Spending Time "In The (Laundry) Rooms"
Can I wash away the generational trauma of alcoholism? Can I at least get the stain to fade?
I was 19 the first time I went to a laundromat. I was in Germany, and on top of the strangeness of lugging my dirty laundry around, I had to do it on a public bus.
The night before, we'd had "Feierabend" at my host parents' house - an evening of celebration just for celebration’s sake. Several of my host family’s friends had come over, and everyone wanted to see the American exchange student do a shot of their family's own special cellar schnapps or basement home brew. Unaware I was a budding alcoholic, I said yes to everyone, had a fantastic time - and then woke up in a bed inexplicably but unforgettably stained black with heaving sickness. I had been too drunk to know or care. I was lucky I didn't choke to death.
It was pretty appropriate: black for a blackout. And unfortunately, it wouldn't be the last one.
All I could do was slink shamefully from the house to the bus stop in our little village, my duvet wadded up in a duffel bag, and go to a laundromat to wash it myself. Furious, my host mom was only somewhat mollified by my initiative, although it had been her and husband's idea to have me take about 17 shots of various types of liquors no one but a clueless greenhorn - or a real jerk - would mix.
My alcoholic misadventures continued for another seven years until I got sober at 26. I'm pleased to say that I've now been sober for 13 years, but what's more surprising than that is that I still love doing laundry!
It's the chemistry of it - which I know is a shocking thing to say for someone who barely squeaked by in that class with a C-. But I love the potions, the scents. I love the quotidian magic of combining different elixirs until an old blanket studded with sandy paw prints looks as good as new, or developing just the right cocktail of additives to keep a ruby-pink sweater from fading. Strangely, I find this a more satisfying cocktail than a Manhattan or a martini.
And despite the indisputable inconvenience of loading up your used, sweaty-or-worse clothing and bringing it to a public place, my only complaint about that is my arm: the pain the errand induces. Due to my nearly decade-old shoulder injury and misaligned joint replacement, it's one of the many tasks that are really hard for me to do. My ability is unpredictable, but on good days, I keep on going to the laundromat and heaving around big old hampers of laundry to prove to myself that that I can.
But I don't like sitting around the laundromat while my clothes are churning. I like to go back out to my car and read or write. I'm writing right now! Well, technically, I'm dictating: I have to save my strength to finish this job and get home again.
As I slipped out of the building to wait on my clothes in the dryer, I caught an interesting tidbit of conversation.
"I told him he can't be doing this," a bedraggled-looking man apparently in his 50s told his conversation partner as they shared cigarettes. He was talking to a blonde woman about the same age, dressed in an expensive teal yoga outfit, whom he seemed to have cornered. She was nodding politely while looking increasingly uncomfortable.
"He can't keep copping out," the man continued. "I told him: I said, 'The program works when you work it. There are no excuses.' Well, he didn't like that. At all. So I told him he can get out of my house," the man said frankly, taking a draw on his cigarette as the woman clucked sympathetically.
Aughhh! I thought, opening the car door and sticking my key in the ignition. That's 12-step talk!
It wasn't until I had moved the car across the parking lot, under the shade of a huge palo verde tree, that I realized: Wait a minute. I'm a 12-stepper, too. At least, I'm trying to be.
No, I'm not going to AA, even though I still identify as an alcoholic. That's because, even though I haven't had a drop since May 26, 2011, I know that if I tried to have one glass of wine today, just for the heck of it, I'd be unable to stop. But I no longer crave a drink except in times of greatest stress - and even then, I know full well that I'll never drink again. Honestly, I’d rather pull out my own eyebrows and eat them than have even a sip of that wine I used to love so much.
So at this point in my journey, I'm solid in my sobriety. But alcoholism has touched my life even more profoundly - and more recently - than my own addiction did.
It's come to my attention that living with alcoholics, both as a small child and more recently, as an adult, may have shaped - or more precisely, may have warped - my thinking in more ways than I currently understand. It may also have messed up my reasoning. And my sense of well-being. And my tolerance for conflict. And, according to research, maybe even the physical structure of neural pathways within my brain.
So, at the strong urging of my mother - whom I must assure you is not an alcoholic - I'm trying out Al-Anon. This is the support group and "treatment plan" of sorts for family and friends of alcoholics.
“What do they need help for?” you might wonder. They're not the ones addicted to a deadly substance that can kill a person in one night of abuse.
