Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls
Page 30
Embedded within so much self-help literature is the notion that a more real version of yourself is buried beneath some emotional rubble. Your “true self” is there to be found and treasured, under all the hurt and pain and damage. The genesis of the concept of codependency is so bound up with our American thinking about the power of the individual, and the “true self” makes sense in this context. Substance abuse recovery as we are most likely to experience it is just a set of concepts, developed in a particular time and place. The heterosexual couple is at its center: a broken man whose wounds must be healed so that he can return to the helm of the nuclear family, to the role of the self-reliant breadwinner, and an angry woman who should make even her rage productive, knead it into the bread dough, so that she might forgive him and restore peace to her marriage and her home.
I haven’t wanted to uncover or to recover anything and I haven’t experienced my path to greater peace this way. After so many years clinging in fear to various identities, I prefer to think of the space of me as empty space, the way I did on the couch with K, freshly vacuumed out, with the hope of him changing, getting better, finally stilled. Once and for all. A moment of no hope and no future. Of perfect acceptance. Recovering implies a doubling back, a recuperation, but my path away from destruction has not entailed a re-covering of anything. Everything is new.
For a long time, I believed that if I took care of myself, I would necessarily, organically move farther away from others. In the binary logic of individualism, you fortify the self at the expense of the other. But in filling the empty space of me, I have found that actually the complete opposite is true. The more I love myself, the more my heart opens, the more present and sensitive I become, so much so it hurts.
Frequently while driving, I reach my hand into the back seat and make a “gimme” motion with my fingers, just like my mother used to. My daughter lays her hand in mine and I smooth her small knuckles with my thumb. I hold her hand and then my son’s. Both are clammy, soft, utterly trusting. My son lifts my hand to his face to nuzzle against it or give me a gentle kiss. I do short then long squeezes, twice, then three times, and they squeeze back the same pattern. We’ve always done this, but I don’t know that my clutching always made them feel as safe as it does now. Perhaps it felt more frantic those hungover mornings in the back seat; perhaps they thought I needed something from them. My love for my children has always been fierce and it has always fed me, which is why I thought I was a pretty good mom even when I was drinking, even when I was with K. I was doing my best with the tools I had. But now that I have better tools, I know that I am a good mom, maybe a great one, and the comfort in that is profound. I think about the fact that they can now trust me entirely, the way I trusted my mother—to be even and reliable, to be awake and alert, to live with integrity—and a sense of fullness spreads through my chest, warm as whiskey.
I feared I would become less fun in recovery. What a relief it has been to discover that the fun wasn’t alcohol or drugs, it wasn’t me being crazy: it was just me. We still dance in the kitchen to The Go-Go’s and The Marvelettes. We do a pretend cooking show, try to beat the timer as it runs down, one of us stirring, one pouring, one plating. My daughter tells me she’s learned to sing “Lean on Me” in her school choral group, so I put on Bill Withers and we sing it together and tears fill my eyes. My daughter tilts her head compassionately in these moments and says, Mommy, you don’t have to CRY, which makes me cry more. I am awed daily by these rewards of recovery. Nothing flashy—all small, contained everyday moments like lights on a string. The rewards of a well-tended life: the clean new house bursting with plants, the dog their father and I rescued all those years ago now grey-haired and snoring in her bed, and this book, almost finished. So many meals together where we share our rose, thorn, and seed: the best part of our day, the worst, and something we’re looking forward to. What is romance anyway if not this? I find myself thinking. Nothing feels more romantic to me now than believing I deserve this joy, this love. The one it turned out I was looking for all along. By the grace of some god or goddess or the ocean or the moon or dumb luck, we have survived this monstrous disease for now.
I can’t let go of everything, all my old ways. For me, recovery, the filling of the empty space of me, is not a renunciation of dependency. Love is still my drug, the potent intoxicant I believe gives our lives their meaning. And the relationships of dependency I enjoy on this planet—with this planet, with books, with the incredible people in my life, and especially with my children—are still what give me purpose. The thing I have renounced, have tried to set down once and for all, is suffering. Unnecessary pain. A belief system that conflates misery with authenticity. I discovered that I could stop obsessing, stop controlling, stop victimizing myself. I only had to want to, to sit down and learn how. I remind my sponsees of the poster that John Lennon and Yoko Ono made in the 1960s to protest the escalation of the Vietnam War that read “WAR IS OVER! (IF YOU WANT IT).” It ought to hang wherever the Twelve Steps go.
