Getting Married (22 page)

W
hen I wake, the first thing I feel is an intense pain in my right wrist. I groan when I feel the throbbing headache making my brain feel thick. My mouth feels mossy and tastes awful, as if something died in it. I shift slightly and an intense pain shoots through my upper left arm. I pry my eyes open and see that I have a gigantic bruise on my arm. In the center of the bruise is a small cut, but it’s insignificant compared to the giant purple blob of a bruise that nearly extends from my elbow to my shoulder. It looks like a particularly hideous Rorschach inkblot.

I raise my right hand to touch the bruise and that’s when I see that I’ve bruised and scraped my inner right wrist as well. I stare at my injury for a moment and then I feel eyes on me. I look up. I’m lying in bed and Will is awake and lying next to me, watching me. Turning sets off a maelstrom of hangover malevolence, but I look at the clock. It’s 5:42 in the morning. For several moments, I can’t remember what day of the week it is.

The cruelly bright sun is barging its way into the room.

“What happened?” I ask.

“You got wasted last night. You woke me up when I heard a crashing sound in the bathroom. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but the shower curtain had been torn down and all the shampoo bottles had been knocked off the edge of the tub. I think you grabbed the shower curtain to keep you from falling, but it didn’t work.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’ve been saying that a lot lately.”

“I know.”

“I love you, Eva, but I don’t know how to help you.”

“I know.”

“I’ll do anything I can to help you. If you want me to look into rehab programs for you or go to Narcotics Anonymous meetings with you, I’ll do that. Just let me know how I can help you.”

“I’ll call Mom. I’ll ask her…I don’t know, I’ll tell her I need help.”

“Good. I think that’s the right thing to do.”

“I’ll call Sienna and tell her, too.”

“Okay.”

He watches me for another hour. I am in so much pain I want to die. I have never had a hangover like this before. I can’t believe I willingly ingested so much alcohol that I could do this to myself. It’s insanity.

“Are you going to be okay? Should I call in sick from work?” Will asks.

“I’ll be fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. Go to work.”

Will leaves for work and I just stay where I am in bed, unable to escape into sleep. All I can do is feel like shit and like an idiot for doing this to myself. At around ten in the morning I muster the energy to reach my hand out and pick up the phone to dial Mom.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Eva? What’s wrong? You don’t sound well.”

“I’m not. I have something to tell you. A few weeks ago, I landed in the hospital.”

“What! Why didn’t you tell me this? Why didn’t you call me? Why didn’t Will call me?”

“Will didn’t call you because I asked him not to. Mom, the reason I didn’t tell you was because I was embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed about what? You can tell me anything.”

“Let me finish, okay? I was embarrassed because the reason I landed in the hospital was because I had a bad reaction to methamphetamines.”

“Oh? A diet drug? That’s nothing to be ashamed of. A lot of women want to lose weight before their weddings.”

The fact that my mother finds no problem with the fact that I would take drugs to lose weight is several therapy sessions’ worth of mental turmoil for me to work out at some point, but right now I don’t have time to deal with it. “No, Mom. It’s a derivative of a diet drug, but meth itself is actually illegal. I could have landed in jail.”

“What? Eva, I don’t…but why…how…”

“It can help you feel energized and with the wedding plans…”

I tell her the whole story, about how dangerous the drug is and how I vowed to stop and how I thought it would be no problem. I tell her about seeing Anne and how I thought I was doing better, but then I woke up this morning after having battered and bruised myself up as if I were a crash-test-dummy, and now I’m beginning to see that kicking this thing isn’t going to be as easy as I thought.

Telling my mother that I cut and bruised myself, but have no memory of doing it, helps her to understand how serious this really is. She cries. She asks if my problem with drugs is her fault. I assure her that it’s not.

“You know what it is? Why you’re abusing drugs?” she says at last.

I sigh, not looking forward to my mother’s armchair therapist interpretation of my problems. “Why?”

“You always had so much anger that you didn’t know how to express.”

“Oh, my God, that’s so weird, that’s exactly what Anne said. But what would I have anger about?”

“You had two dysfunctional parents in a very dysfunctional marriage.”

“Everybody has dysfunctional parents. The whole planet isn’t battling drug addiction. I don’t buy it.”

