Father's Day 2015 Plus 3 - An Assessment

"Most single guys I know think fatherhood is terrifying." ~ Jim Gaffigan

Jim Gaffigan is one of my favorite comedians. A father of five children Gaffigan was given a spot on this year's Father's Day edition of CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood:

"Besides the societal pressure to balance out Mother's Day, what have dads done to deserve a Father's Day? ... Frankly plenty. Besides ordering pizzas and serving as the vice president of the family, dads have to battle their own selfishness every day. Dads strive to raise better, smarter, less dad-like humans. Remember, without the comparisons to dads, moms would look horrible. Damn straight dads deserve a holiday!"

There's so much more there than Gaffigan's self deprecation. Watching this on Father's Day reminded me of the father's journey I have been on the past five years. Father's Day is a microcosm of what dads in recovery endure just as Mother's Day is for mothers. It can be as joyous or heartbreaking as the holidays, birthdays, or other family celebrations where we have an opportunity to compare the what is, to the what might have been.

For me, Father's Day is an opportunity to assess where I've been, where I am going and how far I have yet to go. In one day we are handed a snapshot of our life as recovering fathers, no matter what our situation. Father's Day condenses all what it is to be a dad in recovery into the waking hours (and more if you are one of those immediate dreamers) of one 24-hour period each year.

Some of us spent Father's Day with our children who brought us to this journey. Some of us have children living locally and may or may not have heard from them on this day set aside for us. And some of us miss the son or daughter who is miles away by choice, whether that choice was his or hers, or ours. In all these scenarios Father's Day is a test of our resolve, our resolve to stay in the NOW, to live life not based on the past but grounded in what lies ahead. The journey is the thing.

The experience of Father's Day encapsulates the one truth we must hold onto as we progress along our pathways. Our journey is ours. Our children's journeys are theirs to traverse. This truth hits us square in the face on occasions as this where we are singled out for contributions we have made and continue to make to the precious lives we have helped to bring into this world.

As Gaffigan suggests, "...dads have to battle their own selfishness every day." In our case our selfishness has lead us into the thorny landscape of enabling, fixing and controlling, those insulting parenting behaviors we try, one day at a time, to avoid and purge from our lives.

Did we wait to hear from our son or daughter? Were we expecting a card, a call, a visit? Did we make that call, reach out? On Father's Day we can keep our hopes high and expectations low, love our children and hate The Addiction that brought them to their journeys. We can sit down on the metaphorical hillside and see how far we've come. We can acknowledge that we have gone from ragers to fathers who THINK before we speak. We have replaced anger as our go-to emotion with love for our children and a dedication to living our lives to the fullest.

We are dads, deserving of a holiday.

Damn straight!

... keep coming back

"All I want is to be a good dad but I'm pretty bad at it." ~ Jim Gaffigan

Fear of Connecting

"We need to bridge our sense of loneliness and disconnection with a sense of community and continuity even if we must manufacture it from our time on the Web and our use of calling cards to connect long distance. We must 'log on' somewhere, and even if it is only in cyberspace, that is still far better than nowhere at all." ~ Julia Cameron, God is No Laughing Matter

This is a hard one. This is universal among parents of children who have fallen into addiction, or certainly seems it must be so based on personal experience. Fear is at the core of catatonia. Fear obstructs the journey, impedes striving or asking for or wanting more from life.

Fear of connecting takes this a step further and is a central roadblock to beginning and continuing our journeys. This fear can strike us when life seems to be coming together, a fear rooted perhaps out of complacency, or even the exhaustion of the journey itself. We pause. We cocoon.

The isolation may not have begun when Addiction first manifested itself in our children though isolation may have been a comfortable fall back for many of us at the onset of their spiral. For some of us fear of connecting began in early childhood. For others it is can be traced to the subtle onset of the addiction in our babies.

Whatever the origin, we curl up in a metaphorical fetal position, we seclude then disappear.

