I was so ashamed that we lived in the crappiest-looking house on the block that I’d ask the parents of friends to drop me off down the street at the corner, though everyone in our small Ohio town knew where we lived. I was around 8 then.įrom an early age, it was the poverty I most blamed, not really grasping that it was mainly Dad’s alcoholism that kept us poor and prevented us from having what “normal” families had. On the rare weeks when he worked, my mom would take me with her to the bar at dusk on Fridays to retrieve his paycheck before he drank or gambled it away. His friends called him “Shakey,” for it was said that, even during his worst bouts of DTs, Ted Macy could still paint a beautifully straight line. After a few weeks, the miniature devotionals would disappear, and he would make his way back to the VFW. There were periodic attempts at sobriety, including an out-of-state rehab stint that I was too young to comprehend, after which tiny Alcoholics Anonymous books would appear around the house.īut my dad could never maintain his sobriety. He spent most days at the VFW bar drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, then staggering the eight blocks home on foot. By the time I came along-a surprise to my middle-aged parents and the youngest by far of four kids-he was a serially unemployed housepainter. He was a World War II veteran who dropped out of school in the seventh grade. If my mom’s dad was a mean drunk, my own dad was somewhat easier to manage: He was mainly an absent drunk. Addiction cycles back through at least four generations of my family. I know the pain-the sense of abandonment, embarrassment, and fear-of not being able to count on an addicted family member. After nearly a decade spent educating myself on the issue, even I am still getting a grasp on how insidious and complex addiction is, and to what degree it’s influenced who I am.

Addiction is a heartbreaking, confounding illness, which is why so many loved ones, leaders, and institutions prefer to avert their eyes, hoping the problem will solve itself, or at least not touch them.

“You should write a love story instead,” she said.

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