When I talk to people about my philosophy for managing life, I explain that for me I treat life like kayaking down a river. Or at least what I imagine it would be as I have only kayaked once – on a slow, quiet, shallow river in Toronto and within minutes overturned but eventually got moving though felt a bit wobbly. Hmm – I guess maybe that’s a good part to this metaphor as well.
Anyway – what I say is this: You can’t plan for everything. There’s a lot happening that is pulling you in a direction. But it’s like a river. There are rapids, rocks, whirlpools that get you stuck. There are also lovely slow patches where you can watch the sparkle of the sun filtered through leaves. Sometimes there are other people you can ride alongside with, and sometimes you’re alone. (And a whole other side to this analogy to explore another time is, of course, the fact that the kayak you start with and the roughness of the water is very much an accident of birth).
This is not a passive innertube ride, though. You’ve got a paddle. You can watch ahead for obstacles and you can learn from others how to better pilot your kayak. Just a note, though: It’s lots harder to pay attention to the water and steer your kayak when there’s chaos and distraction around you.
So I started life with a reasonably decent kayak. I had really good teachers along the way starting with my mom teaching me to read, PBS teaching me all sorts of things and eventually really attentive and kind teachers in school teaching me to the point that by age 12 or so I was pretty good at piloting a kayak.
But then we moved and I ended up at a fancy private school where the teachers were mostly indifferent and the students indifferent to hostile. There was stress with my parents as well – my mom missed our old home where her family lived – a six hour drive away. I also started noticing something that they later told me they hid from me very well. They drank. A lot. Remember what I said about chaos and distraction? My mom ended up spending a while in a mental hospital, I would take care of my four year old brother nights while my dad visited her. This is when my inner critic was born and he was horrible. My grades up until then, mostly A’s and the occasional B went down to C’s and D’s. It was a relief to find that after a year we would move back to my old school.
Things were definitely better. School was an improvement. There were no bullies, there were lots of indifferent classmates to whom I mostly felt invisible but that was fine. I had a few really close friends. At home things were still not great. My parents’ drinking increased. But we lived somewhere rural and I could just explore the woods for hours. And then when I got a car it was even better. I could visit friends, we could ride around, listen to music and talk. It was almost like having my own apartment on wheels and in those days of gas being under $1 and making over $6/hour at my cashier job, I was good to go.
The second I could get out, I got out. At age 16 I started university an hour away from home with my own dorm room. I would still get drunken calls from my parents from time to time but they weren’t always there. And if they got really bad I could just hang up. And I had friends and freedom.
Now’s a good time to introduce another part of my analogy. Anchors. If you don’t want to go anywhere, toss one overboard and you will stay right where you are. As fun as certain aspects of age sixteen are, you really want to keep moving forward. In the kayak analogy, anchors are people and things that weigh you down. In my case it was social life. After a year at a private school with people who were hostile toward me, and high school where most were indifferent, I was now somewhere that I had many more friends. Yes, my school was apparently rated a “Top Ten Party School” for the US and lots of our social life revolved around drinking. It’s OK, I thought, because I wouldn’t be one of those horrible mean, sad, or complaining drunk people. When I would drink I’d be fun to be around, spontaneous and ridiculous. And to be fair at this point 90% of the time that was true. The “Oh my god, that thing we did last night was so ridiculous” sort of thing: shouting obscenities and rude comments out the window at people in Montreal (No, not bad words or hateful things, the literal words “Obscenities” and “Rude Comments” – all for the story we would have of that time we yelled “obscenities” and “rude comments” at people), or the time, thinking I would pretend to be like Fred Flintstone and pretend to try to stop the car with my foot on an expressway at 100 km/hr (I wasn’t driving). I brought my foot back inside and the rubber sole was smoking. I’m lucky to have had a foot to bring back in.
