*This is the second post in a series. I recommend reading part 1 first.
At first, starting my road to recovery was a relief to my family. They could finally breathe, but there was still a deep lack of trust I’d instilled in them, and rightfully so, because anyone who steals from their family, breaks into the house when they’ve been told they are no longer welcome, makes a spectacle of family dinner by showing up high as a kite, and going through significant withdrawals at their aunt’s wedding, has a long way to go. My grandpa said when I first went to treatment, because of his lifetime of witnessing others make empty promises and fail to actually rebuild their lives, he was skeptical and would have to see it to believe it. I’m here to say that on his deathbed, he told me he loved me and that he was proud of me.
My mom and sister were willing to give me a chance to make amends for my lifetime of lying, manipulation, and hurtful behavior, but our roles in the triplet were well-established. They both committed to the work needed for their own peace of mind, but as I leaned in more heavily to my new network of support outside of the family, I watched them struggle to find their place with me as I slowly needed them less and less. I was moving out of my wounded bird role, and that meant their job of saving me was no longer relevant.
To stay sober for 15 years is a long time. The growth didn’t happen all at once, and it wasn’t linear. It started with my relationship with my sponsor. My mom and I had a long-standing codependent, yet tumultuous relationship for the better part of my life, and as a young woman navigating what it meant to live a spiritual life, I was also learning what it meant to move into the adult child role. The family dynamics, although unhealthy, were familiar, but now they were uncomfortable.
I relied heavily on my sponsor, a woman who served as my spiritual guide, but also the motherly figure filling the void I’d lacked in my own family. Not that my mom was a bad parent, she loved me unconditionally, and she made sacrifice after sacrifice for my sister and me as a single parent with the one goal of making sure we had everything we ever needed and more. She was, and still is the only person who knows exactly what we need when we are sick, and she made every birthday and Christmas magical. I took it for granted much of the time, but her consistency and stability allowed my sister and me to feel safe and secure, which was necessary because our biological father was such a piece of shit.
He and my mom had divorced when I was two and, even though at times I idealized him because he played the cool dad and bought us sugary cereal and let us watch whatever movies we wanted, his unfulfilled promises, selfish behavior, and resentment toward my mom made things tricky for us. For me, he became the source of the abandonment wounds that plagued me for most of my life. It was confusing, Katie and I both wanted so desperately to have a relationship with him, but he consistently chose pleasure and freedom over us, spending child support money on frivolous things like concert tickets and ski passes forcing our mom to pick up the slack and serve as both father and mother when he’d skip out on our weekend with him for Dave Matthews at the Gorge or a weekend snowboarding at Discovery. She was our superhero, working double time just to make us feel like we were living a normal life because the pain of rejection and inconsistency from our dad brought us down a peg.
As I grew closer to my sponsor, the separation between my mom and me expanded. We had a complex relationship. She embodied all the things my biological father was not, yet my personality clashed with hers significantly making it difficult for us to connect, even as a tiny child. I displayed some of the characteristics of my dad with my impulsivity and pleasure-seeking tendencies that manifested too close for comfort, not to mention I have his face. It didn't help that I went undiagnosed with bipolar disorder until well into adulthood. My sister, in a lot of ways, was a replica of my mom with her reasonable and responsible nature making her easier to love whether it was real or imagined on my part. I don’t think she intended it, but I felt constantly compared to my sister. I felt resentful at times when Katie was chosen for all those gifted groups and excelled in both academics and friendships. It felt like things came easy for her. I know that’s not the case, she worked hard for everything she’s ever achieved, and she didn't have it easy, I mean she had to put up with me. But watching all the praise towards her as I failed to live up to my potential made it easy to see what our roles were. My mom would often say when she was angry, “I hope you have a daughter just like you when you grow up.” She never said that to Katie.
My sister and I were naturally close despite our glaring differences in both personality and interests. We had a unique bond that was unshakable. We were close enough in age that we were only a grade apart and were placed in all the same groups at camps and other extracurriculars. Our humor and curiosity made for a powerful combo. Built-in best friends, we were each other’s person, and this foundation allowed us to withstand the ultimate tests of our relationship. In the throws of my addiction, she stood by me while most dropped like flies.