“Eva, when you were growing up, I had a lot of anger. Your father expected me to be a stay-at-home mom, and I wanted to want that, because I thought that’s what I was supposed to want, but the truth was, as much as I loved you and your sister, I was going out of my mind with boredom. I made up reasons to go to the grocery store every single day just to get out of the house. I was so lonely, so unbelievably lonely. Your father would work all day and then he’d hide in his workshop building furniture at night. I felt like I had no one to talk to. When I finally got a job, that didn’t make me happy either because my bosses treated me like I was some stupid housewife just because I never got a college degree. And the work was boring, too. It was just a different kind of boredom. Then there was your father. He was emotionally absent for you and Sienna, too. You tried so hard to get his attention but it was nearly impossible. You suppressed your anger over that. You need to speak with him and tell him what’s going on with you. Tell him about the drugs.”

“Mom, I talk with Dad two or three times a year. What’s the point? Even if I did confront him about how I think he failed me when I was growing up, what would that change? Do you think Dad and I would suddenly become close after all these years? Do you think Dad is suddenly going to change and listen to what I have to say and magically see the error of his way? Dad and I could talk ’til we were blue and things might change for about ten minutes and then we’d both go right back to being the same people we always were.”

Mom sighs. “You may have a point about that.”

“Anyway, regardless of the fact that I obviously learned some really poor coping skills for dealing with anger when I was growing up, I don’t see how that has anything to do with what’s happening to me now. I have a wonderful man whom I love, I have a good job, I’m financially secure. Why would I suddenly decide now to start hiding my feelings with drugs?”

“Maybe because until now you were so busy working and trying to get your career on track that you never had time to think about serious issues like whether you were happy. Now that you’re not struggling with basic survival, you have time to think about bigger things. Not to mention the fact that you’re planning to commit to spending your life with someone. You’re getting in touch with some of the emotions that you’ve kept buried for a long time.”

“Maybe.”

“Eva, I’m so worried about you. Do you want me to come out there? Do you want to come out here and stay with me?”

I love my mother more than anything, but if there was anything that would drive a person to substance abuse it would be hanging out with my mother for any stretch of time. “No, Mom, that’s okay. I’ll be okay. I think what happened last night finally helped me to figure out that what I’m dealing with is more serious than I was willing to admit before. I think I have to face the fact that…” The possibility seems too awful to verbalize, but I do it anyway. “That I’m a drug addict.”

Even as I say it out loud, the idea seems outlandish and ridiculous. I’m a successful business owner! I have an MBA! Drug addicts are sickly looking people who can’t hold down jobs and have boyfriends with prison records, people like Sandy. I’m not a lazy person. I’m not a bad person. I don’t fit my own stereotype, so how could
I
be one of
them
?

I know life isn’t a fairy tale, but wouldn’t it be nice if life would cooperate for just a little while so you could pretend like it was? I finally fall in love and instead of being able to just be happy about it, all these self-esteem demons and personal issues rear their ugly heads and demand attention, forcing me to confront things I’d really prefer not to confront.

I
n reaction to what happened, I do two things. I book an appointment with my doctor to discuss my anxiety problems and I look online for classes for substance-abusers and find one that’s held every Tuesday night for two hours a night for eight weeks. I call to get more information, and the woman who answers asks me whether I’m required to take level one or level two classes.

“Required? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The courts didn’t mandate that you enroll in outpatient treatment?”

“What? No, I want to. I want some help.”

“Oh,” she says, her surprise evident. I could have told her I was a magic fairy and I think I would have gotten approximately the same reaction.

We work out the payment fee and she tells me I can join the next class.

I continue seeing Anne and my mother calls me every day to check up on me. Sienna calls or emails every day. The constant phone calls help remind me that I am loved and my problem isn’t just about me, it impacts all of the people I love. Even so, a couple times I get really intense cravings. One time it happens in the middle of the night when I’ve had a stressful dream. In the dream, I’m lost in a house and I can’t find the way out. I keep walking up and down stairs and in and out of rooms but I can’t find any way out, I just keep going and going and going. I come into a dimly lit room and there is a man in there, and for a moment I feel relieved, thinking that he can help me find my way. Then I realize this man has his pants down around his ankles. He’s jacking off and smiling at me with a leering smile. I turn and run away. I run and run, but I can’t find any way out of the house, not a door, not a window, not even a vent to crawl through. I turn a corner and as I run down the hall, I realize the surface I’m running on has changed. I hear crunching noises and I finally look around me and realize that every surface is covered with black crickets so thick the walls and floor writhe like ocean waves.

