Bottled up.
By: Patrick Macomber
Tags: Fathers, Alcoholism, Family, Sobriety, Addiction

There are plenty of reasons for my Dad to have found comfort in his poison (and I’m paraphrasing with the above). But what’s important is to know that to stop drinking is to stop repressing. To cope with addiction is to cope with the causes of addiction. And none are so simple.

It’s important to note that we’ve been climbing to the cork of this bottle for some time. And he would get angry with us for asking him to take his life seriously. He’d shut us down when we ask him to slow down. “I have this under control.” Until he couldn’t anymore.

I got into town about 10 days ago. I sat with him and asked him what was going on. How he was feeling. He said he knew why I was there. He said he was ready for treatment. And committing to it. I should have felt joy. I should have felt relief. But I felt nothing.

I wasn’t afforded the opportunity to open up in the way I’d prepared to. He wasn’t in treatment now, so I felt like he might back out of it. A piece of me believed he would somehow find some way to not deal with all this trauma that had built up over so long. A piece of me still does. And I didn’t get to tell him how, despite everything he’d been through, that he gave me a great life. That because of his ability to carry a burden, I grew up with so much less of one.

Then I stayed with him for a few days. I got things out of the way. I cleared his headspace. I mowed the lawn. I cleaned the garage. I drove him around. Like a twisted chauffeur helping someone get their affairs in order before a big trip.

And the last day, because the scheduled reckoning was approaching, he began to drink like he’d never get another taste again. Like he was trying his best to kill himself before dealing with real pain.

I couldn’t take it anymore and I exploded. Everything I prepared to say I said to a person who wouldn’t even remember the conversation. I left. Drove around the block a few times and came back to a man who raised me crying in the middle of the carport.

I apologized for yelling. And said I’d be back in the morning to help him with his final paperwork.

That morning, we finished the consent forms, and they called to say everything was in order. And again, I felt nothing. Just accomplished. Exhausted and still drunk, he went back to bed before noon.

I hugged my Stepmother, got in the car, and drove away to be done with it, just for a few days. And again, I waited for him to back out. Until the morning of my flight. I texted him, “hear anything yet?” No answer. Later on, I texted back “Hello? I’m about to board.”

At that moment my Stepmother called me. “I dropped your Dad off this morning at the facility in Tyler. He’s checked in, and won’t be able to use any electronics or his cellphone. He’ll only have access to their landline and he can only call me.”

And that was the point — at gate 23 in an Austin TX airport — that I felt something. I burst into tears in front of everyone. Relief? Joy? Release? The feeling of some life-long wound beginning to heal? And I couldn’t stop for a bit. He did it.

“Wow, Dad’s life was pretty hard.”

And it’s going to continue to be hard. But it will open so many doors toward building a better life.

He chose to start the process. He chose to let it out. The pain that goes with it. The anger that comes from it. He chose to put down one bottle and open something he knows will be filled with terror, pain, and a thousand other emotions he’d never been ready to deal with. From this point, it won’t ever be easy. But he did it.

And I couldn’t be more proud of him.