It certainly doesn't help that we all felt at some point a scarlet letter A had been tattooed on our foreheads, that guilt-by-association we felt even from the most well meaning of our communities. We felt ostracized, left out and abandoned whether or not this perception was real.

It seemed real enough at the time.

But we got passed that. We continue to move past that each day we decide to live our lives fully and passionately.

Certainly, the individual pathways we seek, find and journey upon are ours to traverse. Recovery, however, is a personal endeavor we cannot undertake unaccompanied. This is one of the contradictions of recovery that can so easily entangle us. Ours is a personal journey requiring connections on so many levels. We work so hard on ourselves we sometimes forget we cannot make it on our own.

Often inspiration may be found along the way from fellow travellers who will not show us the way but will remind us by their simple presence that we are not alone in our endeavor to be true to our truest selves. More often, validations we are on the right path may come from those who are not in any recovery journey. These may be friends, relatives and even acquaintances we have lost, pushed aside, or ignored. We determined these souls don't need our drama and burdens cluttering their lives. We have learned from experience to avoid connection with those who are not on similar journeys. (We even shun those who are travelling similar paths by the way, don't we!?)

How could these people love us, continue to love us, or rekindle their love for us?

This is when the Universe steps in. We receive a phone call, a Facebook friend request, an email or even one of those terrifying alerts that someone is looking for us. These are the gentle nudges from our Great Creator reminding us that we may be ready, even if we are reluctant, we are ready to accept the little bit of love, closeness and camaraderie we've denied ourselves.

We'll see an out-of-town area code on our cell phone - this happened to me. Our fear is replaced with perplexity that can be replaced with anticipation if we allow it.

"Who could this be?" we wonder.

Understand that we can replace the fear of connection with a sense we may be at the brink of a new adventure. This is the Universe at work, our Higher Power enjoining us to participate more entirely in life.

Take a deep breath. Close your eyes and take that call. Watch what happens. Let it take you. Relinquish your learned trepidations and let go as your new adventure begins!

... keep coming back

"Sometimes reaching out and taking somebody's hand is the beginning of a journey." ~ Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

"A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality." ~ John Lennon 

Survival

"Thriving, that's fighting. ... Surviving is barely getting by." ~ Jillian Michaels

In my opinion survival is an often misused word.  The attribute survivor can summon images of beleaguered souls emerging from darkness - the darkness of the Holocaust, the ravages of war, the seeming death sentence of cancer. These people to me are not merely survivors. They are heroes, conquerors, messengers to us all that the human spirit may be bent but there are examples out there proving it may not always be broken.

The human spirit, our spirit, is magnificently resilient.

We have been through a lot. We have seen our babies struck down by a disease no one wants to talk about. We've been, or we are, at war, first with the Addiction, then, with our tendency to want to fix, control and enable. Some of us have been fortunate to begin our slow emergence from the battlefield, our re-entry into life. Others are still in the trenches, battling.

All of us are more-than-survivors.

We are heroes. We are inspirational. We are conquerors.

But there's a rub that makes contumely of our lives, as there often is when we learn to strive, to Seek and See, to progress beyond our tormentor's scope of influence.

The rub is this. As parents of addicts we are not the triumphant returning Gulf War veterans of conflict. We are more akin to the Vietnam-era vets returning to snubs and disdain. Addiction is not sexy. Addiction has not and may never be vanquished. Addiction is an unpopular and possibly unwinnable war.

So how do we survive, thrive and avoid the pitfalls that our children's life choices would have us dragged into?

Don't get me wrong. Survival is important. Survival is the byproduct of our human instinct to keep breathing after we've been knocked down or out. Survival is the act of refusing to acquiesce. Survival tells the oppressor that we will not ... go ... quietly.

The Addiction would prefer us to remain survivors, to stay down, remaining remission-like, in abeyance, not quite out of the woods. As I have mentioned, at some point in our journey we want more. Perhaps this is what emboldens us to move beyond survival to take the first step out of the prone position to which we have become accustomed. We want more and then some.