I remember smoking weed in my car with her on some random mountaintop that my 1987 Honda Accord had no business climbing. We would contemplate life and make up rhymes that we still laugh at today and that still make no sense. What does, “A bear on the scare, a bear on the loose!” even mean? We also had a silly system of categorizing vehicles as cars, vans, trucks or car-trucks, car-vans, and van-trucks, that only made sense to us and would send us into a fit of laughter because we were amused by our private humor. There was no explanation needed, we were both always in agreement if it was a car-van or a van-truck.
We had a good childhood, we spent hours playing real-life moms of the American Girl dolls and babies that our mom made sure we had under the tree. We created an imagined world where our house was transported into an apartment complex in which we were both tenants. We also played made-up games such as Superman where I would balance her on my legs hovering her high above the ground, or Bicycle, a ritual she put up with where we would lay on the couch or floor, legs facing each other, and fight to kick the other one's shins in a peddling motion. I always dominated because I was at least a foot taller than her until she caught up to me in high school. Even though it most definitely hurt, she endured the pain as I pretended to run out of gas, fill up, and turn on turbo mode kicking her rapidly over and over while we both howled in laughter.
We also shared the same love of music. Death Cab for Cutie, in particular, would carry us through all the emotions of adolescence and early adulthood and brought me great comfort while I was in treatment when she burned me their newest album and snuck it in so I could have a little piece of home with me during my painful detox. I would lay in bed at night, crying, as I blasted the tunes through my headphones pretending to listen to recovery speaker tapes.
She knew our mom and I butted heads. I’m sure it plagued her. She had to serve as a buffer for countless arguments and often felt forced to mediate or be the voice of reason when we were not on the same page. She watched me sneak out of the house and begged me not to go, I went anyway, and she never told our mom. When we were older she would come with me and willingly participate in questionable behavior so I could have a safe person in a potentially dangerous space. I exposed her to things no one should have to experience, but our bond was solid enough, and thankfully I got to make amends for those things later.
I noticed she began to set better boundaries with me once I got sober, and I didn't always like it. She was putting in the work- doing her own recovery within our family system, but I, like many alcoholics, think I'm the exception. It's easy to say everyone needs to change for me or get on my level because I'm now flying right, but when I don't like how changes affect me, and others grow and shift in their behavior, like my sister, it's important for me to recognize it, adjust, and give them the same courtesy I expect for myself. I don't get the luxury of cherry-picking how my family adjusts when I start to get better, they are doing what is best for them and vice versa.
Our mom had a harder time though. Our recovery book says, “Years of drinking would make a skeptic out of anyone,” and she has remained a skeptic on some level to this day. My relationship with my sponsor fueled her insecurity in our relationship. The less I needed her, the less relevant it appeared she felt. I was becoming my own person, and simultaneously filling the void from our relationship with my new sponsor. This would continue for almost nine years of my sobriety. It didn't help that when my mom would question me or my blind devotion to recovery, I would inform her that my sponsor thought differently, or that she didn't understand, or I'd use my relationship as a way to drive the wedge further because I'd immediately run to my sponsor, which wasn't fair.
It wasn’t until my stepdad got sick that my attention turned back fully to my family. Not that I wasn’t showing up for them, but I’d placed my recovery so high that I could have been perceived as evangelical, giving me a false superiority over them. It took me a while to realize recovery is not about becoming so better that you become better than others. It's simply about becoming right-sized and egoless which is why the spiritual aspect is so important. A person can make amends for all the shitty things they've done and start to act in an improved and more productive way, but it's the spiritual transformation that creates the real change because otherwise, I'm just a person who is sorry and no longer a hot mess.
My stepdad came into our lives very soon after my parents’ divorce. Ray was everything my real dad wasn’t. He was kind and stable, and he showed up consistently, but what caught me off guard the most was how he saw and validated the real me.
I was the black sheep in my family, and similarly to the way my sister and I were, Ray served as a light in my corner who defended me time and time again. He spoke my language when no one else could. He encouraged my eccentricness, and let my freak flag fly. He had a way of helping me see my mom’s side without telling me I was in the wrong. He’s always been like that, not just with me. He has a way of making everyone feel special through his ability to connect and always say what needs to be said in a way we can understand. Don’t get me wrong, having him in our lives amplified the lack of my other father, and when I was in a mood and he would try to work his magic I would say something snarky and it would set him off. Nothing was perfect, and it never is, but what made him really special, even more than diffusing often tense arguments between my mom and me was the way he created space for me to shine. He went out of his way to make me feel seen and heard. I grew up singing and would often sing at the top of my lungs during what was deemed inappropriate times, or I’d over-explain the plot of a movie I was excited about. It was too much for most people, but Ray would call me down to the basement and ask me about the movie or have me sing my newest favorite song while he worked on his books for the business he owned, or sometimes I just needed to talk endlessly, and he let me do that too.
