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March 1980

Last night, our meeting took a turn into a familiar subject: our kids, the monsters. I had gone to that meeting hoping to raise the topic of our children, but in quite another context. I was thinking about my daughter, prompted by a magazine article I had read concerning alcoholics’ children who grow up looking good and acting perfect and then, later in their lives, begin to fall apart. What seems at first to be their healthy self-reliance proves to be unhealthy loneliness brought on by a parent or parents who could never be trusted. I was hoping we could discuss this—see, perhaps, whether there were danger signs in our own children, ask ourselves what we might do to heal such an injury. The meeting never did get around to this; but for me, the topic was far from closed.

When I came home, my wife told me, with some emotion, of a conversation with our six-year-old daughter earlier in the evening. She had asked our little girl to be especially kind and patient with Ben, her fellow first-grader, who lives on our block. Ben’s mother, she explained, has a crippling disease that keeps on getting worse, and she cannot do most of the things that other mothers do. Ben has talked about his mother’s sickness, and he knows that she’ll never get better. He probably thinks of it a lot and gets sad and frightened, and that is why he seems to be hurt so easily and cries a lot.

Our daughter seemed to understand immediately, and this was her response: “Oh yes, I know. Remember when Daddy was sick and you both would argue so loud at night? I would go into the bathroom by myself and just cry and cry—and I was so scared!” And then, after a thoughtful pause: “It sure is lucky that you both had things you could get better from!”

I had no idea that such a thing had ever happened even once, let alone repeatedly. But that is not so surprising, for in my drinking, I had become totally insensitive to everyone and everything about me, and the blackouts wiped away what few thoughts I had. But we were surprised that my wife had not seen the child run from the room to hide. And why had she waited all this time to say anything about it? It hurts me to accept the obvious explanation: Her mem­ory was triggered because her feelings on those awful nights were as terrible as those she thought Ben must have at seeing himself being left more and more alone, looking with dread toward the time when that abandonment would be total.

These thoughts came tumbling out, along with a flood of painful memories. Painful they will always be, but thank God, they are kept from being bitter memories by one thing—the new life that the AA program has given to all three of us. My disease has been arrested. As my daughter said, it is something I could “get better from.”

I don’t pretend to have a perfect understanding of her young mind on this or any other topic, but last night did give me a fresh insight. On our vacation last year, I spent one of our precious evenings in Paris getting to a meeting at the American Church on the Quai d’Orsay. My daughter was a bit annoyed by this, and asked me why I had to go to all those meetings anyway. I told her it was something I had to do to keep from ever getting so sick again from alcohol. I finished with the rhetorical question, “You don’t want that to happen, do you?”

“Oh no!” she said. “It’s no good for anyone to be alone!”

I wasn’t sure whether she was thinking of me or of herself as being alone, or even whether those rather cryptic words simply reflected her limited command of language, rather than the more profound significance I was attaching to them. Now, I see that she really had felt the terror of loneliness, of estrangement, of isolation beginning to envelop her. She has just told us that the memories of those past days are still with her. I hope with all my heart that no more than the memory is there, that the feelings themselves are gone.

I do not take her for granted. All I have to do, if I think “our kids, the monsters,” is remember how my drunken ravings sent her fleeing in terror. I want to do all that I can for her and, especially, with her. I expect no praise for this; it is neither a penance nor a burden. It’s one of my greatest joys, one of the rewards beyond the price of my new life.

K.C., Racine, Wis.