I got to pick my kid up from school yesterday, walk him home, cook him dinner, play a video game which I didn’t even begin to understand, read him a book, and drift off to sleep with him next to me. The simplest and most profound of pleasures wrapped up beautifully into one. But although I now see him regularly and he stays over often, this is the first time I’ve picked him up from school in a few years. Why? Because the last time it happened, I was drunk. So visibly drunk in fact, that one of the carers had come over and challenged me, hesitantly, with something like, ‘I’m sorry but you’re drunk and you’re not allowed to pick children up like that.’ In the certain and outraged terms of someone who was indeed drunk, I told her it was none of her business and to back off, which she promptly did. She was young and, it was immediately apparent to me, lacked confidence. I’m not young and have plenty of confidence, some of it misplaced and an abundance of it when I’ve had a skinful. Looking back now, I applaud her courage and decency and I wish I could tell her that. Nonetheless, the deal was done and I got my kid. And yes, I was drunk when I got in the car and drove him home. And I know it’s a terrible thing to have done, and I’m still working on a way to forgive myself, but it is part of the reality of alcoholism.
All this came out in the wash of course (it always does), I was confronted by my then wife, admitted my guilt and was promptly taken off the school pick-up list, a thing which outraged me at the time. This is my child. My right. My this. My that. The disinterested observer looking in, could see instantly who is right and who is wrong in this scenario. I scarcely need to spell it out. But for the drunken party at the time, it is extremely difficult to see right from wrong because everything, and I do mean everything, narrows its focus onto you, your wants and your needs, all of which end up in the same unforgiving locus – alcohol and its effects.
That my ex-wife was absolutely right in taking me off the school list is beyond all moral, legal and whatever other measure you want, doubt. But all that takes a while to dawn when you’re drunk. And when I say ‘drunk’, I’m talking years here, not a couple of days or weeks. Years. What Scott Fitzgerald called the ‘Lost Decade’. But come to dawn it does. The frozen outrage you feel at being a ‘deprived father’, melts slowly in the realisation that it’s not you that’s being deprived, it’s your child being deprived of a responsible parent. As a drunk, you’ll try and parse this anyway you can from Sunday. To my long-suffering sponsor at AA, I’d say something like, ‘Yeah, but it’s a short drive home, on a straight road, traffic isn’t bad and I’ve only seen a police road check twice in the last year…and…and’, and something and something. There’s always something. Putting aside for a moment the strictures and guidelines of Alcoholics Anonymous, his response would be one of common sense and simple decency: ‘Nick, listen to me. You’ve driven your child home drunk. Is that really the person you want to be?’
The obvious answer to that question rings in your head immediately, but at the same time comes very slowly indeed.
Some years later, not driving (but with driver’s licence intact), I had the chance to pick my boy up from school again and be the dad I really am. It’s not much, but it’s also everything, for me and for him.
When you’re drunk the window of life narrows in ways that obscure everything you think you are, and know, and have. The hours and minutes and seconds dissolve into one blurring moment that turn out to have been years. As recovery begins, the seconds turn back again into recognisable minutes, hours, days, weeks, and the window of life reverses, opening again onto the vision of a child, his father and the walk home from school.
Nick Jordan
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