This anchor was not that heavy at this point, my grades stayed OK and I managed to stay out of trouble. However, the next year I found more friends who drank more. And those anchors slowed me down further. And then I learned that even then back in 1989 there was Internet chat. Yes, it was very different than now. You’d type a sentence, it’d go out in the ether to the channel you were in (or person you were speaking privately with) and then 30-40 seconds later you might get a response. At the same time I learned that my parents could no longer afford to help with school and it would be my last semester. And so, instead of going to classes, I just enjoyed the other aspects, often going down to the computer lab at 9:00 PM and chatting until the sun came up. It should be no surprise that this anchor was enough to sink my university dreams. My last report card was embarrassingly bad. I failed both genetics and organic chemistry. Oddly enough my best grades were in Astronomy (B+) who’s homework I’d do while drinking with friends and psychology (B) whose lectures I stopped going to almost four months before the end of the semester and panicked when I couldn’t find the final exam because it wasn’t in the lecture hall – they’d announced the location in the previous class. I still have anxiety dreams about forgetting to do important things like show up for work for weeks on end and remembering when it’s too late.
When I got back home, I was bereft. If I had thought of this analogy I would have said my kayak was sunk – or at least beached for life. I worked nights in a grocery store and when I’d come home in the morning my parents would already be drinking (My dad worked nights and so they both drank “after work” – cocktail hour was 8AM). When I’d wake up to go to work – a bit after my dad, my mom would have already started drinking. After all, now it really was night time. On weekends I would go back up to university to party with friends. They happened less frequently but what I lost in frequency I made up for in intensity. Some weekends instead of going there I’d instead sneak into a nearby university’s all night computer lab and use an account I had there to use the old chat system I was on, talking with friends and making new ones.
Fortunately there are not just anchors for kayaks, though. Small motors are available. The first of which I got when a local biotech company hired me for an entry level role. I could leave the grocery store and that motor started pulling against the anchors. I could feel it.
But the anchors at home were getting bigger. The arguments louder and more stressful and they started pulling me into them which was horrible. One morning it was too much and I vowed to find a place to live. I found a shared house a few weeks later and moved in. As I left my mom told me she was sure I’d be moving back in a month.
But I wasn’t. I lived with mostly folks older than me but still fun to be around. And the second summer I was there I had even a few folks my own age. I was working Wed-Friday and every other Saturday so I had tons of time off and we had some great parties. They were so good that the police had to break them up two times. On a couple of occasions, a new thing started happening that can be illustrated with this example. At around 10PM one night I was drinking and listening to really loud music with my friend. “Some Like it Hot” by Robert Palmer was playing and we were beating the big maple table along with the drums, the landlord had just called to tell us to turn it down as he’d received complaints. Then, with no transition, the phone was ringing, my mom was calling and it was 9:00 AM. How did the rest of the night go? No idea. There were a couple more embarrassing instances of this that I’m not going to share here but let’s say that blackouts were a trending topic.
On one of the more tame parties, I was drinking and chatting with my housemate, an engineer and his friend from Dartmouth. His friend had a computer account he never used and said I could use his username and password. I would use this to get back on chat and as I was working 7PM to 7AM I’d often spend nights off on chat. On one of them back in 1991 I met “Phantom” whom I felt so connected to and yet after the first few hours didn’t even know their gender. I remember thinking how it was going to be a weird conundrum if they were a guy. But they were not. In fact, most of you know this story. That person was Sage. She came for a visit in November 1991, two months after we met online and is still here. Here’s more of the story if you’re not familiar:
As our relationship got more serious before she came to visit, I went out drinking with a friend in Boston for my birthday. The funny times of yelling silly things out the car window were gone. This was embarrassing. I told Sage about the whole night and she told me then that I could have her or alcohol. The choice was easy and you know the answer to what I chose.
Sometimes your kayak gets in a whirlpool and someone throws you a rope and helps you move forward. If they’re strong they can help you pull against the anchors. If they’re really strong they can point them out to you and you can unhook them and start picking up speed.