How do we move from survivor to thriver, to the conqueror and adventurer the Universe is calling us all to be? How can we accomplish this and still love our children? This is the hook The Addiction has placed deep inside us constantly drawing us in like a marlin in a deep and tumultuous sea, back to a life of enabling, fixing, and pursuing control of the uncontrollable.

We are in a fight for survival. We can spare no energy to restore sanity to our children's lives.

With our Great Creator as our guide we can only restore ourselves to sanity. We can only love our children, gently remove the hook and allow The Addiction and the power it holds to slowly drift away. We can pray for our children and if prayer is not an option, allow The Universe or other Higher Power to take over the duties of watching over our babies. It is no longer our war.

We would never refer to our returning veterans as war survivors. They are heroes, an inspiration and in many cases quiet examples of our grandest aspirations.

All these more-than-survivors, the conquerors, come out of their respective darkness damaged but often better for it. Many have found others for support, communities in which they may immerse themselves to search for faith in something they may not immediately understand, a pathway into, after exiting through the doorway out of whatever hell they may have experienced. These more-than-survivors are inspirations to us all.

We can find a community of souls who have experienced our pain to share our experience, strength and hope. These communities exist. Within these communities there is no malice, shame or even any attempt to help us find our solutions. These communities are there to guide us to our own best selves. When we find one, we'll know it. It may require a few attempts for us to soften our hearts and souls to accept the love and kindness we'll feel while there.

We are in the throes of post-traumatic stress.

Give it time. Thrivers Seek. Thrivers remember what was and what is important. Thrivers take risks with no other motivation than the thrill of discovering, perhaps for the first time in their lives who they really are. Thrivers affect change within themselves and those around them. We are seekers of life, seekers of the truth.

Remember The Addicton hates the TRUTH. The Addiction hates REAL.

We can hold our children close by becoming our truest selves. Our children may witness this, see it, or perhaps not. They will do what they will do. The disease will see to this. This will be whether we thrive, or not.

SO WHY NOT THRIVE?

Who know? Someone may be watching.

... keep coming back

"My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor and some style." ~ Maya Angelou 

Prayer - The #PWord

"Your prayer for someone may or may not change them, but it always changes you." ~ Craig Groeschel

"If the only prayer you said your whole life was 'Thank you,' that would suffice." ~ Meister Eckhart

OK, let's discuss the "P" word.

Before we talk about prayer we must first acknowledge the journey upon which we have embarked is spiritual in its very nature. Our growth, our progression along our pathways and the myriad of miracles encountered along the way can no more be logically explained than our children's plunge into addiction.

It is simply inexplicable, this marvel called recovery. After acknowledging we were in the shit with no prayer of escape we reached out for a Power greater than ourselves to take IT all away. We found a Presence to dump on and after we dumped, that Presence said to us, "Is that all you got? Bring it on. I can take it."

The journeys of parents in recovery are undertaken by travellers in possession of various spiritual baselines. We are connected to fellow parents who are Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Atheist, Agnostic, from Deist and Theist backgrounds. We arrive at our journey, many of us feeling failed by religion and various dogmas and creeds which seem to somehow drift from the real teachings of messengers who centuries ago carried simple proclamations of love, truth, inclusion, acceptance and prayer.

For this discernment I blame the Jesuits, who taught me to look at what was written in the Book(s) in the context of the times, not how the message had been metamorphosed through centuries of misinterpretations, corruption and theological politicization.

We have a tendency to feel alone as humans.  As parents of children who abuse drugs, alcohol or any obsessive behavior we reach a tipping point of aloneness that drives us more deeply into the abyss than most humans ever experience. Beaten, we have nothing to grab onto. Laden with unimaginable burdens we cannot rise from the six-point hand-knee-toe stance. We are in a pit at 10 times gravity, the gravest of situations.

We are able to raise one hand. We say a prayer unlike any prayer we have ever articulated. The prayer is not an appeal. It is a statement of fact:

"I am beaten."

We fall, prone against the bottom, whatever the bottom is. Face down we let go. We have no choice.

"Take this from me, please," we plead.

