Happy anniversary, Ben

The Jantar Mantar in Jaipur, India – a giant sundial. source: flicker.com

Dear Ben

Today is your anniversary. On this day last year, I was on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, caught in a sweltering summer, finally exhaling as I read the email from the detox centre confirming that you had been admitted. This was after you relapsed so dramatically the day after Rosie and I left for Canada. After you had ignored my calls and refused to speak to me, forcing me to ring my friend in London daily to ask her to drive down to our place simply to check that you were still alive. In the end, she did more than that. She drove you to the detox centre.

Inheritance of loss

These are the things our parents give us (and that we, in turn, bequeath to our children). There are the deliberate gestures – the passing on of certain attitudes and behaviours:

• no shoes in the house
• a love of good cheese and chocolate
• an appreciation of literature and classical music
• frugality that morphs into a penchant for recycling
• disdain for flashiness and the pursuit of financial gain at all costs
• the pursuit of education at all costs
• a deep sense of justice and fairness
• a secret love of meringues

And then there are the accidental loans  – the unconscious drip-drip of patterns and behaviours that leak out despite (or in the absence of) the best intentions:

Understanding my umbrella

No, this isn’t a riff on an old Rhianna hit, though I suppose it could work that way, too. What this is, is an ode of sorts, long overdue…

Once upon a time, before Ben and before I had any notion of what my life would become, I took a year out between degrees to go travelling. I spent several months on an island on the other side of the world, an island fraught with trouble yet continuing to trade on its reputation as a paradise on earth.

One day, a cousin and I were talking about the peculiarities of the English spoken there. This cousin, who happened to grow up on the island and whose English is rather good, was sharing a somewhat derisory joke at the expense of his less accomplished compatriots.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘It was raining and I heard this man say to a girl, “Come, come – come over here and understand my umbrella.”‘

I admit, I laughed – in a friendly and non-judgemental way, I assure you. But there is something sweetly apropos about this syntactical accident. You see, when I got freshly pressed at the beginning of this month, and a torrent of support welled up in my notifications window, this was the phrase that kept bobbing up in my mind.

Before then, I’d been writing my posts, throwing my torment onto the screen because I had nowhere else to put it, and hoping that someone might some day be comforted by the knowledge that she or he was not alone. The first person who really made contact with me was Stronger Me. In sharing her experiences with me, in showing me she had been through the same thing, I felt buttressed. I felt like someone sort of had my back.

And then I got freshly pressed. Suddenly there were scores of comments flooding in – so many of you with similar stories to tell, so many of you reaching out to me. After feeling so alone for so long, I felt like I had (have) a community out there keeping me afloat – a community actually interested in seeing me succeed without judging me. A community of people standing under my umbrella and bolstering me with their understanding.

Does that make sense?

On Saturday, the detox centre let Ben out for a few hours on condition that he would be breathalysed on his return – and chucked out if he tested positive. He went back to our flat, cleaned out the fridge, checked the gas, water and electrics, packed some extra clothes and his drums so he could practise in rehab – and mowed the lawn.

On Sunday, he used his free time to visit the Imperial War Museum.

On Monday, he completed detox and lugged his gear to the rehab centre where he was successfully admitted. He is now in rehab and will remain there until the end of November.

How does it feel? Bloody marvellous, really. Although, me being me, I’m already thinking of November and what that will mean. On the other hand, I’ve got you, my good people, following me, talking to me, keeping me a bit saner than I would have been had I been doing this entirely on my own.

A few months back, my therapist suggested I check out Al-Anon. I said that I’d wanted to, but that given I have no childcare during the evenings, attending a group was next to impossible. I said I’d started a blog instead and that I had made contact with a few people, which I’d found helpful. I said this was the best way for me to get the support I needed, because I could do it any time, without having to leave my daughter with someone.

So, everyone, I want to thank you. I hope you will stay with me as the months go by. I hope you will keep sharing your thoughts and offering your support. And I hope I can do the same for you.

Thank you for taking precious time out of your days to check in on me and my little family. Thank you for being candid and caring at the same time.

Thank you for understanding my umbrella.

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Brakes on, still falling

I am a body in free fall. I am like Wile E Coyote in those first deluded moments, treading the air like it was earth, unaware of the chasm beneath me. This is the point I was at a few days ago – stage 1 of the fall. Call it bliss.

But now that I’m officially halfway through my holiday, I’ve entered stage 2 – realisation. I know that this suspension of woe is temporary. In a few weeks, Rosie and I will return to our home in London, back to our tiny flat on the western bank of a dual carriageway, back to school for her and work for me. Back to a whole cauldron full of trouble.

