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The Guilt and Regrets of an Addicted Life

January 26, 2019 by Denton 2 Comments

Guilt and Regrets

Two weeks ago, my wife gave birth to a little girl who will one day steal my heart.  I’m not big on the baby stage of life, so I’m admittedly just surviving her right now.  She’ll be daddy’s little girl in no time; it’s just not happening today. This stage is for her mama.  I just want her to magically be a year old. I know I don’t get that, so for now, I’m just interested in keeping her alive until she becomes fun.  I’ve done it twice before. I can do this!!

This little girl is different, though.  She is my first, last, and only child born to me as a sober man.  I think because of that, I’ve settled into this weird daily existence of excitement, fear, dread, worry, depression, stress, and buckets of monotony.  I do not enjoy the first six to twelve months of a baby’s life. It’s not for me. I’ve said that to people before who look at me like I just stuck a baby in the microwave, but I do not feel guilty about that stance.  Not at all. I know what kind of father I am beginning at the one year mark, and that’s a damn good one. Not great. I’m far from great. But I’m good enough to be proud of the job I’m doing now.

But the experience in knowing that, and especially the serenity that comes with my first baby as a sober man, means I have to unload the guilt from the others, especially my oldest daughter.  I was a drunk for most of her life. I’ve needed to get rid of that guilt for a long time.

This is me saying goodbye to it.

Sometime shortly before the baby was born, this realization led to a depression that was a little different than most, and I couldn’t figure out why until I started writing this.  For once in my history of depressive episodes, this one contained some hope. But again, it took me a little while to see it. I think it finally occurred to me that new life brings hope in some unexpected ways.

If a person’s brain can be savagely and repeatedly molested, and that brain belongs to an addict (recovering or active,) the molestation that occurs will most likely be in the form of guilt and regret.  All the daily stuff that an addict must do to get the next drink or drug is just maintenance. It can be stressful on the mind of an addict, sure, but it does not savagely rape an addict’s mind the way guilt and regret do.

Sadly, my oldest daughter will always top this list.  She didn’t deserve ANYTHING that happened to her when she was little.  At 18 months old, her biological mother (and my wife at the time) was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  It was called a glioblastoma multiforme. Deadly. She was gone in fourteen months. My daughter was two months shy of three years old.  No toddler deserves that.

Her daddy drank the night before the funeral.  Heavily. I delivered what I’ve always considered to be an excellent and fitting eulogy the next day, with my daughter oblivious to the woman in the big box.  So oblivious was she that she just decided to climb all over the front of the pulpit while I was delivering said eulogy. She was having a damn blast.

I’m almost certain I drank the night of the funeral, too.  I didn’t miss many nights before OR after that. It just got easier to drink whenever the hell I wanted to.  From an addiction standpoint, I literally had nobody left in my way. I could start drinking before lunchtime if I wanted to.  I didn’t have to hide it from anybody. The toddler in the house had no idea what beer was. She just wanted to play with her cousins or her daddy.

And I did play with her.  I would go push her on the swing or play a board game or get out the shaving cream and food coloring and let her make colorful designs on a cookie sheet (weird game, I know.)  I would take her to the kid’s museum over in Raleigh and I took her to Disney World right by myself. I planned play dates as much as possible because I wanted her to have all the fun she deserved.

To the outside world, I was a freaking rockstar single daddy.  I even started getting single moms messaging me on Facebook and asking people to set me up with them.  They thought I was a damn CATCH!! Like my daughter at her mom’s funeral, though, the outside world was oblivious to the man I was inside my house.  

I did almost everything in my power (shy of allowing her to keep me from my addictions) to make her happy.  When she wanted a play date, I made it happen. When she wanted chocolate milk, I made it happen. When she asked about her mom, we sat down and looked at scrapbooks and then immediately played a game to get her mind focused on something else.