We have learned in that instant to pray for the Universe to enter our lives, to intercede, to work its magic for us in the context of Truth and Love, not entitlement or privilege. We begin to pray for ourselves, to See the possibilities that lie ahead amid the tempest. We pray to allow the Great Creator to guide us, to utilize talents buried inside for too long while we concentrated on our children's recovery. We give it up to that higher power, God, the Universe, what ever you wish to call Her, Him or It, (or her, him or it), a Power that's got it together more than we do or ever will.

We stop praying for the things or situation we want and begin to pray for the possibility, the potential, to see what's out there for us.

Things begin to happen for no apparent reason. Events occur, progress is made. We know we have an ally, a mentor, guide, a Sherpa who can bear our heavy load up our personal Everest.

It's our journey. What a view.

And it is then with the revelation of our own possibilities. we can pray for the same for our children.

... keep coming back

"Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is a daily admission of one's weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

How Ya Doin'?

"'How ya doin'?' I always think, 'What kind of question is that?' And I always reply, 'A bit too early to tell,' " ~ Christopher Hitchens - Love Poverty and War" Journeys and Essays 

A friend of mine once told me he is no longer greeting people with the seemingly requisite "How are you," or, "How are you doing" greetings. The logic here is no one really wants to know how we're doing. Really, do they? Imagine the look of horror we'd have received from friends or acquaintances if any of us would have responded honestly while in the throes of attempting to fix our children, or during any of our challenges along our journeys … insert recollection harp music here.

"How are you?"

"Well, we just had two large men escort our son from our home this morning at 3 a.m. They took him on a red-eye flight to a wilderness camp were he'll bivouac in snow surrounded by the high southern desert of Utah because he is addicted to pot and prescription drugs and was killing himself. Hopefully after 8 weeks of that he'll be cleansed of the chemicals in his body. We'll (note the emphasis on we'll, not he'll) be following this with 6 to 12 months at a therapeutic boarding school for as long as we can afford it and hopefully after all that we'll have our baby back.

"So, how're you guys doin'?"

The checker at the grocery asks me how I'm doing. Well meaning, often sweet but possibly a corporate directive, I feel she doesn't want to know. How could she? I am one among hundreds for whom she will scan on that particular day. That's a lot of encapsulated life stories to consider.

I respond, politely, "Good," and hope her day is as "good" as mine is in the moment.

The query how are you doing begs comparison narratives. The various levels of how we are all doing morphs into a competition sport, a comparison chart. We gauge how we are doing on an imagined scale of 1 to 10 based on the ebullience of our response contrasted with the response of our inquisitor.

I've stopped asking people how they are doing.

I now simply say, "It's good to see you."

The relief is palpable. Recipients are grateful to not be cajoled into a corner where their life is being compared to every human with whom they will be put into contact this particular day - no wonder so many people never leave their homes, never see the light of day, or the lights of the nighttime.

Friends and acquaintances who receive this message, yes the message, not the greeting or question, seem pleased. All of us need to have our goodness reaffirmed. To some it's a shock. It's out of the box. It's one of those things about saying "It's good to see you," that I love. It may be words some of the beneficiaries of the message haven't heard in a long time.

Sad.

For me, the affirmation keeps me focused on my journey, on the now, on the positive, focused on moving forward. I don't know why, but it does.

Parents of children who have crossed into the emptiness of addiction run the risk, daily, of losing focus, straying off the journey pathway into the bramble-filled detours of fixing, obsessing and enabling.

We know we are there when we ask our children the unsolicited question, "How are you doing?"

Instead, we can visualize an encounter with our children where we say, "It's great to see you."

For our children, we can add the word, "… always."

Saying. "It's good to see you," transports us out of the past and into the present. In that instant when we greet the person presented to us we are in the present! "It's good to see you," is immediate. It is affirming that all who are under the warm blanket of those words are, at least in that moment and in the now, validated and actualized simply for who they are.