You see, now that Ben is in detox, I have enough head space to devote to the other major worry in my life. In a few months, I am going to be made redundant. This might not have been such a big deal if times had been less straitened. But this is no time to be losing my job. I am the sole earner in our household – I’ve got a mortgage to pay, mouths to feed, bodies to clothe. If I think too much about the disaster awaiting me, I go into paralysis. I claw my way back up to that first airborne moment. I cloak myself in delusion. And when that doesn’t work, I panic.

The truth is, each time I pass a homeless person on the street, I think, that will be me in a few months. I know I’m prone to melodrama, but who amongst us isn’t a few steps removed from a cardboard box? Few of us are so financially secure that we can comfortably weather a few months without an income.

I know I have options. In fact, I probably have quite a few. But right now, they seem rather fantastical and foolish. I’m not one for believing in fate and luck, but I keep telling myself that something has to change for the better – at some point, something good, and I mean really good, has to happen.

Perhaps I need to look at my impending joblessness as a sign (even though I don’t really believe in those either). Maybe it’s telling me that my time in London is over, that it’s time to move on and make a home somewhere else.

The world is big – really big. And somewhere in it is the right place for Rosie and me. I just hope it doesn’t take too much longer to find it.

 

 

Escape to the country

Rosie and I are visiting an old friend of mine, out in mountain country. She lives in a rambling, two-floor property, with lacquered pine floors and a covered veranda. The garden drops away below the house and ends in a wall of trees. The night sky is filled with stars – millions of them – staring down at us like tiny gods.

This is the first time I`ve slept in weeks. I mean really slept. I`ve had 10, 11,  even 12 hours of unbroken sleep per night. So has Rosie. Must be the mountain air. And the fact that Ben is locked away safely in detox.

The other day, my friend and her little girl took us out trekking. We wandered through wooded paths, negotiating mud, wobbly logs and startled frogs. Below us, the rapids foamed.

We were intrigued by the variety of fungus scalloping up trees or springing out from the undergrowth. Tiny bright green mushrooms stood up pert in the soil, made all the tinier by giant beige toadstools. And then there were the shiny carnelian and yellow mushrooms, catching the light and ornamenting the landscape like poppies.

Later that night I sat on my friend`s front porch, watching the stars and listening to the ubiquitous call of the crickets. Still later, she and I sat on the covered veranda, chatting by candlelight, calmly dissecting the conundrum that is Ben and me. In the end, the solutions we came up with were familiar. But the fact that they were said out loud makes them more real, more demanding of some kind of accountability.

Meanwhile, I have been emailing Ben, feeding him news of Rosie`s and my exploits. Once he enters rehab, there will be no e-contact. For 28 days, he will have no outside contact at all, aside from the occasional phone call. So, I suppose I shouldn`t have been surprised when I received an email yesterday in which he said that once he was off his meds, he would be allowed to go out for a few hours. He said he might go back to the flat to collect some things for rehab.

Within moments of reading that email, my calm was shattered, if temporarily. I guess I don`t have much energy left to put in to his recovery any more. I still managed to get about 8 hours of sleep. And while I am a bit worried, I can`t help feeling it is really out of my hands.

Outside the window – outside my friend`s home office – the crickets are still singing and the trees – firs and birches – fill the window. Beyond, the view is long and open.

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Flight of the monarch

Yesterday, I was walking with Rosie through the small field that runs along the rail tracks at the end of my mother’s road. It was late morning, the crickets were buzzing and the grass was alive with monarch butterflies.

Flitting in shivery circles, they loped about at mid-height, some pausing on the footpath, others parabola-ing off and away from one another like non-commital lovers. “11… 12!” cried Rosie. In the end, we counted 15.

The monarchs are on their way to Mexico, preparing for their great migration south, when they will fill the sky with their ecstatic, frenetic flight. Like them, Ben is on a frenetic path right now, his movements as circuitous and uncertain as an individual butterfly’s – the shaky flight, the indecisive wing-beats flicking him one way and then another.

But now – now – he is on the path to something more certain, like the millions of monarchs that have yet to take off. At 4:40 this morning, my friend Sarita rang me to ask whether she should drive down to Ben to take him to the detox centre. The centre had arranged for Ben to be admitted today, because Ben’s GP – the one who has been following his case for the last two years and who has made every effort for him (unlike the one Ben saw some days back) – faxed the referral form the centre needed to make the admission. Needless to say, our local drug and alcohol service were rather useless on that front.