He was my safe space and my security. Our unique bond was special. As fellow Geminis, we would sneak off to go to the pawn shops and look for new movies, or run to Staples just to buy fancy office supplies. We still do this. He’s just as quirky as me so when he started acting listless and more agitated than usual, we all became concerned, especially my mom. After a bunch of tests, he was diagnosed with Lewy body, a form of dementia often misdiagnosed as Parkinson's, and our family crumbled.
He started to deteriorate and my mom scrambled to get him the care he needed. I knew my family needed me during what felt like the hardest thing we would ever go through. I didn’t step away from my recovery, but I cut back on my meetings and let my service commitment go so I could be available as much as possible. I upped my meditation and my morning writing/reading routine so I could still have my foundation and be fully there for them.
He became a different person, no longer the social butterfly, or fondly nicknamed, “Mayor of Downtown.” His well-established business was a Helena staple and everyone knew him and loved him. He was so beloved that when he turned 50 the city shut down the entire block his business was on and had a party with a live band, food vendors, and beer distributors. The party made the front page of the YourTime, a weekly insert in our local newspaper that showcased all the Helena happenings for the week. The event drew hundreds and, in my opinion, planted a seed in the downtown organization that would later organize weekly summer block parties of the same caliber that continue to this day.
We sold his business, and he became a recluse. No longer eating, we watched as he rapidly became emaciated while his brain simultaneously turned on itself. My mom, sister, and I rallied together to do everything we could to make him comfortable and savor every moment with him as if it were our last. Dementia is a devastating and fucked up disease, it removes the soul of a person, essentially killing them right before your very eyes while keeping their body alive. We were grieving the loss of our rock while also doing our best to make him feel safe and secure because he too was having a hard time grasping what was happening with his mind and body.
While everything was quickly and unexpectedly falling apart faster than we could comprehend, I had an awakening with my recovery program that snapped me out of the spell my sponsor had over me. I had stepped just far enough away from her and deep enough into my connection with my God, that I could see how attached I was.
She and I had slowly developed a codependent relationship. She swooped in at the exact right time and saved me when no one else could. I was so terrified I'd slip, that I became addicted to her words of wisdom and relied so heavily on her that I couldn’t fathom doing recovery on my own. Recovery isn't meant to be done alone, a sponsor is suggested, but she essentially became my Higher Power, which is not suggested. It had been almost a decade since I started cleaning my life up and working with her so the thread that connected us was like concrete and would take an act of God to sever. I started having an existential experience where I wondered where the years had gone and how I was going to face the fact that my childlike behavior was no longer cute.
I was approaching my 30s and it was time for me to grow up. Don't get me wrong I had grown up a lot. I had gone to college and done incredibly well, graduating proudly and having achieved several high honors throughout my education. I didn’t graduate with any letters, but I did have an award-winning paper I’d researched and written with one of my professors and I was damn proud of it. I had also proven myself as a strong writer for the school newspaper. I was on a first-name basis with all of my professors, and unlike my primary years, was recognized for my hard work and validated for my mind.
I had also finally broken down and allowed a doctor to diagnose me with a mood disorder and got the help I desperately needed thanks to both my soon-to-be husband who was a pharmacist and understood mental illness and the miracle of modern medicine, and my mom with her extensive background in psych nursing and first-hand experience with my disease in action. They teamed up and, without judgment, intervened and saved my life. I was dying inside. Sobriety had saved my life, but bipolar II was destroying it.
My soon-to-be husband was a huge catalyst in grounding me during this major life pivot. Just like when I was a kid, as a newly sober young adult I was buzzing all the time and had a hard time not radiating chaotic energy. I had some time under my belt but was still a hot mess. He offered consistency and patience and pushed back when I needed it, and he loved me unconditionally. I felt safe and secure with him and I began to slow down. I also finally got my ADHD under control, thankfully. I don't know how I even drove a car, let alone graduated from college prior to getting help. The combination of the spiritual actions I’d taken to set myself up for the life I truly wanted to live, his love, medication, and the tragic diagnosis of Ray allowed me to be there for my family, but it also meant I had to reevaluate the dynamics of the relationship with my sponsor.
