The FIrst Step

Step One: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable.

The First Step

As a young boy I recall my parents being social drinkers. I remember watching my parents celebrating the holidays and the good times with friends over alcohol. I was intrigued by their alluring laughter and the kinship brought on by the foul smelling, funny tasting beverages my father would concoct in our kitchen.
My earliest experience with alcohol was when I ten. I was an alter boy in our church and I was tasked with refilling the cruets with wine and water after mass. I’m not really sure why I did it but I found myself one evening after mass sneaking sips of the wine. I disliked the taste and I was unable to understand at the time what was so glamorous about alcohol to my parents or why they would choose to celebrate with it. I vowed never to drink again that day but I was only ten at the time and unable to understand the true power that alcohol could have in a person’s life.
It was four years later when my drinking career began in earnest. My father had lost his steady job and my parents, unable to pay the tuition at the Catholic school I attended, decided it would be best if I moved across town with my grandparents. I didn’t understand why I had to leave the house at such an early age. I was the good kid. My sisters, teenagers at the time, had started with their rebellious behavior and yet it seemed like I was the one being punished. The only answer my parents could give me at the time as to why I couldn’t attend our local school district was simply because there were too many minorities at the school I would have to attend.
I hated living with my grandparents but after the school year I was able to return home. My father had begun working out of town and was gone for months at a time. My mother for reasons still unknown to me began allowing my sisters to have parties at our house. Alcohol was always present and my bedroom soon became the hookup room. It wasn’t uncommon for me to wake up and have to slither my way around people passed out all over our floor.
I lost my virginity that summer. One of my sister’s friends came on to me as we sat outside on the porch swing. She asked if I was a virgin and I told her I was. She seemed excited by the thought of taking my virginity and even though I still considered myself a good Catholic boy and wanted to save myself for marriage, I gave in. Afterwards, perhaps out of guilt or shame, I began drinking. For awhile I only drank on the weekends and it seemed to make me popular with my sister’s friends but I soon found myself drinking alone and on the weekdays.
When I was sixteen I got my girlfriend pregnant. We waited as long as we could before we told our parents. My girlfriend and I got married after my oldest daughter was born and just before my seventeenth birthday. We both stayed in school and my daughter gave me reasons not to drink. For a short time I managed to stay sober, but soon I was back on the bottle again.
It was just before I left for boot camp that my mother-in-law found a pint of Jack Daniels in my dresser drawer. She gave me an ominous warning that alcohol could ruin my life, to which I did not heed. After boot camp I began to drink on a daily basis. Drinking gave me a way to feel social and pass the time. It also gave me a way to hide the depression I was suffering from the dissolution of my first marriage and the distance I spent from my daughter.
I left the Marine Corps in 1998, returned home, and married my current wife a year later Though I was happy to be near my daughter again and in a good relationship with my current wife I was unable to stop drinking.
The first time my wife left me, after the birth of our second son, was because of my drinking problem. You might think this would scare me sober however you would be mistaken. Even though I was to drunk to walk down the stairs and she had taken the kids and the car and the money, I somehow managed to find enough quarters in our laundry money to walk to the liquor store, buy a case of beer, and stuff my emotions back down. She came back the next day under the guise that I would quit drinking, however a week later I fell off the wagon and was soon back to my old ways.
Year after year my wife and I would fight and argue about my drinking problem and time and time again I gave her the empty promise to quit drinking all the while knowing I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to quit drinking. I only wanted her to stop nagging me about it.
This past decade has been a blur. A cloudy, drunken haze most of which I don’t remember. My wife claims that I quit drinking at one point for several months at a time but I do not recall this period of my life.
Last year, I promised her I would quit drinking for good and I managed to stay sober for seven weeks, but at Christmas I decided I could drink just like everyone else did. I gave into the urge and took my first drink and my life quickly spiraled down from there. Alcohol held me in it’s suffocating grasp for this past year and in the end I was drinking just to maintain my sanity (or what little of it I thought I had).
The last night I drank I do not remember. I blacked out. I know my wife and I fought and argued. I know we fought and argued the next morning when I woke up and the arguments continued for most of the day. It came down to two choices. She would leave with the kids or I could leave and get help with my drinking problem. I left. I had no where to go and spent the evening in my van in the Wal-mart parking lot. I was broken. I had lost everything, my wife, my kids, and my home. I had lost a losing battle, 22 years in the making. Just as my first mother-in-law had predicted some 17 years ago, alcohol had ruined me and what little of a life that I had left had been unmanageable for as long as I could remember