to wedge women’s reality, specifically women’s pain, back into the stories we tell about the world. Riot grrrl was very white and very suburban—it was rightly criticized for becoming an echo chamber for girls like us—but I cherished the scene for giving me a new language and a purpose. Riot grrrl continued the work of Second Wave consciousness-raising by foregrounding the first-person narrative, which we believed had radical potential, and by recasting human history as riven by incest, rape, and other abuses of power. The movement also continually acknowledged its own messiness and the mess that was womanhood—particularly sexuality—and validated our growing sense that patriarchy was not only a thing that was being enacted upon us but a throbbing, oozing, living system in which we were complexly complicit.
But as I was embracing radical feminism, my relationships with my family, friends, and boys were growing evermore enmeshed. Friendships and crushes were consuming and obsessive. I felt targeted and trapped by the intensity of boys’ feelings for me. And though I was learning about political experiments in collectivity, I knew that the more primary feminist project lay in cultivating autonomy, and that seemed impossible to imagine. My responsibility to my family alone precluded any possibility of real independence. Between my budding feminism and the demands of my relationships, there was a disconnect. I found myself utterly unable to put my new principles into practice in my personal life.
As a teenager, I spent hours enveloped by the tall, overfull pine bookshelves at the used bookstore in our town, looking for a book about someone like me. Someone who searched for drugs in her sister’s shoulder bag, in the aperture of her sister’s pupils. Someone whose parents had gone limp and ragged with worry. Women had lived for centuries as we were, beside the beast of addiction, tormented both by its predictable heartbreaks and by the specter of death, its menacing, unpredictable end. I thought there must be something soulful, something wise written by a grown woman, someone who had felt this way before, who would know how to handle it. I found a couple crappy self-help books and page-a-day compendia of hackneyed “wisdom.” The well-thumbed books that mentioned codependency seemed so pandering, so simple. They were collections of complaints with chapter titles like “Cindy” and “Jessica.” Was this therapy-speak the reason my father had been so dismissive of Al-Anon meetings? Maybe I was no better than he was.
What I mostly found was the I, I, I of the addict, shelf upon shelf of their lush, gorgeous, narcissistic tomes. The canon of personal and cultural reflection on the disease produced by alcoholics and addicts is enormous, varied, and often brilliant. I became an addiction literature junkie. I read Junky; The Basketball Diaries; Jesus’ Son; Bright Lights, Big City; Confessions of an English Opium-Eater; Drinking: A Love Story; Postcards from the Edge; Trainspotting. I’ve since read Lit, Tweak, Cherry, Blackout, Permanent Midnight, The Night of the Gun, Running with Scissors, A Million Littl
e Pieces, How to Murder Your Life, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, Drunk Mom, and on and on. I came to resent that there were so many books and films for “them” (addicts) and none for “us” (codependents).
But back then, I never found what I was looking for. There were women alcoholics, but what about the women who lived with alcoholics? Who cooked and cleaned for alcoholics, raised their children? What about the mothers who watched their babies grow possessed by drugs, as mine had? Were they too tired to write anything down? Too busy making their own mistakes?
The particular emotional storms that attend this experience were collected and named codependency, but those who had named it hadn’t adequately answered the only questions I seemed to care about: Why did taking care of other people feel so good and hurt so much? Why was I able to build an ironclad feminist politics but not able to live according to its most elemental message: that I was a person equal to any other?
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My parents reluctantly dipped a toe into the Al-Anon pond in the late 1990s as my sister’s addiction crescendoed. The suggestion they received in the rooms was to “detach with love,” show my sister some “tough love,” and refuse to shield her from the consequences of her drug use. Protecting her from having to pay the price for her own actions was a form of enabling, after all.
They couldn’t embrace this thinking one bit. My father seemed uninterested even in the meetings themselves. He didn’t want to have to sit through the sharing of all of these different types of people with their different ways of relating to their common problem. He wanted something he knew would work for him. I wish there was a meeting for college-educated fathers of heroin-addicted daughters, he said when I asked what he thought of Al-Anon.
Maybe you should start one, I said curtly. But that wasn’t likely. That’s not how Twelve Step recovery works, for one thing. It is precisely based on the idea of transcending differences, listening to the experiences of others, and believing that, as in a church, support and salvation come to everyone, regardless of their background or the specificities of their situation. Moreover, my parents were ashamed. If the perfect support group had come to them, knocked on their door, and perhaps promised not to alert their broader community to my sister’s heroin addiction, they might have taken more of an interest. But they weren’t entirely ready to announce themselves as the parents of a drug addict to a roomful of strangers, especially when one of the strangers might turn out to be someone they knew. We lived in the suburbs, my parents were well respected and normal, and they had raised us well. By that logic—the logic that has kept addiction stigmatized for so long—Lucia’s problem wasn’t supposed to happen. The revelation would have been an indictment of my mother in particular, or at least it was likely to feel that way, since discord in the home traditionally reflects the inadequacy of the wife/mother. They were not inclined to talk about it outside of our family, which made telling my friends or even the guidance counselor at school feel suspect, a mini-betrayal that, even if it would never make its way back to them, still counted as a mark against our clan.
Another reason Al-Anon didn’t take was because its message, particularly then, was that family members of alcoholics and addicts must focus on themselves and stop letting the ups and downs of addiction rule their lives. They must stop trying to manage someone else’s decisions and disease and stop buffering against the repercussions of another’s actions. But there was simply no way my mother could ever be convinced to change our locks, stop giving my sister help, support, money, or time. Sometimes, when I was frustrated by how consumed she was, I wished she would just banish Lucia. For once, just tell her that we’d had enough. Sometimes the impulse was well-meaning: I thought for a time, naïvely, that maybe a stint in jail or being homeless would jolt her into recognizing the severity of the problem and convince her to get and stay clean. Other times it was powered by resentment: maybe if she got kicked out, I could get some attention from my parents. Either way, my mother disagreed.