No. But often, family and friends of alcoholics are deeply and harmfully enmeshed with the drinkers, which can create, at best, a sickening codependency that stands in the way of healing. At worst, the dynamic is a unique and deadly system of neglect, abuse, and trauma, whereby the non-drinker is actually an author of her own torment as much as the alcoholic is.
But that's if you're an adult making a choice to interact with an alcoholic on the regular. If you're a kid, forced by circumstance into the alcoholic's proximity or home, it's different. If you're a kid, you just suffer.
As the child of an alcoholic parent, you learn to fear every evening and weekend. You learn to monitor the change of every facial expression. You listen for every "Goddammit!" and wonder what you did wrong: a bottle may have merely slipped out of a shaky hand, a dog may have left a surprise on the floor, or - hell - the coffee mugs may have been discovered incorrectly stacked. But you learn to think that, whatever it was that caused that “Goddammit!" it was somehow your fault.
You may crawl into a closet or up to your treehouse and focus all your attention on braiding the hair of your doll - but even that doesn't distract you fully, because you know the alcoholic might find you anyway and come screaming about something you know nothing about. It'll be your fault, even when it's not your fault - even when it has nothing to do with you at all. And if it's your fault, you begin to believe, then it's also your responsibility to fix.
But because you are only a child, you cannot tell the difference between being screamed at for a legitimate reason and being screamed for no reason. And so you learn to live as if you are always being screamed at - and then you realize that you're still just ... waiting: waiting for the screaming to start again, aimed at you.
Because you're certain, at a deeply-imprinted, cellular level, that it will start again and it will be aimed at you. Even if that screaming alcoholic who trained you so devastatingly, so very harmfully, has been dead for 13 years now - which, yes, does indeed have something to do with your own sobriety date! No wonder I learned to cope with my own bottle.
At that realization, I took a break from writing.
Still, I kept thinking about it as I rummaged in the car for my precious stick of works-every-time stain-fighting gel that I can only find on Amazon. I'd meant to apply it liberally to a pristine white sweater I'd just gotten. The first day I wore it, I promptly smeared it with the strange pseudo-chocolate from a KIND Breakfast Protein bar inside twenty minutes. Because of course I did.
But today, I didn't have my special secret weapon. I’d left it in the other car.
I debated running down to the nearby Dollar General. Might they possibly have something like it?
No, I decided. Sometimes you just have to make do with what you've got. Plus, I'd have had to forfeit my prime parking spot under the palo verde.
Then I realized I did have something else that just might help: a Tide To Go pen.
Or maybe it wouldn't help at all, I thought. That's just more detergent. And I was going to wash everything in Tide, anyway.
There was no harm in trying, though. So I dragged my load of whites inside the laundromat, scribbled aggressively at my delicate sweater with the Tide To Go pen, and started the load without the turbo-charged stain-fighting power I'd come to expect from my favorite product. I had done what I could. The sweater would come out however it came out.
After I took another load out of the dryer and hauled it with some difficulty out to the car, I collapsed in the driver's seat and began to massage my bad shoulder. This was all getting pretty heavy - the laundry, literally, and my thoughts, figuratively. I opened up my favorite website, Slate, and began to read the Dear Prudence advice column for the day.
When my last load was done, it was all I could do to clumsily sweep the clothes down out of the dryer and into my hamper. Luckily, this one had wheels, so I pulled it out the door, loaded it in without too much trouble, and went home - clothes clean; thoughts still muddled.
Later on, I went to put away my laundry and came upon the new white sweater. I picked it up suspiciously, holding it by the shoulders, and inspected it for signs of the chocolate smear.
Was that the ghost of an outline, right there below the neck and to the right? Was that a small, light-brown streak - almost gray, actually?
I shined my flashlight at it. Yes. I could just make out the very thin outline of the mark made when the dark brown chocolate had hit the snowy pointelle knit. But it wasn't bad. It was hardly noticeable. I mean, I'd had to know the stain could be there in the first place - and then look for it with a flashlight.
Good enough, I decided, setting the sweater down and folding it. In fact, I thought, it's much better - surprisingly so.
Some things you can't undo - some stains never lift entirely. But those stains can fade. And sometimes, they can be made to do so even without the use of particularly specialized tools. Sometimes something simple, something pretty well-known, can make a big difference.
May I be just like my sweater. May we all.
a lovely story!