Dad’s Addictions

Dad’s addictions included money, power, sex, women, perfectionism, and control. He had to control everyone and everything in his path. Especially me.

Sex was one of Dad’s addictions. I even met one of his girlfriends once when he and Mom were having problems.  She was skinny and she smoked.  I couldn’t believe Dad would date someone who smoked.  I mean he had asthma.  How could he stand it?  

“Your father does whatever he wants with whomever he wants,” my mother snapped at me over a huge pile of unfolded laundry and a coffee mug full of vodka. I was no more than 11 or 12 at the time.  Oh… okay.   That’s why he was always so “friendly” with the Rumbleseat waitress and Busch Gardens tour guide.  I couldn’t have been more than seven or eight when we went to the Busch Gardens amusement park in Tampa, Florida. I clearly remember Dad flirting with the busty redheaded tour guide who showed us around. 

Dad lived in an era that was tolerant of men cheating on their wives because “that’s just what men did.”  Work all day, have a scotch, get laid.  That was the schedule.  All of his buddies had this same routine.

Above all, his biggest addiction, or defect, was rage.

Dad and Rage

I dread the dream

Your anger reigns

It’s all anxiety

Nobody gains

You’re never satisfied

With what you’ve got

Or anybody else

And it’s got to stop

(Dread the Dream, from Fearless Moral Inventory, by Juliet A. Wright, copyright 2008, all rights reserved.)

Dad was a rager.  He really could blow up and go nuts to the point that the whole earth would shake.  Usually he would take everything out on me at the barn.  Again, I don’t mean in a physical sense, as he never actually hit me.  Instead, he could yell and scare the dickens out of me.  He really had a terrible temper, which I’ve inherited.  Lucky me.

Fuck Ass

Sometimes Alice would take showers in Dad’s bathroom.  I don’t remember exactly why.  Normally it was kind of off limits.  Not officially, of course, but on an unspoken level.  The downstairs bathroom was Dad’s and the upstairs bathroom was for the girls.  We would never catch him using ours.  Even in the middle of the night, he’d go downstairs to his. 

Alice had hair down past her waist.  She used this conditioner called Long & Silky on her hair. Well, one day, she left a bunch of empty and half-empty bottles in his shower and he had a canary about it. 

“All these fuck ass bottles,” he screamed at the top of his lungs.  “Fuck ass, fuck ass, fuck ass!” Gosh, I can still hear him yelling.  I can still feel his rage.  He started throwing the bottles everywhere, some empty, some half-full.  Finally Mom came in. 

“It’s alright, I’m here now,” she said, trying to keep the top of his head from blowing off. 

“I don’t care!” he screamed.  “Fuck ass, fuck ass, fuck ass!!”

Wow!  So that’s where I get it.  No wonder it comes so naturally to me.  That’s a relief.  Whew? Is there a cure?  I shudder to think.

Grammy Amy and the Toilet Incident

Grammy Amy (Dad’s mom) and Dad got in a fight at the Florida house one night around happy hour. He was mad at her for drinking too much.  He also was accusing her of cleaning the toilet with the wrong cleanser.  This cleanser had speckled the once entirely green toilet seat with light blue polkadots.  A seemingly unimportant, fixable situation such as this was enough to send my dad into a ballistic rage to the moon, similar to the “fuckass” Long & Silky bottles incident. I’m not saying be sloppy and treat your furniture like garbage, but, I mean, the way he went off, you would have thought that she had lost all of his money at the racetrack or something.

It is difficult to be around someone who is addicted to rage, especially when you are a little kid and the rager is your father. You kind of just have to put up with it. I have had my own issues with rage, which I will speak of later. But now, as an adult, I can choose to not be around people who have rage habits. 

I also can use some of my mantras as a tool to help me in this area:

• Observe, don’t react.  The Observer is who you really are.
• Relax and watch.
• You have a choice.
• Go for process, not content.
• You are only responsible for yourself.
• You are only in control of where you put your attention.
• Treat it like the front page of the paper. This is another technique that my therapist taught me. Whatever I’m going through, I can imagine it is a headline on the front page of the paper that doesn’t really affect me. I find it helpful. 
• Change your how high habit. When someone says jump, I have a habit of saying “how high?” I don’t have to do what everyone else wants me to do anymore.
• Change your self-judgment habit.
• Set boundaries for yourself.
• Remember your bubble. My therapist told me to imagine a protective bubble around myself so that when hurtful things happen, I am not affected. The bad stuff only hits the outside of the bubble.
• It’s not my fault.
• This has nothing to do with me because even if I had not (been in the room, done something wrong), this would have happened anyway. This is about their process, not mine.
• Go do something that makes you happy.
• When I am feeling emotional, I can make an excuse and get out of the house.
• I am clear and up front in my communication.
• Be patient.
• Take care of yourself.