Yes, things needed to change with my sponsor because I was growing up, but I still had a long way to go. When I first met Tom* I was still acting like I was 25. I was going out dancing with my friends every weekend, and rather than prioritize grown-up things like keeping my apartment clean, opening my mail, and not oversleeping, I was acting like a sorority girl and my social life trumped everything. The medication and my now solid spiritual routine were keeping me sane though, and they stabilized many of the things that I couldn’t help because they were chemical, not of my own making. It worked so well one might've said I became an adult then. The shift felt like it happened overnight, but my sponsor couldn’t get there. She still saw me as the dependent, yet defiant loose canon. She implied that my medication was risky as a recovering addict even though I was taking it as prescribed. She also, in not so many words said that I was using my diagnosis as an excuse to behave badly, even though I wasn't anymore. I wasn’t as chaotic, acting on impulse and forgoing responsibility for pleasure. Her image of me behaving badly amplified when my personality began to change as I navigated my sobriety on a spiritual level that made her not my God anymore. Just like when I dove into recovery and my family saw me pull away, the tables had turned and I began to pull away from her.
When we’d talk, she was insensitive to my sadness about my dad getting sick. I had been a rollercoaster of emotions for the first several years of sobriety so she would play mean cop and would give me the tough love I needed to snap out of my self-pity. This time wasn’t self-pity but she couldn’t differentiate the two with me. She was also unsupportive of my new boyfriend (soon-to-be fiancé) because she’d seen my track record with men and even though this time it was different, she didn’t believe me. And her claims were valid most of the time, I had a revolving door of men in and out of my life for the first several years and she had a front-row seat. She watched me make bad choice after bad choice with men as the common denominator, so this time she dismissed my real feelings of love for lust. I had done the work to break the cycle, it took me long enough, but, just like drinking, I'd finally recognized my pattern of behavior and how powerless I was over my thinking. She was the reason I was better, she showed me the roadmap on how to stop all the heartache. But I think she liked being the one who could make me better, and thought she was the only one capable of it. I believed that also, wholeheartedly for years, which clouded her judgment when I started to get there on my own and made me question if I actually was doing something right.
She claimed everything I was doing was just an excuse for stepping away from my recovery. Her answer was I needed to show up more, meaning call her every day like I was a child. Checking in with a sponsor on a daily basis is often necessary when a person is new, or in a place where they need extra accountability. I was neither in this moment. I naturally pulled away, then my distance became too great to reach out. I think it validated her theory because she took my distance as me being unstable and would then criticize me when I would actually reach out for the help I needed from my longtime mentor.
It was a perfect storm of misunderstandings. What was happening mirrored the phenomenon that happens in families when a person sobers up, my new growth and serenity disrupted the toxic dependency we had on each other. I was doing better than I’d ever been, on solid ground finally, despite the circumstances, and she wasn’t a part of it so convincing her I’d changed was a challenge.
I confided in Tom about the pain I felt from our strained relationship and he helped me to see all the good I did have in my life. He helped me understand that if the relationship was as strong as I thought it was I should have the courage to call her and have an honest conversation about what I was feeling and how I’d like to move forward towards an adult relationship, not a child/parent one. My solution, up to that point, was to avoid conversations and to run away. See, I still had work to do. But I no longer needed her the way I always had. If we were going to have a relationship in the future as a sponsor/sponsee I knew things needed to change, and I was finally going to say something, even though it felt like a lost cause.
I had a very painful conversation with her and I realized nothing was going to change. I felt proud of myself for standing up to her and asking for what I needed, not my usual behavior of submission without question and doing whatever she said. My reputation with her was set in stone and despite the misunderstanding, I finally understood so clearly, no amount of proof or explanation was going to fix the now-broken relationship. She no longer had the power she’d always had over me because I no longer wanted to be treated like a child who was punished every time I confessed what I had done. That method worked for a long time, don't get me wrong, I'm manipulative and sneaky, so the fact that I was always willing to own up to my actions was huge. It was also a big deal that I wasn't afraid of the ramifications of my behavior. I listened to her and followed her directions and it worked, every time, until it didn't.
