Caloden

The part of the addiction cycle I hate the most, as if there is actually a part that I find enjoyable and healthy, is perhaps the part where the addict has fucked up in a huge way and attempts to make amends for once again wreaking havoc in the lives of loved ones. From the viewpoint of a bystander, or an active enabler, this is the point where we are 100% fed up. We have recently given the addict/drunk money for some sort of emergency. Or we have found ourselves down on our knees cleaning up some sort of bodily fluids, anything ranging from vomit to blood or even worse, off of our furniture. Or we have been the recipient of one too many creepy phone calls that either sing our praises or curse our existences. We are pissed off because we have once again allowed ourselves to be caught up in the train wreck that is our loved one. And we are pissed off at ourselves for the very same reason.

I always knew my brother was a bit of bad news. He is four years older than me and was always getting into one scrape or another. By the time I was in middle school he had either been kicked out or asked to leave nearly every high school in our valley. Too bad because he was so damn bright, but he was far more inclined to smoke a bong than write a paper. I knew he was headed for big trouble when on my Christmas break during my freshman year of college I couldn't ever get into the bathroom because he was far too busy free basing coke for most of the 24 hours out of every day. I ratted him out on Christmas Eve day to my parents, after all it was the late 80's and I had bangs to fluff and spray so I needed that bathroom something fierce, he was in rehab by New Year's Eve. It was the first of many sobriety attempts, none stuck more than a few months.

Over the years my brother has tried every mind altering substance there is. He gets away with it because my father always bailed him out, literally, and legal council has been free. My mother has, until fairly recently, been easily led by my brother's lies. My father could never quite fully deal with my brother's addictions. Instead my dad established one of the state's most successful drug courts and helped many other families mend the pain that an addict can bring. I was so proud of my father for his program and it brought him so much joy to be a part of it, but I never quite understood why he couldn't deal with my brother's addictions. I have also played a role in it all: keeping the secrets my brother asked me to, giving him money when I knew he would just go around the corner and spend it badly, cleaning up the messes.

The thing of it is that I am just so damn done with it all. My brother called Loren on his birthday, June 30th, this year and demanded to speak with him. Unfortunately, he was so wasted he couldn't even remember Loren's name, only referring to him as his "god damned, fucking nephew". When I told him he could talk with my son when he was sober, my brother began screaming at me about what a loser I was and how I was raising my kids to be trash. I hung up and turned my phone off. We happened to be in the car at the time and I looked over to find Loren crying and shaking with fury. He didn't understand why my brother always gets wasted on his birthday and calls or corners him. Last year my brother did the same thing, only he happened to be at the Manor at the time. He got wasted and talked the heads off of Loren and his friends. The whole conversation was so inappropriate that Loren was mortified. And there was Loren's 10th birthday when we were at a water park and my brother popped pills and got drunk and nearly drowned Cassidy in the wave pool. I had to pull her from his clutches as the waves washed over head. Of course my brother doesn't understand my, or Loren's, frustration over these incidences. He has no memory of any of them, he blacked them out. And there are so many others like those.

So now I am pissed. And done. I don't want to clean up any more blood or barf or broken glass. I don't want to be cornered while listening to an addict's view point on my sub par parenting abilities. I don't want my kids listening to the toxic spewing of somebody who makes a living by playing the victim, somebody who has burned all their bridges and lives a life of isolation. For so long I felt guilty for having the germ of these thoughts, thinking that I shouldn't feel that way about a family member. But it doesn't phase my brother when he steals and lies. The time he totaled my mother's truck late at night on a curvy mountain road? No guilt. He crowed about how most people would have died in such an accident. That time he house sat my town home and I returned to find shattered glass on nearly every surface and bloody hand prints all over the walls? Not a care in the world. For all the messes, the debts, the lies, the rampages he subjected the children to, for all of those reasons I am done. I am currently on his shit list for standing strong. I am the big bitch right now. The uptight, un-fun one. And for once I simply don't give a damn. It is enough energy to establish the boundaries.