When I wake up, my heart is pounding and I’m completely stressed. All I can think about is how I want to escape from what I’m feeling and how getting high would be a great way to do just that.

The other time I crave getting high is after Will and I run into a friend of Will’s from college when we’re at a restaurant. We ask Will’s friend, Brant, to join us. Brant is a middle school teacher, and when we ask him about his job, he tells us about all the twelve-and thirteen-year-old girls who get knocked up each year and about the girl whose father had to admit he was raping his daughter after she came to school with hickies, and about two boys who attacked a girl in the hallway of the school, tearing her skirt down and thrusting their fists into her so hard they bruised her pelvis. They only got ten days of suspension and the boys’ parents thought that was too harsh a punishment. That’s the part that makes me so upset I can’t bear to feel what I feel. That there are parents who think publicly raping a twelve-year-old girl with a fist isn’t a very big deal. That’s the kind of thing that makes me hate the world I live in. But I don’t get high because I know my using isn’t going to help that poor girl. My running away from anger and frustration isn’t going to help a thing.

My doctor prescribes me Lexapro for my anxiety and Trazadone for the nights I’m having trouble sleeping. I notice a difference right away on the Lexapro. I actually find myself smiling and feeling happy instead of feeling anxious all the time.

As I feared, it does have an effect on my sex drive. I can still have orgasms, but it takes longer to have them than it used to. On the weekends, it’s no problem to prolong foreplay to get me where I need to be, but on mornings when we have quickies before Will has to high-tail it to work, it’s simply a lost cause. For the time being, that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

When the night of the substance abuse support group comes, I’m scared out of my mind. I keep telling myself that everything is fine and my problem isn’t that bad and this has all been a terrible misunderstanding, but then I look at the bruise on my arm that still hasn’t gone away. It still looks terrible. If anyone saw the bruise, they’d think I had an abusive boyfriend for sure.

I’m not exactly sure what I expected from the people in the group. I guess maybe I was expecting an emaciated group of people that could fit right in with the cast from
Trainspotting,
but the five other people in the group don’t look at all scary.

The man leading the group is named Tad. Tad is in his midthirties and is cute in a tall, skinny, nerd-with-glasses sort of way. There is a black man who looks to be in his late thirties and four other Caucasian women ranging from about twenty years old to about forty-five. It seems odd that there are so many more women in the group than men when the stats say men and women battle addiction in equal numbers. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, or maybe it’s just that women are more willing to admit they have a problem that they need help with.

Tad begins the class by discussing how you go about making a change, whether it’s quitting smoking, changing your diet, or getting off an illegal substance.

“The first thing you need,” Tad says, “is to believe that you can change. If you think that you are an addict and that’s just the way you are and you’ll never be able to quit, well, then, you’re right, you’re never going to be able to quit. But if you can imagine yourself getting through hard times sober, if you can imagine why making that decision will ultimately make your life richer and more fulfilling, then you are off to a great start. The second thing you need to do is unlearn learned behavior. Maybe you associate relaxing with drugs or a drink after a stressful day at work. Well, you need to learn a new way to unwind after a tough day. The third thing you need to do is to make a conscious decision to change. Often we’ll make promises when we’ve landed in jail or we’re going through withdrawal. But if you’re serious about changing, your heart needs to be in it, not just when you can remember the pain of addiction, but when all you can remember is what you liked about using. Fourth, you need to cope with cravings. I wish there were an easy way through this step, but whether you crave chocolate ice cream or crack cocaine, the only way to get through the cravings is to buckle down and wait them out. Last, you need to find something to replace the old habit. If you used drugs when you were feeling bored or lonely, you’re going to find a new way to kill time when you’re lonely. Maybe you can take up a hobby or join a book club or take a pottery class, but you’ll need to do something because when you quit abusing drugs, you’ll find that you have a whole lot more time than you used to.”