Day Nineteen

Mood: 5/10 - Felt low today, as much due to lack of sleep and cranky kids as anything.

Energy: 4/10 - Bad night with the baby.

Withdrawals? None.

Ate/Drank:

• Breakfast - Nakd bar.
• Lunch - Chicken stir fry with sweet potato and brocoli
• Dinner - Chicken stir fry with sweet potato and brocoli (yes, again)
• Drank: 2l water, 4 cups of peppermint/detox/camomile tea.

Deep breath. Wednesday I see my therapist which means this is always the hardest blog to write. I noted last week that having dug deep into my past and unburdened myself somewhat, I felt the better for it over the following days. Of course a therapy session being an hour, you can only really scratch the surface, so this week very much picked up where last week left off, which was heavy. 

I feel as though it is safe to say the root of the anxieties and the pain that I once drank every day to avoid and which I've tried to escape with a litany of methods ever since comes from the 3 year period between when my Dad fell down that flight of stairs and fractured his skull and when he died. It is the uncoordinated and prolonged manner of the end of his life which has left the most scar tissue. Were he just to have banged his head and never woken up from that coma, bizarrely I believe it may have been easier to digest what happened, at least in the long run. 

Digging into my teenage years, I can see that while I lost my Dad in 1998, I couldn't grieve him because he was there in body, just not in personality. I have strong memories of moments where I'd fracture and break - when he came home after being in the coma, seeing him in Portrane, the day I realised he was never getting better, etc - but I also remember that at the time, I was a teenage boy. I was 13-16 when all of this happened. There is a lot going on in a teenage boys life. I was caught up in my own shit. I didn't know the importance of feeling everything that had happened. So something would hit me and in the moment I'd be in ribbons. Then I'd pull myself together and go on with my day. There was no bigger picture. I was aware that the Dessie who went to Spain and the one who came back were different people. I was aware of that in my teens. I was not aware of the magnitude or impact of it. Your relationship with your parents is different to your relationship with everyone else. The fall of Dessie was one thing to the people that knew him. The disappearance of Dad was a different thing for me. 

My Dad was a cool guy. He was always very into looking his best. He always had new cars, the fancier the better. He viewed himself as an important man, which he was in his business, working his way from the bottom to the top. He was a charmer with the ladies - calling them sweetheart or something similar but almost never by their name (that was more acceptable then!). He was one of the gaffers on my football team. My friends liked him. He brought me to footie games. That was Dad. 

The person who came back from Spain was different. At first he was gaunt, then he was morbidly obese. His face was bloated and he would often be very unaware of his appearance, wearing clothing that could probably do with a wash. His fingers and teeth were yellow from smoke. He would smoke and drink, and smoke and drink, and smoke and drink. He could not work, he could not drive. He was so out of shape he couldn't walk the 10 minutes to Malahide village from his house without stopping on the bench for a few minutes to catch his breath. His breathing was haevy and pained, you could hear him struggling. He had the mental fragility of a child - For example, late one night when I was 16, Michelle was furious at me for something and I was refusing to get into an argument, so she spat at me, from point blank range, right in my eye, to get a reaction. This was, and is still to this day, unacceptable as far as I'm concerned. You don't spit at people. Disgusted, I left and walked the half hour or so to my Dad's house. But Michelle had already rang, knowing where I'd go. When I arrived, Des cried and begged & pleaded with me to go home so as to not end up involved with the drama. So I did, and walked the half hour or so home. That was him then. He couldn't handle responsibility or anything like it. It's impossible to verbalise all this unless you lived it, except to say the person I described in this paragraph was my Dad in name only. Witnessing the loss of his personality and sadly so much of his dignity in that time was unfair. In hindsight, selfish as it sounds, I believe it would have been easier had he just never come home from Spain. When he died, I grieved the man who'd just gone, not the father I'd lost three years prior. And it's that gap that still haunts me. He went and he was replaced, and I never grieved him. Reflecting on it, it's the awkward sequence of events that makes it so bruising. It doesn't fit in a box. When I told that story above about leaving Michelle's house for Des's and then being sent back the other direction, my heart broke for 16 year old me - a lost little boy wandering from one place to another just trying to feel at home.

One night he reflected on the prior decade with a lucidity I had never seen from him in the 3 years after the accident, which in hindsight should've told me something. He told me how the toll of the end of his marriage, his wife's affair with his best friend, his accident, and the loss of both his parents was a lot to take and he hoped that things would look up now, believing they could only get better. He pondered maybe he'd buy a bar in Spain and go and live there. I think we both knew that would never happen. He died 5 days later, and that was the very last conversation I had with him. I believe that my Dad was in there somewhere, the man I knew, and he could feel that he wasn't who he had been, that his personality and his dignity had slipped. Maybe Spain represented a chance to re-establish an identity for him. Or maybe going when he did was the only peace that he was ever going to find. Wherever he is, I hope he found it.

The thing about addictions is they come in many forms. People can use any number of things to escape themselves, and I can see that while I'm off sugar my tendency to escape all this baggage is still there, manifesting itself in other directions. And I'm not ashamed of that. I'm embarrassed sometimes, but I can't be ashamed because judging myself too harshly does me no favours. I think I should be stronger. But it's fucking hard you know? It's really fucking hard for me sometimes. I struggle with this stuff. I didn't drink every day of my life for 6 years because it was fun, I did it because I was emotionally fucked up. I've been struggling with it for years. I put one foot in front of the other every day and I focus on doing the things that are important to me. I believe I am a good father. I believe I am a good husband. And I think that while I have my hits and misses, I largely know enough to be a pretty good brother, son, nephew, co-worker, neighbour etc most of the time. I have just always found it hard to be the best me that I can. And I still do.