I wrote this as a sample narrative for my college composition students to model theirs after. The story is true, and it ended up inspiring some of these 18-year-olds to confront their own issues with alcohol. I think you'll like it.




My Journey Home



“It seems to me,” Miss Theoris, my counselor, observed one fateful Thursday morning in January of 2000, “that you feel you don’t belong anywhere.” I stared drop-jawed at this regal African queen of a woman. I leaned as if exhausted into the back of her plush office chair. That was it! That was the basis of all of my problems. Weeks of in-patient groups and therapy had brought me to this realization, and now, I thought, we had solved the puzzle. It seemed suddenly so obvious, but it was true: I had drunk myself into alcoholism because I had lost my sense of home.

It had begun gradually, as most addictions do. My mother, my best friend, had died suddenly almost exactly one year after my wedding, and only four days after my husband Alex and I had relocated all the way out to Seattle. I began to crave wine every day. I cried every night. It didn’t help that we moved every year during that marriage, that Alex kept switching jobs, and that I was in my bones a midwestern girl who missed her midwestern upbringing. Nor did it help that after our son Eliot was born we moved back home to live with Alex’s father. These elements in my life were fuel to the fire, which grew, and grew.

I lived, you see, in the same house on Phoenix Drive for seventeen years. I knew that house like I know myself– the smells, the creaks, the patterns on the furniture, the bathroom closet and its fascinating contents, the drawers of my father’s study desk. This house was me, and I belonged there. My childhood was what some would say idyllic, replete with summer sprinklers and Popsicles and go-cart building and frosted blueberry Pop-Tarts and magical candlelit Christmas Eves. I could thank Mom for these things; somehow she knew how a childhood should be. But while I studied in Europe my junior year in college, Mom and Dad left that house and moved not only to another house, but to another city in another state, to pursue another dream. It doesn’t matter now what that dream was; it was to become a nightmare to me. This new house was where my mother would find herself dying.

So I drank. First I got a divorce, and then I drank wine as much as I could. I was a good mother to Eliot, but I could have been better; one day I accidentally poured wine into his sippy cup instead of apple juice. And do you know what he said? He said, “Mama, this tastes funny. I fink this is your juice, not my juice.” He was four years old. When he was six, I gave him a baby brother, little Jay, who was conceived and born in my addiction and whom God in all his forgiveness made a final normal boy. But one day I phoned Alex, who had Eliot for the weekend, and very calmly told him I was going to check into Pathfinder Resources for Women and Children. I had been so sad for so long, so lonely. I would sit at the table for hours and just stare out the window at nothing, my coffee mug full of liquid escape at my elbow.

For eighty-eight days Jay and I lived at Pathfinder. We spent four holidays there. We didn’t go home, as we had no home to go to. And then there came the Thursday I found myself gaping dumbfounded at this brilliant Miss Theoris. Now that I knew the problem, I could fix it. So I graduated from there and was assisted with an apartment and a job and a car and life was oh, so good– for about four months.

Then I heard about Autumn. She had been my closest friend at Pathfinder and had relapsed on vodka so badly that her entire body had basically shut down, including most of her memory. I made the mistake of visiting her in ICU. I made the mistake of loving her. And I made the mistake of buying a pint of Peppermint Schnappes on the way home that day.

I could write volumes. I could tell you about the shakes I got one Sunday and there was no alcohol to make them go away, and I could tell you how I drank vanilla extract in lieu of wine. I could tell you how I poured Schnappes in a mouthwash bottle and colored it a nice greenish-blue so I could take my “mouthwash” into Grandma Johnson’s house. I could tell you how I’d fill a Big Gulp cup full of white wine and take it in the car with me everywhere I went. And I could tell you about the countless times I’d stay behind while friends went dining, inner-tubing, camping, out for coffee (you’re kidding, right?), movie-going– I’d stay behind, because it was a dry restaurant, or a dry county, or a dry party. My sense of not belonging led to my not belonging to anyone.

My liver almost shut down. I retained water by the liter. I stopped menstruating. I found a place to check myself in again, and this time I was treated as if I were very, very ill. Because I was. I was dying.

When I left that blessed place three days later, with a bag of diuretics and a strict diet regimen, I walked in my front door and rearranged the furniture. I didn’t want a table at my right hand, because I used to keep a glass there. I rearranged other things, too. I blinked my emotional, spiritual eyes several times and really LOOKED at my two amazing sons. And suddenly I couldn’t STOP looking. What had I missed before? They were so beautiful! And look at the cats, the cute things they do! And those flowers! What are they? I want to grow some of those. And these tomatoes! Did anything ever taste so good? And you, my dear friend, who never left me! Come here, give me a hug, I love you.

That was three years and seven months ago. And the thing is, it’s all still beautiful. It’s not that I almost died and I have come to appreciate life, like those stories in Reader’s Digest or those inspirational magazines. It’s just that I realized where I belong. I belong with my boys. I belong with memories of my mother, and my purpose is to recreate my childhood through my children. When I began to do that, to make forts out of cardboard boxes and convince Jay I just saw Santa in the sky, when I crank Peter Gabriel as loud as I dare and dance around like a fool, I remember where I belong. I remember that I am home.


By Kristin ***** *****
September 2005

(Now, however, it's been five years! There is hope, you know. What empty holes are we alcoholics trying to fill? Identify the hole, and we're on our way...)