Everybody outside my house spoiled the hell out of her.  They pitied her. She lost her mom, so they had no intention of telling her no to ANYTHING.  She wasn’t spoiled by me – quite the opposite, actually – because of this fact. I had to be pretty tough on her.  It wasn’t that hard because she was just such a great kid. The only real struggle – the area I fought her on daily – was food.  Everybody else fed her whatever she wanted. I tried to make her eat vegetables. But I was the only one. So I lost that battle.  And today, she eats terribly. That is NOT my fault. I tried. I don’t regret that.

The guilt and regret don’t reside in anything I’ve already written, in fact.  I actually have very few guilts and regrets left outside of fatherhood, for that matter.  I have some guilt and regret in decisions I’ve made concerning my career choices over the years, but those have mostly faded.  I also have some guilt and regret for the hell I put my wife through the first three years of our relationship, but for whatever reason, those don’t linger.  She’s mostly forgiven me, we’ve both moved past that, and I have no interest in staining the happiness that now resides in our marriage by dwelling on it too much.

We all have those minor regrets where you wish you could take back something you said, or said something you didn’t say, or did something you didn’t do, or wish you could take back something you did.  Those are mostly meaningless. They’re just part of life and of growing up, which we never really stop doing, if you ask me. In fact, I think I’ve come to the realization that those are required. If you don’t have regrets, you haven’t truly lived and you haven’t earned that beautiful gift called wisdom.  If you don’t have guilt, how in the hell do you have a barometer of comparison by which to better yourself?

The most troubling regrets, however – those that have not faded enough yet – reside in the things that held the most importance in my life for the first twelve years of my daughter’s life.  I’ve heard addicts say they could care less if their kids had food on the table as long as they could drink. I’ve heard addicts say they have left toddlers and sick kids at home for hours by themselves to go drink.  It’s insanity. I’m not guilty of either of those, but alcohol and tobacco were the most important things in my life for the first twelve years of her life.

That’s remarkably painful to accept.  But I’m going to. And I’m going to move past it now.

I was an amazing dad between the hours of noon and 9:00 pm daily.  Why noon? Because daddy was hungover and had to sleep in. I left her to get her own breakfast and play by herself for the first three or four hours of her day.  And this was when she was only four or five years old. I rationalized it because I was so freaking amazing the rest of the day. And I was doing this parenting thing alone.  She would need to be tough and independent as she grew up, so I was “helping” her get there as early as possible. Just stupid, ridiculous freaking rationalizations. It’s absolutely heartbreaking that I did that.  I can’t even believe I’m admitting it. But I have to. I have to cleanse that part of me somehow.

I’m amazed to this day of the young lady that lives in this house and still proudly calls me Daddy.  In some twisted way, that toughness and independence that I was “helping” her with has actually manifested itself within her.  She’s a well-adjusted, Principal’s-List-achieving, soccer goalkeeping, theater-loving, social butterfly-fluttering, angel of a human being that is absolutely amazing with her little brother and sister and has a relationship with God that I envy.

I truly don’t know how I raised her for seven years alone.  I don’t know how that experience led to the amazing, beautiful-inside-and-out young woman she is today.  It’s truly remarkable.

But I will never look back on the experience of raising her alone with pride, and that makes me enduringly sad.  I’m not proud of being a drunk at any point over the past twenty years, but the years where a completely innocent child was neglected in favor of alcohol and tobacco will forever hold a dead spot in my heart and mind.

I’m just eternally thankful that she’s still here, she still loves me, and she is proud of me for being sober.  The only thing I can do for her now is to make my relationship with her something SHE takes pride in, and hopefully the pain in my heart with slowly evaporate.  That’s the hope. Since she’s still here, there’s always hope. Better yet, since she has embraced this new mom, this new little brother, this new baby, and this new life, that’s a little bigger than hope, is it not?

There are a couple of minor guilts I have to wash away today, as well.  I have guilt knowing that she got the worst of me for her childhood, but her brother and sister are getting me sober.  This new baby girl even gets me sober from day ONE!! But there is guilt there. I will forever hate the man that allowed alcohol and tobacco to hold importance over his own daughter for twelve damn years.

