You're Still Doing Great Today

Notes on a birthday. Poems. Tunes.

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Today, we’re celebrating my oldest son’s birthday. Although he’s appeared in this newsletter several times, this one from 2020 was his first.

When Julieanne told me she was pregnant, there was a slow hum in my head as I contemplated how I was supposed to react. Yesterday, I asked Julieanne if she remembered what expression I wore as she told me, and she has zero memory of it. Given how daunting everything was in my life at that exact moment—with legal and financial troubles reaching absurd levels—it should have been an easy answer as to what we should do. Also notable: I wasn’t quite 100 days sober, thanks to a minor, unspectacular relapse. 

Yet, it felt right. Every part of my life was so bleak that raising a child—with all its impossible hardships and unknown horrors—was an opportunity to be happy during the misery. I don’t know—I wasn’t thinking clearly. My brain was scrambled because my life was scrambled.

That baby, a boy we named Ozzy Umberto James Daulerio, arrived prematurely on June 20, 2017. I saw him first. He was gray and slimy, and his hands were enormous. I cut the cord, watched his first bath. Sat in on the circumcision. (Wish I hadn’t done that, to be honest.) I was there for it. Wide awake. But still not even a year sober.

I wrote this essay a little over four years ago. It came during one of those guilt-filled, obsessively doomy spirals, convinced that my oldest would be mentally ill and alcoholic, and it would be all my fault. Typical.

But he just turned seven, and I’m still sober—we’re hanging in. It’s essential that I continue to give him a chance to be happy and that I do the same for myself. It’s the least I can do. — AJD

You’re Doing Great Today

Even though he's only two and a half, I recognize my firstborn son's sensitivity as my own. Sometimes, he'll smirk at me right before he throws a truck at my head, and it's the same face I'd make at people right before I did something terrible. His tantrums are intense: He spins out and throws himself onto the ground or sometimes flounces face-first into the couch. In addition to all the other new fears of parenthood, I worry my poor Ozzy has a brain like mine, and he'll have the same long, self-destructive road ahead. 

I think this is normal for every parent, but I struggle with the idea that my son (and all my children, really) will be preternaturally fucked up. I asked Clancy, who's a father of four, if he ever felt guilty about his lifetime of alcoholism and suicide attempts, jails and ex-wives, and if he ever thinks about how it could affect his children. Does he think they'll be troubled?

"Yes. Of course. And they will be. As in Philip Larkin's poem, This Be The Verse, they fuck you up, your mum and dad.

So they'll be in therapy. But then, everyone should be in therapy. It's all those other genes that scare me the most. 

"So you know, the particular anxieties we inflict on our children were also inflicted on us. We can only try to do better by being honest with them about our struggles and erring on the side of kindness and whatever sanity we can scrap together," Clancy said.

But does it have to be that way? What if somehow they turned out normal (if there is such a thing)?

****

Every morning, I write down my fears in my journal before writing down my gratitude list. I must know if my head's in the right place before the day begins. Lately, it's been very focused on what I'll call "world events," which could mean about a dozen things right now. But I'm also paranoid that my current life--the one filled with children and a dog and a warm house---has never existed and has been a librium-induced version of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," and I'll wake up back in a small, sweaty bed in a Florida rehab. 

My favorite picture of Ozzy is one where he's probably five or six months old and climbing on me with a big dumb smile. And I'm hugging him with closed eyes, full of desperation and relief. That hug was when I realized that my life had miraculously changed. 

And sometimes, when I yell at him, I walk over to him and hug him tightly, just like in the picture. Under my breath, I apologize for who I am. What's that saying about shame?

Guilt says I made a mistake; shame says I am the mistake.

Whenever I go to an Adult Child of Alcoholics meeting, I wonder if I'm keeping a seat warm for him.

*****

I couldn't sleep when I was younger. I'd try to sleep in my parents' bed–or even next to their bed--but I was disrupting their sleep, and they'd lock their door. I'd knock and knock, but they wouldn't respond. I'd hear them rustle in their beds, willfully ignoring me. I'd give up and return to my room, ready to endure the anxieties of the night. If I couldn't hack it, I'd take my pillow and sleep outside their door like a pathetic cat.

I'd be okay if one of my parents–usually my mom–laid on the couch to watch late-night TV. I'd try to fall asleep before she came to bed, or else it'd be one of those terror-filled lock-the-door nights. At the end of Saturday Night Live credits, the whining saxophone would set me in a full-on panic because it signaled I'd soon be awake and all alone.

That summer changed me for life–something inside me became twisted and defiant. After the summer ended, there was a big hole where all the swirling panic lived–a hole I would eventually fill with chemicals and chaos.

Because I'd never figured out how to go to bed like a normal person, I spent most of my 20s and 30s avoiding bedrooms as much as possible, laying on the couch with my eyes closed and the TV on in the background. Sometimes, I'd sip Nyquil through a straw and fall asleep with cigarettes on my belly. I even snorted melatonin a few times. Tylenol PM.  Trazodone. Xanax, of course. These weren't guaranteed to work, but it was the best I could do—no more locked doors.