The Strong Sweet God of Wine

I am in a strange, metaphysical place in my life. When I was younger I drank not knowing why. Now I understand why I drank for twenty-two years and why I stopped. I also know why I would drink now, but won't. Also, for the first time, I have a sense of place and time, and my connectedness to it. I am no longer a stranger in my own world; good, bad, whatever, I am here and I belong. This place has its rent however; being here, I can't run, can't drift, fade, or wander off. I need to stand and face the consequences of living an examined life.
I suppose drinking was always held a self-destructive motive for me. I never craved alcohol, never kept it around, never thought much about it. When I did go out with friends, I would drink. If I had enough money, or charity, I would get drunk. From the beginning I lacked that bio-feedback mechanism that lets you know you are disoriented or have had too much. A little felt good, more felt better, too much felt great. Being raised in an environment where no one was allowed to discuss my step-father's drunken behavior, I guess a back-to-zero policy was my default. When I went out to drink, it never occurred to me that bad things would happen, though a simple retrospective journey would have made it very possible, even inevitable. Instead there was an odd sense of adventure, of anything happening. I felt a youthful sense of power in that. What confuses me to this day is not my own willingness to step out into the darkness, but that others would repeatedly follow me.
The morning after would bring a deep sense of dread. I didn't always remember the events of the evening before, and could never be quite sure I hadn't forgotten something. Waking up in my own bed was always a good thing; it meant that I hadn't done anything too bad or stupid, or that I hadn't been caught. Often I would wait for colleagues to reveal the details, that is if I let them. Being drunk was a license to be confident, arrogant, aggressive, decisive, unrepentently so. I am sure there were some people who feared or respected me for this, sadly. I never understood the darkness that came out, the anger. I didn't feel those things when I was sober, and my only experiences with alcohol were violent, so I guess I believed it was the alcohol itself, never having to face the demons inside that it released.
I didn't drink often, and I didn't drink because I was happy or sad, it was more a matter of opportunity. I never put it altogether, never connected the dots until I was in my thirties, expecting my second child.
I was watching a show about atheletes and alcohol (not by choice) and I listened to Dennis Eckersly as he explained why he quit drinking. He had never had the problems I did, he simply watched a video of himself from a party. At the time, he thought he was charming and witty, later all he could think was "please God don't ever let my children see me that way". He quit drinking on the spot. So did I.
That was seventeen years ago, and I have never been tempted to take a drink. I have dreamt of drinking and the resulting problems, almost sobbing with relief to wake and find it only a dream. Lately though, I have come to understand why someone like me would choose to drink. From Hesse: "The god of wine...he invites those who are dear to him to feast and builds them rainbow bridges to blissful isles. When they are weary, he cushions their heads; he imbraces and comforts them like a mother when they become melancholy. He transforms the confusions of life into great myths and plays the hymn of creation on a might harp...the known world shrinks and vanishes, and the soul hurls itself with fear and joy into the uncharted distances of the unknown where everything is strange and yet familiar; and the language of music, of poets, and of dreams is spoken." Peter Camenzind
There is a special kind of romantic who has no business romanticizing anything - he has never loved, nor allowed himself to be loved properly, so he opines a sugar-sweet soliloquy that serves as a thin veneer for his self-pity. And even in his own deluded state, he recognizes the hollow tone of the song he sings. But when he drinks, his melancholy contrivances gain flesh and sinew, and that which never existed breathes and brings him pain. Alchohol constitutes the lie so well, it mocks the sincerity of truth. He wallows in the manufactured pain, and eventually drinks, he thinks, to escape it.
I don't always know what to do when I am down, or when I feel that sense of dread that follows me out of my sleep to haunt the beginning of the day. Worse, when that apparition appears in the daylight, or early in the evening, I have no consistent way to cope with it. I know if I can distract myself, it can be temporarily abated, but it will return. Sleep is no bargain either, as it is often intermittent, and the residual effects are often more intense than the malady I fled. So I try to cope, to face the underlying issues that create my malaise. But I know, it's always in the back of my head, that I could take a few drinks and everything would transform. I can almost feel the exhaulted sense of self, the swift turn around of emotion and perceived fortune, and the false happiness produced from virtually nothing. I understand why people turn to this form of therapy.
I won't drink. For I was lucky enough to see the ravages of alcohol long before I heard the seductive promises. I have done enough soul-searching to know I don't want to contribute to my own self-destruction, and that any temporary illusion kills some part of my soul. I have learned to think about prayer differently though, having listened to a recovering alcoholic: "It's not that I pray I won't die if I take another drink; I pray that I will."

Heartache

I guess there are two kinds of love, each accompanied by its own brand of pain. The first is that love that surrounds you, embraces you, but never penetrates the recesses of your heart. I think many children of alcohol and chaos know this love. They have a need for human contact, for a stunted kind of intimacy despite the fact that they can never fully open themselves to it, and inevitably they know this leads to foreclosure. While it exists, it is warm, comforting, and familiar even as it begins to slip away. They will lose friends, lovers, spouses, and if given enough time, even their children (the most forgiving and patient of all). And they will watch the familiar play unfold, act to act, without the possibility of rewriting it. The pain they endure is lonely, desolate, and unrelenting.
Then there is the love you let into your heart. It must have been created by a bipolar deity - it is euphoric and crushing in its power, and it is the only kind of love that breeds hatred. I don't know how the children of alcoholics learn this love, how they learn to trust it, how they cope with it. I guess it is a lot like alcohol itself: Warm and inviting in embrace, fun and giddy in abandon, and cruel and vicious if abused or neglected. Only the bravest of those whose family love was beaten into them endeavor such a risky venture. Trading a familiar, dull pain for the cruelest enmity of all - betrayal.
Imagine the child, surviving, learning how to protect herself, how to withdraw from the daily nightmare no one else knew, growing up to offer that untouched heart, that virgin portal to her soul to a stranger. Imagine the risk. And he will come offering, begging for access in the name of love and unity. She will open her heart and learn the pleasures and peril of that level of trust. She will learn new emotions, new forms of insecurity that only come from fear of losing that which you could never hope to hold. And if she prevails, doesn't sabotage her own desperate desire with caution and distrust, she may gain what so few of us seem to obtain. But if she does allow him in, gives him every ounce of her heart, and he betrays that gift, the pain she suffered in her childhood will pale in the shadow of the carnage to come.
I don't know how these children learn to love, learn to trust, learn to share. I don't know how they survive intact, willing to open themselves fully to the possibilities of love and life. I do understand the friendship of loneliness, the security of a consistent, familiar pain.