I spoke to Ben this morning, before he left, and he sounded resigned. He hates that so much money is being spent on him because it forces him to be accountable for his actions. He is tied up in shame and guilt, but as everyone, including the detox centre manager, has told him, it’s time to accept the help he is being offered. It is time to accept it and assume the responsibility that comes with that acceptance.

The detox centre manager, Patrick, who has also made all kinds of effort to get Ben in, emailed me a few hours ago to say that Ben had been admitted and was safe. The centre will arrange Ben’s transfer to rehab in 10 days. Ben is now out of the flat and somewhere safe and I can now start my holiday.

I feel unaccountably sad. I now lie awake wondering what my next step will be. I have achieved the first thing I wanted, which was to get Ben out of the flat – for his sake, for Rosie’s and mine. But there are many more steps for me, too.

And so, there will be many more nights of wondering, fear and hope, before I, too, take off. We are all on our individual migrations – taking flight to that place of safety where we can feed and grow a new life for ourselves and those we love.

And…. contact

I finally managed to reach Ben yesterday. Or, I should say, he finally decided to pick up the phone. My friend, Sarita, went down to the flat to see him, and took him to the GP so he could get a referral to the private detox centre we’ve settled on. The GP was rude and abrupt and refused to follow the centre’s procedure. She simply wrote out a generic letter and printed out his case history. I think she takes a dim view of alcoholics, which is fine for her as an individual, but not fine as a doctor. Is this really how severely depressed people should be treated when they visit their doctor?

I’m really hoping that the centre will accept her letter and print-outs as a referral, because we are running out of time. Meanwhile, Ben has insisted that he can manufacture something that will allow him to be detoxed in hospital. None of us thinks this is a good idea. He isn’t thinking clearly and is only doing this because he feels guilty about the added expenditure.

Thing is, if he had taken responsibility in the first place, and stayed off the booze for those last crucial days, he would be in rehab now and we would not be in a position where we have to fork out an additional 2 grand for a detox.

When I spoke to him today, he said he was going down to A&E this morning. I asked him to make sure he tells Sarita once he goes, so she knows where he is, and so she can tell me. He said he would.

I went out with Rosie after speaking to him. I took her to the Biodome where we saw a two-toed sloth, sturgeon, pink spoonbills, macaws, penguins, an otter and much more. For a few hours, I forgot all about Ben and London. I was engrossed in Rosie’s excitement at seeing a caiman, or splashing through a water installation.

When I got back, I tried ringing Ben. There was no answer. Sarita told me he wasn’t answering her calls either. He probably never made it to the hospital.

So tomorrow, I’m back on the phone, ringing London, trying to sort things, trying to get that all-important referral, trying to buy myself some peace of mind.

Straight to voicemail

It’s been two days since I’ve spoken to Ben. He won’t answer the phone or his mobile. He won’t answer my Skype calls. I’ve asked a friend to contact him. Most of the time, he won’t answer her calls either.

Meanwhile, I have been searching for detox centres. One of them quoted a fee of 4000 pounds for two weeks. None of us has that kind of money to throw around. Given that Ben used up all the public funding he had from our borough on his day rehab programme (the day programme he failed from day 1 because he was drinking on the sly), it is very unlikely that he will access another detox through the NHS. So, we have to go private.

I think most families of addicts end up here. Having exhausted all avenues through the NHS, they have little choice but to go private. It is not something I believe in, in principle, because, as Danny Boyle’s Olympic tour-de-force so movingly showed, the NHS is a great British initiative founded on the most basic principle: that everyone is entitled to quality healthcare, whatever their financial means.

But here we are. The NHS has helped us, yes. Ben has been detoxed twice already and received a generous funding package for him to go into a rehab day programme. But the  fact remains that he was given the wrong care, because the NHS blindly follows guidelines motivated by budgetary concerns. Because he hadn’t received care in the community the funding panel, in their infinite wisdom, chose to send Ben to a day programme rather than a residential one. Everyone, including Ben’s own care manager, knew this was the wrong choice. In the end, it was a waste of public money.

So, here we are. There is no guarantee that going private won’t be a waste of private money, but what other choice do we have?

How do I feel about all this? In refusing to answer my calls, in provoking and sustaining my anxiety, Ben has done the unforgivable. Yes, I will sort out his detox. Yes, I will ensure he gets from there to rehab (well, my friend will). I may even try to sort out an exit plan for him, once rehab is over. That exit will probably entail him going back to Australia. Because I don’t want him back in my home.