"It's good to see you," is liberating. It requires no response. When we say this we are not fumbling in our minds for any answer to the boomerang response - I'm good, how are you? We are not asking for a fraudulent decree of anyone's state of mind. This is none of our business. Instead we focus on the person and our feelings. We focus on our present.

"It's good to see you," is a blessing we can give to others and blessings bestowed come back tenfold.

"It's good to see you," has transformative powers and can become a mantra for living our lives. All people, places, events, victories and trials become experiences in the now from which we can draw strength and hope, catapulting us along our recovery journeys. In a constant and ever-immediate celebration of the NOW we get out of our heads and plunge enthusiastically into whatever adventure we encounter. We are not comparing, We are neither dreading the future nor regretting the past.

Life is, simply put, good to see!

… keep coming back

"How YOU doin'?" ~ Matt LeBlanc as Joey Tribbiani, Friends

Regretting the Past

"The only thing you regret are the things you don't do." ~ Michael Curtiz, Director (Casablanca, White Christmas, et. al.)

We all have regrets. Even knowing we didn't cause our children's spiral and we couldn't control their deepening thrusts into the vortex of addiction and we certainly cannot cure the disease, we doubt ourselves on a regular basis.

We ask ourselves what we could have done to prevent our children's struggles. It is only human nature, and we are human after all.

We begin looking backwards, searching for the invisible, the vanished. We are looking for something that is no longer there. In looking backwards we stumble and sometimes fall. We stop looking forward and in doing so lose our focus on ourselves and our journeys.

Try it sometime. Try taking a walk in the woods or even on a smooth blacktop pathway, looking backwards. It's not easy walking while looking behind, at where we've been. It's actually comical to imagine.

When we stop moving, regret can be easy. Looking into the abyss of the past, the silence of the done, the finished, the evaporated, what is no longer visible, can be more consoling than exploring the exhilarating unknown of our future selves. We fashion our own version of what transpired and allow The Addiction to take hold. Regret can become second nature if we are not careful. We wallow in it. We stop moving. We become an easy target for The Addiction, stuck in our own shit.

The past is the past. We do not require additional looks back to remember. More precisely, the past is indelibly etched in our minds and our souls. The pain, heartaches, failures AND victories are all there, forever. The past never really goes away. We don't need to be constantly looking for it, relying on it, leaning on it, dwelling on it.

It's a part of us.

The past is part of what makes us who we are. As a part of us and with our pilgrimage inaugurated we can be buoyed by our past. There is no need to obsess or camp out in the past. Obsession with the past brings with it the four horseman of our apocalypse: Shame, Blame, Regret, and Fear (with its travelling companion - Paralysis.) We become immobile. Any introspection or self renewal becomes poisoned.

And The Addiction wins.

Our children are left alone.

The beacon of parents relishing fulfilled lives, fully involved in the present, striving, seeking, laughing and improving is snuffed out, stifled and shattered. When we go back to the past we truly get in our own way. We cease to progress along our pathways and regress into regret, stumbling into self pity and the tragedy of depression.

Sometimes we'll even seek out those distractions we had long since abandoned, the over-depedance on something, anything, that had detoured us from our journeys - alcohol, sex, chocolate (one of my favorites), fat (ok, another), fast food, drugs, gambling - those unhealthy diversion we know kept us from showing up 24/7. As parents of children who have succumbed to addiction, during the course of beginning our recovery we have awakened ourselves from the sleep The Addiction wishes upon us, the sleep of doubt, inactivity, idleness, self loathing and seclusion. The Past had forced this sleep of death upon us. Our obsession with it left us exhausted and lifeless.

The little curator inside of us will keep the past experiences filed away, accessible for when these are required as gentle reminders of detours taken into destructive behavior and a grand memorial to our progress and fortitude. We can visit the museum when we wish. Regret would rather we live in the cold archive of the past, where we would have remained isolated and stuck.

Instead we have become doers, seekers and participants in life's adventures. We renounce regret and embrace our own beauty, wonder and splendor with all of our divinely-bestowed imperfections, past failures, missteps and destructive tendencies The Great Creator had given us to eventually catapult us to our next level, our own best selves.

