- Alcohol
- Drugs
I was the youngest of 5 children. My first memory was of my brother turning the basement light off and holding the door closed with me having to find my way to the stairs and up, all the while hysterical and screaming for help. My second memory was of my first day in grade one at 5 years old. I didn’t want to go to school and my mom took me there but as soon as she left, so did I, just out another door and back home a different way. Hmmm, my first two clear memories were of stark raving fear. For a while after that my mom would take me to school and stay there with me until I was brave enough to stay. But my first memory there was of feeling different from the other kids. They were interacting and playing together and I just stood on the sidelines, feeling different, looking back I believe it was a feeling of being less than others.
My mom was a stay at home mom, while my dad worked hard as a carpenter foreman. Even though mom stayed at home with us, I don’t recall ever interacting with her and never, ever, getting any affection or loving direction in my life. My dad rarely, if ever, spoke to me about anything. I have one memory of me going to work with my dad on a Saturday and he let me steer the car and I was unbelievably happy. I guess he was in an unbelievably good mood that day because that’s the only positive interaction I ever had with him.
My parents drank a lot on the weekends and often there would be parties at our house that went on till all hours of the morning. I remember being afraid of anyone coming into my room so I would stay awake quite late.
In grade 2 my parents moved from Vancouver to a small town in the country. Going to a new school brought up all the feelings I had when I first went to school, but I didn’t leave and go home. My parents built a cafe and both of them went to work there full time to make a go of it. We had no home life at all. I would walk to the cafe when I was hungry and sit in the storeroom at the back and my parents, or an employee, would bring me a meal. The parties continued and became worse as their alcoholism progressed. My dad who was divorced from his first wife and much older than my mom started to accuse her of cheating on him as his ex-wife had. At night I would listen to them arguing in the bedroom and I would hear him sometimes hit her and her crying as a result.
By the time I was in grade 3-4 I was going to the store and stealing fish hooks and stuff so I could go fishing. I got caught once as the hook was caught in my pocket and as I tried to get it out my hand got caught on the hook. I had to go home with my hand in my pocket with a red fishing lure dug into it. I literally got caught red handed. My parents really gave me a scolding, telling me I was nothing but trouble and to smarten up. But later that night after they got drunk my dad told me I was a little bastard and I was a mistake and, while they were trying so hard to make a living, I was bringing disgrace to the family and he wished I wasn’t born. Shortly after that, they had a party. After they passed out I got up and went out and drank what was left in some of the bottles and got drunk for the first time. I remember feeling better than I ever did, then I got sick.
The first time I, and a couple kids I hung out, with got a hold of some booze, I felt a feeling of being equal to others for the first time in my life. I could carry on conversations without feeling less than or sounding stupid. I could ask the girls at the sock hop to dance or if they wanted to go on a date. I asked more than one girl out while drinking and backed out on the day of the date because I couldn’t get booze to drink before going to pick her up. But I knew I had found the key to life, I was magically transformed into a “normal” person, or so I thought, as long as I could get some booze or drugs in me.
One of the first times I used drugs I took way too much LSD and was in a psyche ward for almost two months. At one point they were concerned that I may never be normal again. But on my release from the hospital, I went home where there were still a few tabs of LSD. I only took a couple, but I went into a fear filled trip that sent me right back to the hospital in an ambulance after jumping thru a plate glass window.
By then I should have had enough negative consequences to take a look at what was going on but when I didn’t drink or use drugs I felt so less than and unworthy of anything in life that I couldn’t stop using
I had quit school in grade 8 after failing once. When I got out of the hospital this time I got a job in the sawmill piling lumber, still drinking and by now using MDA and other drugs. I started dating a few girls because I had money and had bought a car. One of the girls I met didn’t drink so I thought she would be the perfect wife. I thought she could help me to be normal without using drugs and alcohol. But even as we dated, we would go to parties and after I would take her home I would go back to the party and get stupidly loaded right out of my mind.