I know all the trite sayings about regret and guilt.  You could put worry in there, too, but I don’t worry too much.  They’re similar in that the only good any of them do is to destroy TODAY.  They do not allow a person to live in THIS moment. Something that cannot change or cannot be predicted ends up destroying the moment you’re currently living in.  I know that. And I know I shouldn’t. And to be honest, I seldom do. But when it hits me, I feel like shit.

My daughter does not hate me for this.  Somehow, through my honesty and contrition, she seems to understand.  Forgiveness, for her, was never in question. Not once has she made me feel guilty for being an addict the first twelve years of her life.  Well, that’s not necessarily true, but anything she has said that made me feel guilty was simply a young girl asking questions that she didn’t understand.  She’s never consciously or maliciously tried to make me feel guilty about it. And I know she won’t.

I hope she grows up with that kind of understanding heart.  I hope she is able to see the goodness in other people and look past actions that don’t reflect the goodness.  I hope she doesn’t hold grudges. I hope she is accepting of people trying to better themselves, even when their mistakes are disgusting.  And I think she will be. Somehow I raised her to be that way. In that, I succeeded. It’s pretty ironic that that success was due in part to the very things I regret.

I also will forever have one small regret in my son’s life.  I regret I waited until the ninth month of his life to get sober.  This regret is about as impactful on my life as a dandruff flake. It’s basically already forgotten.  I will not raise my son with regrets. There will inevitably be something that I feel guilty about or maybe even regret, but I will not be a man who lets any type of fatherhood guilt and regret fuel depression.  When you give your all every single day to be the best parent you can be, there is absolutely no reason to possess guilt and regret.

And now there is a new baby.  She will not live a single day with an active addict.  She and I will grow together, just as I have grown with my son.  I didn’t grow with my oldest daughter; I decayed. I’ve grown these past twenty months, even if it hasn’t been in ways I’ve expected, and even if I look at my life sometimes and feel so stagnant that growth feels impossible.

But sobriety is growth, no matter the intangibles it produces or the stagnation it magnifies.  In that same light, the guilt and regret that came from alcoholism are necessities. If I didn’t have them, my chances of relapse would increase.  For that reason, I’m thankful for my guilt and regrets. Mostly, though, I’m thankful for a daughter that won’t remember her father as an alcoholic, even though it was a very big part of her upbringing.

One day my daughter is going to read this, and I won’t be ashamed when she does.  I will not be one of those people who lies and says, “Oh, but I did the best I could.”  That’s bullshit. The best I could have done was quit drinking and made her my priority from the time she was born.  Even for the last twenty months of sobriety, I can say I’ve done better, but I’m not to a point yet where I can look at anything I do – especially fatherhood – and say, “I did the best I could.”

Of course, that brings up a dilemma about parenthood. How do I actually know what my best is? When I one day think I’m there, can’t I push myself to go higher? Or is it the opposite of that. If I know I’m not at my peak yet, what if I look back in twenty years and see that this actually WAS my peak? I think I would be disappointed in myself if I feel that way in twenty years, especially about something as important as one’s own children.

One thing I’m almost certain of is that I will probably never truly understand my purpose on this Earth, but I know for a fact that my biggest purpose (that I understand, anyway) is that of husband and father. At least now I’m at a place where I can look back one day and say I TRIED to give marriage and fatherhood my best. And I will do so without guilt or regret. My best efforts cannot include them. They do nothing but suppress and depress honest efforts at being a badass husband, father, and man.

Goodbye, guilt and regret. I will not miss you.


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Comments

  1. Melissa Stephenson says

    January 26, 2019 at 3:56 pm

    Great post. It has helped me reading this to let go of my regret that I did not spend enough time with my daughter when she was little, (age 3-4) I think I was a good mom, but still struggle with “I should have done…..”. Thank you!

    Reply
  2. Jennifer says

    January 26, 2019 at 12:23 pm

    Denton, thanks for sharing so openly and honestly. Your ability to write is truly a gift.

    Reply

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