Eyes forward, we look ahead, not behind. It's a much more comfortable journey now, isn't it?

We are who we are. We haven't gotten this far by being perfect. We are human after all!

Our victory comes when we truly accept ourselves and reject that look back. We know we are on our way. We replace regret with Gratitude and rejoice in the journey ahead and the challenges and joys attendant with the unknown.

What's that up ahead? Let's go check it out!

… keep coming back

"My imperfections and failures are as much a blessing from God as my success and my talents, and I lay them both at His feet." ~ Mahatma Gandhi

Is It Time To Admit Defeat Again?

"Sometimes it takes a quiet, temporary admission of defeat in order to win the war." ~ Patrick Benjamin

For many of us defeat brought us to this journey of recovery. Beaten, bewildered, flattened and flummoxed we began to find ourselves and in doing so, embarked on our personal search for happiness. Eventually we learned we could begin a pilgrimage to self actualization even while our children walked their tumultuous pathways of self destruction and occasional epiphanies.

We began to feel things. Best of all we began to feel … happy.

After so many uphill climbs it seemed as if we were bounding along waist-high meadows of daisies and butterflies. Our children could see that we were no longer cajoling, lecturing, or attempting to fix. We left them to their own wits. We knew they could figure this out. We embraced a new behavior where we no longer insulted our children with belittling suggestions or dire predictions for their futures.

Today, the directions our children take on their journeys, for good or bad, are our children's decisions. They are progressing, ever so slowly, with the occasional visit to the darkness, because of the choices they make.

We know this now. We cannot own our children's journeys. Our recovery is difficult enough without the meddling into others' affairs we had become so accustomed to in our past lives.

We coast a bit. We'd been through so much. We deserve the respite, don't we?

Yes we do. We deserve happiness. We deserve a rest, to take a load off, to "Take 5."

But let's not get complacent.

Perhaps it is once again time to remember how we began our journey. Perhaps it is time to find again the feelings that brought us here.

Perhaps it is time to once again admit defeat. There are times in our recovery that we have an obligation to acknowledge our victories, growth, new awareness and restored passion for life have not been accomplished in a vacuum. There has been a Universal force at work guiding and nurturing us through our journey. Any hubris we bring to our journey is an insult to our Higher Power and may allow The Addiction to reinsert itself into our lives beckoning us to again insert ourselves into the lives of our addicted.

It is time to once again fool The Addiction.

It just may be time for a tactical withdrawal.

It's time once again to admit defeat at the hands of our children's addiction whether or not we are in a "good place." We can once again admit to our powerlessness to fix, change, control and save our children. As we acknowledge this we do not divert entirely or permanently from our path. We simply take a side trip of our choice, on our own terms, to collect ourselves, to remember a long and difficult journey traversed and honor progress achieved. Like a character in a novel who travels back through time we may even catch a memory of an earlier version of ourselves reminding us of how far we've come.

The Addiction within our sons and daughters may see this as an opportunity to strike at a perceived weakness. We know we are simply using this time to regroup, become stronger and even better prepared for our continuing journey.

What might trigger this tactical withdrawal? It can be a prolonged silence from our addicted son or daughter who is no longer at home that activates the evil projectionist's worst-case-scenario movies to play in our minds. It can be other family issues precipitating the need to take this deliberate diversion. We may be taking for granted the strides we have made. The Addiction is a resourceful and cunning foe and may not attack through the accustomed battle lines of the children who brought us here.

We are not denying or mistrusting our inalienable right to happiness. We are simply appreciating with gratitude where we are at this moment and how far we have travelled.

We are on guard. We realize complacency can drive us back, back to where we were, where we never wish to return.

We will emerge from this tactical withdrawal stronger, energized and ready to keep moving along our recovery pathway.

… keep coming back

"By yielding you may obtain victory." ~ Ovid

"Retreat hell! We're not retreating, we're just advancing in a different direction." ~ Major General Oliver P. Smith at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir - Korea, 1950