After she graduated high school, her and I moved in together. It was not what I had expected. By then my mother had died at 51 of a heart attack and my dad was a very cranky old man and everything was about him. I rarely saw him and me and my brothers and sisters were never close at all, so I never saw them. So my common law wife was all I had, yet I still drank and did drugs like there was no tomorrow. She got pregnant twice in 18 months and we had two children, a boy and a girl. I always said I would never treat them as my mother and father treated me, but although I took time to interact with them during the week nights I was gone partying like I had no family on the weekends, by then I was using heroin regularly and using anything else I could get my hands on…I wanted so bad to stop but the bad nerves and feelings would not allow me to.
In 1983 we had another baby, his name was David Joseph, I had promised my wife, by then, that I would turn my life around and I tried 12-step programs and abstinence, neither worked. We soon found out that David was sick. He had hemophilia and a rare form of heart disease. I made a promise to God that I would stop and prayed my son would get better, but I couldn’t stop. By then my wife and I were constantly fighting, our son was often in the hospital and one of us had to be with him while he was in there. I was using anything I could to try to feel normal, by then I had a few brushes with the law while trying to get money for drugs.
My wife left me because of my behavior and in April of 1987 she served me with divorce papers to sign. Meanwhile, my son David, was very sick and had minor surgery and his heart stopped. They could not get it going properly and had to put him on life support. On May 16, 1987 my son David was taken off life support and he died. Divorced in April and my son’s death in May of the same year put me into a place no one ever wants to go.
Given a lot of my problems came from my addiction, some of them were just life on life’s terms, they were too much for me to handle and I was hell bent on self-destruction. I was homeless within a couple months and I thought death would be a welcome alternative to life but I wasn’t man enough to just kill myself outright so I set out on a slow suicide. I was in jail or hospital, often found overdosed or unconscious more times than I can count. I never saw my other two kids as my lifestyle was out of control. Homeless and helpless, I was not able to get my life back on track, nor did I want to, but at times I would go into detoxes just to get shelter from the storm called life, especially when I was out of drugs and couldn’t get more.
One night after I had a gall bladder operation (as it was giving me much pain and I couldn’t eat) I couldn’t get drugs to get high so I walked to the doors of the emergency room at the hospital and ripped the stitches all open and reached in my stomach and pulled out what felt like a bunch of hot sausages and walked into the hospital and said I fell down and my incision broke open, just to get some drugs to deal with what I was feeling. They took me to surgery and stitched me back up with huge stitches and kept me in the hospital for over a week.
A few weeks later, I tried to get help through a recovery house. I stayed there for some time and then left, I went to a few more as people wanted to help but I was not reachable.
In 1992, while sitting in jail for stealing food, I decided that I didn’t want my young son’s life to be in vain so I reached out, in earnest, for the first time. I hit my knees and asked God to forgive me and help me. I was able to get into a very highly recommended treatment center and was there for 14 months, one of the longest clients there. By the time my first year cake came around I had been working out of the recovery house and saved my money and bought a beautiful headstone to take up to where my son was buried and replaced the rotting wooden cross that someone had kindly put on the grave as I couldn’t even do that, at that time.
After several months I got a job and within a year I had started a demolition company, a social business with all my employees being folks that had problems with substance abuse or were homeless. I owned and operated that business for 21 years. I sent an amends letter to my ex-wife and we are on speaking terms today. I got my son and daughter back in my life and have been for 22 years now. They are both non-addicts and drink very little and have never had a problem with it, they both have full time jobs and I have 5 grandchildren who I love deeply. I volunteered for 5 years at a juvenile detention center and I have also worked for many non-profits that deal with at-risk youth and it has been a real blessing in my life.
Why was I an addict? Based on all the research I have done I do believe I have a genetic predisposition to it. As well it could have possibly been environmental, growing up in a dysfunctional environment. But am I mad at my parents? Of course not, they probably had poor parenting too and perhaps their parents before them did. Maybe they did the best they could, given that they too were alcoholic. What is important is that I break that chain of dysfunctional/addictive behavior so not just I reap the benefits of recovery and my children and their children too.
If you are reading this, I want you to know I have left out a lot, as it was bad and somewhat repetitious but my hope is that if you need help it is out there. Don’t try to figure out why you are the way you are. Just accept it and ask for help. If I can do it, anyone can.
Barry J