The rain comes and goes but the Bay Area cold still lives in my bones. All ten fingers never warm. On Tuesdays, I stand outside the church basement entrance and wave to the people coming in, the ones who want the kind of life I want now, whose stories I have been following for nearly two years. I hold the door open for one of them, a young woman in her twenties whose girlfriend is a violent drunk. When she looks up to acknowledge me, I see that she has tears in her eyes already. Inside, I pour the shitty coffee into my cup and sit down in the least creaky pew.
For my mother and father
acknowledgments
Thank you first and foremost to my family, who let themselves be written about and showed nothing but love. You continue to prove we are unsinkable.
Thank you to my parents for imparting a lifetime love of words. To my mother—my North Star—who reminds me to also write my joy. To my father, for steadily keeping the beat and for always listening. To my sisters: you complete me. Thank you for being the funniest people who have ever lived and for your unflagging belief in me. To Leah, for living to fight another day with grit and grace and for turning it into art with me. To Alexa, the other half of my black-and-white cookie, for understanding me in ways people only dream about.
Thank you to Sylvia Yules. To the Brauns, Arons, and Lermans. To Deanna Steele, Beth Holland, Jersey Lynch, and especially Zac Judkins and Erica Nagel for all their support.
To Elise Herrala, my forever first editor and rom-com costar, who was there at all hours and who read every word at every stage, from the very first sentences, which dropped from the sky in the middle of the desert.
To my first loves: Beth Blofson, Ryan Hawke, Medb Marsceill. My grrrls, my heart. Keepers of my memories. I would hardly have any idea who I am without you.
To Tai Power Seeff for our love everlasting, for too-late nights, cemetery walks, and coupons.
To Tre Wallace for being a rock, my favorite bookworm, and an endless source of comfort.
To Carvell Wallace, the most reliable source of wisdom I know.
Thank you to Flip Brophy for always telling me I could do this and for calling to make me laugh throughout the whole painful process. To Jim Rutman, interlocutor extraordinaire, for your expertise and for engaging with my ideas—good, bad, and ugly—over all these many years.
To my editor, Alexis Washam, who got it from the very beginning and who has shown this book such care. To Jillian Buckley, your knowledge is deep and your enthusiasm contagious. To Gwyneth Stansfield, Melissa Esner, Julie Cepler, Dyana Messina, Nicole Ramirez, Anna Kochman, Annsley Rosner, and everyone at Crown who helped bring this to life. Thank you to Louisa Dunnigan at Profile Books and Jason Richman at United Talent Agency.
To the friends who read this book in drafts for their brilliant, funny, and, above all, useful commentary: Brian Gallagher, Anna Godbersen, Melissa Richer, Laura Smith, Yael Stiles, and Diana Thow. You kept me going and ma
de this book better.
To Nora Reilly, Jessica Egan, and Christopher Roebuck for answering research questions.
To loved ones near and far who light up my mind, and who have too many gifts to begin to count: Ryan Calder, Ethan Hawke, Ben Dickey, Patrick Marsceill, Cal Light, Lindsay Leopold, Kara Urion, Rebekah Witzke, Mary Beth Keane, Rian Dundon, Charlotte Buchen Khadra, Zachary Levenson, Rahfee Barber, Lawrence Barth, JR Geisler, Yael Gottlieb, Lia and Felicia Halloran, Michael Weber, Summer Brenner, Gloria Frym, Patricia Kubala, Leila Nichols, Rachel Goldman, Robin Meyerhoff and Michael Ryan, Ariana Wolf, Hall McCann, Judy Zinis, James Spooner, Lisa Nola, and my sisters in rock: Rachel Sager Sales, Kristy Morrison, and Christie Call.
Thank you to Teresa Sabatini and Tracy Helton Mitchell. To Lilly Gage for freedom and time. To Felicia Keller-Boyle for wisdom beyond.
To K: there are no words.
And finally, to Emmett & Iona Mae, my brightest lights, true loves of my life. You are the key to the map of my existence. Thank you for showing me who I can be.
about the author
NINA RENATA ARON is a writer and editor living in Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
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