We parted ways, and we both would say it was because of our own individual needs. She would claim I was untamable, unteachable, and I didn’t want to follow her rules. I knew she no longer served me with her limited viewpoint on my life and methods for healing. Our relationship remained broken and to this day is nonexistent. The few times we’ve accidentally run into each other over the last several years were awkward and superficial. She seemed uncomfortable, and I definitely was. We'd apparently lost any sort of understanding of how to interact. I resented her for a while but I moved on and started working with a different sponsor. I have peace about it now because I recognize how valuable she was to me at one point in my life, but relationships fade when both parties aren’t committed to growth in the same direction, and that’s OK. Everyone needs different things and sometimes we need a clean break. I owe her my life, but that doesn’t mean I still need or want her there.
Just as quickly as I knew our relationship was over, my relationship with my mom began to change profoundly. We were like new people, able to exist as we’d never before. The relationship with my sponsor filled a void but as a byproduct got in the way of me fully having the adult relationship with my mom I'd always wanted. We became a team fighting for our family and it was a beautiful thing.
My mom had basically paused her entire life to take care of Ray, and he needed her to do so. I credit her immediate response, ultimately leading to an early diagnosis, to his miraculous recovery. Her consistency and healing qualities which Katie and I had experienced first-hand growing up, paid off. She got Ray’s routine down to a science. He was so afraid all the time that any shift in the routine would throw him off and make him feel agitated or uneasy. This included unexpected visitors or if my mom tried to give him something other than the smoothie she’d make him twice a day, which was basically just a cherry milkshake and the only thing he’d eat. If my mom deviated from the exact number of frozen cherries she’d use, Ray would know and protest, or god forbid if she offered him an alternative like toasted English muffins with peanut butter and huckleberry jam which he would later become obsessed with.
Lewy body often causes hallucinations, which, until his diagnosis, I didn't realize could affect all the senses, not just the eyes. Ray wouldn't eat because most food tasted like poison, as he once described. It was one of the early signs my mom noticed that made her think something was wrong. I remember waiting on them at a restaurant I was working on and he didn't want anything because it all sounded terrible. Now coming from from Ray, this was alarming. He loved food, especially burgers and chicken. I remember my mom and I trying to suggest items that we knew he would like, but he kept refusing. Finally, he ordered a cheeseburger. I watched as it arrived and he looked disappointed and began scrapping the cheese off. Both my mom and I noticed and knew it was out of character.
For the first year or so, he was so agitated and afraid, he wouldn’t leave the house and only trusted my mom. When he wasn’t feeling well and I wanted to come by and visit I could hear him angrily tell her no. She would turn me away and I would hang up and cry. It was awful. The man I once was so close with wanted nothing to do with me anymore. But I was a wrench in the routine, it wasn't me, and it wasn’t him, it was his disease. I held out hope that what I knew was inside would eventually come back. We all did, we had to. What else were we going to do? So often I see family caretakers burnout because it’s too much. The years-long commitment with very little hope of joy again is a death sentence and most people can’t take it. We tried our best, especially my mom, and Ray came around. Most people don’t get the happy ending we did, so I don’t blame them. It’s not lost on me that we witnessed the impossible.
Ray defied science and recovered. My mom’s immediate response and persistence with the doctors made his miraculous recovery possible. No one gets better from dementia. No one. He didn’t fully recover, but Lewy as we fondly call him, went basically into remission. His soul returned and we had our dad back. He still has some deficiencies but they are a tiny blimp on the scale of how far we’ve come.
We honestly can’t fully explain it, and neither can the doctors, but he became a medical miracle. I know that we are lucky. Families go to the ends of the earth to save their loved ones with dementia, and it's almost always a losing battle. We won and, although none of us fully understand, we aren’t going to question the precious gift we’ve been given.
During all of this, I was planning my wedding. Each month, as I checked another thing off my list, he became a little more keen on the idea of attending the wedding. He went from snapping when I mentioned including him on the boutonniere list, to eventually walking me down the aisle. I walked with him and my mom, each linked to one of my arms, as everyone in attendance lost their shit and didn’t even try to hold back the tears as they witnessed a hopeless case walk towards recovery in front of their very eyes. My wedding acted as an unintended reveal of how far he’d come. Most people knew our situation and knew it was grim, but seeing him there, on that day, was remarkable and everyone was stunned.
-Come back for part three in the series
*As a courtesy I changed my ex-husband's name to protect his anonymity.
*The second photo of Katie and me is of us working at Ray's coffee shop.
*The last photo of Ray is from my wedding when he first started to get better.
*The first is a couple years later.
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