In her 2005 book, The Too-Good Wife: Alcohol, Codependency, and the Politics of Nurturance in Postwar Japan, anthropologist Amy Borovoy, who studied Japanese women’s codependency support groups, writes that “tough love” held little sway in that context. “US substance abuse discourse relies heavily on the American language of rights and autonomy,” writes Borovoy. “Yet Japanese discourses of family and motherhood do not emphasize the independence of the child from the parents; neither do they grant the parents rights by which they may separate themselves off from the needs of the child.” The women Borovoy observed and interviewed had an understanding of motherhood as completely central to their identities, and their understanding of the mothers’ role was incompatible with the individualism at the center of Al-Anon. In the context of “American ideologies that fetishize individual rights,” Borovoy writes, “…there is little language for conceptualizing the necessary compromises in self-determination that sociality entails.” Relationships that jeopardize or compromise individual rights or autonomy are “classified as abusive or exploitive.” Only “self-loathing, uncontrollable compulsion, or a troubled family background” could explain why an individual would enter into such relations. My mother, a Jewish American woman who’d spent most of her life on the East Coast of the United States, had a great deal in common with these Japanese moms. She practiced the art of motherhood in a way that celebrated our profound dependencies. The idea that she should reclaim her individual rights by relinquishing responsibility for her child’s illness was repellent to her, and one reason why she never stayed long in the rooms of Al-Anon.
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Eventually, I tried Al-Anon, too. I was sixteen. A day after my math teacher returned a quiz with only one correct answer and the words “Wake up!” written in red ballpoint cursive at the top, a note from the guidance counselor appeared on my locker. It wasn’t an invitation to see her, but an appointment already scheduled. I just had to show up. I had seen the school nurse, who kept a dish of tiny plastic babies in her office that she used to warn teenage girls against abortion. But the guidance counselor seemed normal enough, and when prompted I described for her “the scene at home.” My parents were splitting up, my sister was a heroin addict, and I was in the middle. I had been called upon to listen, absorb, mediate, help, and soften. According to the counselor, my role was the family “hero child,” enlisted to patch up the leaking ship of our home, determined not to complain about it, and to be a good-enough girl to remain under the radar of parental concern. The guidance counselor, who was also the mother of one of my classmates, told me kindly that I could take refuge in her office when needed, and suggested that I try a meeting.
In spite of the diversity of our town and my naïve sense that addiction was a young person’s problem, the meeting, held upstairs in a linoleum-floored and wood-paneled church rec room, was populated mostly by grandmotherly types. Many looked weary, like they’d lived through a century of Midwestern winters. They introduced themselves at the beginning of the meeting and had names like Doris and Shirley. Surely, Shirley, you can’t expect me to stay here, I snickered to myself, surveying the scene. A few wore synthetic-blend cardigans clearly knitted by hand and at least two reached into tote bags and took out bulky knitting projects to work on while the meeting was in session. The paneled room smelled both musty and freshly oiled with Old English, a citrus-chemical odor that lingered in my nostrils and made me wrinkle my nose as I looked around, taking it in, my mouth pursed in a sweet little smile of friendly curiosity in case any of the ladies were looking at me.
After the reading of a few boilerplate introductory texts, the women raised their hands—sometimes interrupting tens of seconds of painfully uncomfortable silence, during which only the odd sniffle or squeak of a chair leg could be heard—and took turns sharing for a few minutes about things that seemed to me entirely unrelated to drugs or alcohol. The women
(almost all were women, and all but a few were white) in the meeting were talking about decisions as minor as choosing not to call someone back immediately, saying no to an invitation to lunch, holding one’s tongue rather than offering unsolicited input on the wedding of a grown child. What the fuck does any of this have to do with anything? I wondered. I had been told by the guidance counselor that Al-Anon meetings were a place where people could talk about what it’s really like to have alcoholics and addicts in their lives, but in this room, I couldn’t grasp what the common thread was. If what the women were saying could be grouped into any theme, I guess it would have been self-esteem? They generally seemed to feel at ease doing what they pleased in their rather uneventful-sounding lives and reporting on these events to the larger group. That was sweet, I guess. I imagined—with the flagrant ageism of a very young person—that these were women with little else to occupy their time. They must not have anything else to do, maybe it was fun for them just to get together and chat. Were they married to alcoholics? The mothers or sisters or daughters of alcoholics? They scarcely mentioned their “qualifiers”—the people whose drinking got them into “the rooms” in the first place. Rather, they cycled through “shares” on a constellation of everyday behaviors that didn’t sound that bad at all. At the end of the meeting, afraid one of them would try to talk to me, I made a beeline for the door.
The “scene at home” was so much more dramatic than anything these elderly women seemed to be living through. And it didn’t even strike me as possible that they had lived through equally harrowing things and had through their efforts ended up being this okay, this calm and removed. Almost once per share, something was said that would send a ripple of tranquil laughter around the room, and a couple times an eruption of real laughter and enthusiastic nodding. I attended a few other meetings—because the culture of each meeting is slightly unique, newcomers are encouraged to try at least six different meetings before deciding whether the program is for them—but Al-Anon scared me off. I was too young, and things at home were too crazy. How could I raise my hand and say the words “heroin” or “crack”? I thought the mild-mannered knitters would fall off their chairs.