Soon after Sage moved in we moved out of that shared house and to a small apartment outside of Boston. Still, my parents drunken calls came in. Sometimes they were goofy but mostly they were upsetting. Sometimes my brother would pick up the phone and tell me how it was for him to live there – it was just as bad if not worse for him, now 13 as it was for me when I was that age. After a particularly difficult call with them I went to an Alanon meeting (a meeting for families of alcoholics). It was helpful to learn I was not alone in this and it was such a relief. The next time I talked to my brother I told him he should find Alateen (the same thing for younger people). Not long after we hung up my dad called. He and my mom both yelled at me for suggesting he get support and to “Keep your crocodile mouths out of our business.” I never answered their calls again. That night I cried as if I’d lost both my parents, and I suppose in some ways I had – and in other ways I had lost them years before. And so began years of mourning for my parents whom I’d lost – the ones in the late 70s who were supportive and who either didn’t drink or hid it much better from me. Holidays were really hard as I spent them alone watching other families. I did keep in touch with my brother – mostly through surreptitious calls and other methods like shared voicemail boxes and as he got older even sneaky visits. But within a few months we moved to a new state and shared no info with anyone in my family. Not long after I disconnected, my parents divorced. I wasn’t surprised given the years prior. I was surprised, though, when my mom died in 2000. What surprised me most then was that it was so much less sad. The letting go had already happened eight years before. It was sad but not the crippling sadness that I felt the night I decided not to talk to them anymore.
At work I met more “tugboats” – people I had worked with in the past who helped me in my career and gave me advice and support. My career grew and you know most of the rest of the story: we became parents, we grew closer to Sage’s mom and eventually lived in a yurt near where she lived. And then, when things started to get weird in the US we immigrated to Canada (thanks to all the help/support from folks at work to get me the experience and knowledge to make me marketable here).
I look back at many of the folks from my old life and see a glimpse of the way things could have gone. Looking for my best college drinking buddy I found a mugshot from his domestic violence arrest, a cousin of mine lost his license for life after a terrible DUI accident, other relatives arrested for supplying drugs to minors. In 1995 I got an odd call from the girlfriend of a drinking buddy from the shared house I lived in. I had an unlisted phone number but she was persistent and told the operator she had important news and could she connect us. She told me that my friend had died at age 32 in an alcohol-related car accident. He was a passenger but could just as easily have been a driver. I think of all these potential anchors and wonder what could have been had Sage not encouraged my better impulses and pointed out all the anchors I was surrounded by.
Which brings me to something I’m not sure how to relate but I’m just going to dive in. I got an email a bit over a week ago from my brother. My dad was in very poor health. By Sunday he was gone. Again, like with my mom, it was sad but not devastating. But it did get me thinking a lot.
The first thing I thought is how I knew his cigarette brand, a few of the bands he liked, and of course his beer brand, I didn’t know what things he really loved in the world. Was there beauty that made him tear up whenever he saw it? Was there a dream he had like mine of travel or living abroad for a while? What I knew was that his arrival home was to be feared if I did something wrong, but also how hard he worked at work (and to be fair I think that’s also part of why I have the same work ethic). I know he did have on some level a “never give up” attitude because he did give me a pep talk in 1985 when I was crying thinking I would fail a math class, telling me not to worry and it would be fine. (It was).
But then he’s also the reason all these thoughts here came to mind. Because when I think of the lives of both my parents, they had so many anchors – intergenerational trauma (My dad spoke so fearfully of his father that the only story I really know is that his hands used to be covered with warts until the day his dad died. The next day they were gone, my mom’s parents would chain up her little 3 year old brother in the yard when he misbehaved), a culture of alcohol and the New England culture of just stuffing all your feelings. In many ways up until, say, age 21 (my parents’ age when I was conceived), we weren’t that different. I just had someone come in to start a major course correction. For that I’m grateful – and it helps me understand and forgive my parents, even as I still am certain of the necessity of my own decisions.
It feels like I’m reading someone’s personal diary, which I shouldn’t be reading.
I hope you are feeling better now. A lesson I learned quite late in life: “let go”.
Yes, thanks, I’m feeling pretty OK. Like I said, the ‘heavy lifting’ was done in the early 90s. This was just closing the book fully.
And yeah, it’s a bit more personal writing than I usually do. But I also know I’m not alone in that sort of situation and if someone else is feeling similarly I want them to know there’s hope – but hope often requires big changes on our parts. It was very much worth the effort, though. And considering the alternative…