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Long distance anxiety

Repeat after me. I am on holiday. I am on holiday. I AM ON HOLIDAY.

Except that I’m not. Today I rang Ben, because I hadn’t heard from him (he usually rings a few times a day to speak to Rosie). I tried him several times, but couldn’t get through. Eventually, I reached him on Skype earlier this evening. Big mistake.

I could tell right away that he was intoxicated. There’s this thing he does with his eyebrow – it goes up in a distracted sort of way. I asked him whether he had been drinking and he replied: “Not yet.”

Apparently, he’d bought a couple of beers and was thinking about drinking them. He told me he went in to the rehab centre to be breathalysed this morning, and tested positive. He said he’d drunk one strong beer the night before. I asked him why. Actually, I didn’t ask. I shouted at him – through my brother’s iPad: WHY? WHY? WHY? And then I told him he’d messed up everything. Even as the words hit the air, I knew they were the wrong ones. I shouldn’t have said anything. In saying them, I’d given him license to  wallow – and drink.

He hung up. His mobile is on voicemail. The landline is not working, apparently.

I knew it was a bad idea to leave without ensuring he was already in rehab. I knew he couldn’t be trusted. Now I have a migraine and am desperately trying to arrange a detox for him so he can be admitted to the rehab centre. His mum, who lives on the other side of the world, is trying to do the same.

You see, the centre doesn’t do detoxes. So, he needs to go somewhere else for it. There is no way the NHS is going to pay for another detox, so this, too, will incur a cost.

I keep thinking, if he really wanted it, he would have stuck it out – he would have kept away from the booze these last crucial days. If he had made it to Monday, they would have admitted him, and there would be none of this anxiety, none of this wasted money.

At one point, I even found myself offering to pay for the detox. But the thing is, I’m already paying. I pay every day for his condition in sweat and worry, and given that I have to support a family and pay all the bills, I really don’t think it would be responsible of me to blow the money I need for Rosie on him.

So, what next? First, I need to find a detox centre for him. Then it’s rehab. And then? Then he doesn’t get to come back. I’ve had too much of him tearing my life apart, too much disappointment and despair.

Soft landing

It’s late –  past 4am my time – except I’m on Canada’s east coast and it’s closing in on midnight here. It is a thick 31C, the air unmoving in the house where Rosie and I are staying. Outside the window, crickets scratch out a familiar ostinato. It is hot. Even my fingertips are sweaty.

Sixteen hours ago, Rosie and I left London for a long-awaited holiday from Ben. In the old days, I might have said that the objective of this sojourn was to see my family who live out this way. But over the months, that primary motive has been eclipsed by the greater urgency of escaping the stultifying atmosphere of our flat and – let’s be honest – Ben.

Coming here, I had to compromise on one thing. I had said in an earlier post that I wouldn’t let Ben stay at the flat while Rosie and I were away. In the end, Ben left his admission to residential rehab so late that I had no other choice. Yes, I could have played hard ball and kicked him out, but he has pledged to go into rehab now. What good would it do to jeopardise that over something as shifting as my boundaries?

On Monday, he was in severe withdrawal, shaking and vomitting. Nevertheless, he travelled the 1.5 hours to the rehab centre in South London to attend an assessment. He spent most of Tuesday lying on the futon, drying out. On Wednesday morning, the day Rosie and I left, Ben took the train back down to the rehab centre to be breathalysed again. He will go back on Thursday, and if he tests negative, he will be asked to come in on the Friday so he can be breathalysed again and finally admitted.

Given his stated commitment to the programme, his declaration (which sounded sincere) that he was ready for it now, I couldn’t take his keys and throw him into the street. We have come too far for that. He is so close – so very close – to finally getting the treatment he needs. At some point, I have to let go and leave him to it. So, I’m trusting him, counter-intuitive as that may be.

Of course this means I will be on high alert until Saturday, fearful of another relapse. With him, it is all so unpredictable. But if he is admitted… well, I dare not indulge in that possibility, for fear of being disappointed. I hope he doesn’t let himself down. I hope he really is ready and that he stays strong over the next crucial days.

As for me, I am many times lighter than I was in London. There’s more room here, for one thing. And no one occupying half our living space and most of my head space. Today, I walked into this house – the house where I spent my childhood – and saw the sun reflecting off polished wood floors. It was an image that I have carried with me all these months – one that would open up in my mind whenever things became too awful – reminding me that an end, even if temporary, was in sight.

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