Family of Origin

I was a twentysomething, twentysomething. Lost and wayward, yet somehow granted the occasional tentpoles of good people to guide me along the way. I was nudged by one of those people at the time to go work for a rehabilitation center. I was raised in an alcoholic home and, like many who come from such beginnings, memory is a blur to me. A roof beam here, an adult’s face there, maybe a friend’s house. But the older I’ve gotten, the more I can see how things were.

The adults aren’t my parents, the roof beam doesn’t belong to a place I recognize, and the friend’s house isn’t really a friend’s. I was shifted around a lot. I was the youngest of my family and because of this, I was kept away from the disaster zone. Like many, I’m sure, I was left with a lot of questions.

I knew the “how” and I knew the “why,” but not the “what” exactly. What is the profile of a person? What is in the architecture of a person who loses their motherhood for the bottle? It’s a fall from grace that many don’t want to know exists. Women, I know, have described motherhood as something “sacred.” What exactly is the making of a supposed transgression?

While it originally brought some amusement to tell people that I was interning at a rehab, it would turn out to be an incredibly rich, spiritually nourishing experience. Moreover, this voluntary engagement would soon turn into employment. At the start, my placement was once a week and each day was illuminating. Shadowing the therapy team, I was sitting in on group therapy sessions, handovers, and supporting clients during their stay.

There’s a prevalent cultural misconception about what a rehab is and what exactly it does. These places don’t and can’t fix people, neither do they heal or get rid of addiction. In clinical terms, twenty-eight days is hardly a pocket of time at all. What a rehab can do and what I’ve witnessed it do, is bust denial. It can give appropriate interventions in the correct environment to assure that there are no illusions about the scale of the problem. A rehab can give a person abstinence and the tools to uphold it. It can show the way for a lasting sobriety. It is entirely up to the individual if they want to take it beyond their stay; the choice can only be made by them.

Across the months, there would be clients passing through for twenty-eight-day stays, or longer. Treated as a collective, they would be known as the “community” by the therapy team. Within a month it became clear I was in the right place. Each community passing through included at least one woman in her forties who had become alcoholic. More curiously, father, brother, lover, son… they all had a significant “Oliver” in their lives. So who were they?

They were clearly people giving their all. Perhaps too much, they were all remarkably hard on themselves. They were all either the only girl in the family, or the youngest, having a profound sense of being the runt of the litter. They were all from homes where doing one’s best was required and yet having one’s feelings acknowledged was seldom. They were all from formative environments where anxiety could be felt in the air. They were all able to speak of a mother or father, sometimes both, that they just couldn’t reach.

From school rebellion, to university freedom, to home life and domesticity, each was profoundly affected by their actions letting down others. Each understood their drinking habits but hadn’t realized the extent of this pervasive spiritual anesthetic. Each one of these women felt unseen or unheard as perennial perfectionists with sewer-bound self-worth. Something had to give.

Yet I look at these themes and can’t help but figure… it’s no cosmic curse. It’s not a smiting from the Almighty. To be sure: some had a genetic predisposition, a family disease, but some didn’t. The women in question were remarkably warm, provincial, and familiar figures. You can picture them loading up their shopping in a supermarket car park. Or waiting and chatting with fellow parents at the school gates. Maybe catching a coffee with friends, prams and/or little monsters in tow. Perhaps finding an oh-so-rare moment to themselves at a nearby salon. These women aren’t anomalies; they’re all around us everyday.

Transgression or falling? I’m not so sure. Addiction has an eerie ability to breed denial and minimization. From what I’ve seen, it’s a playing-out of matters we can’t control, a hard turn of misfortune, a flicker of fate away.