Father and Son: Codependence and the ACA

“There's so much you have to go through” (Father and Son, Various Artists). 

In my last post, I made a conscious choice to talk about my father. There were some things I intentionally left out. I don't think I'll ever tell it all. In this post and the next I'll share a little bit more. This will be a journey from the hero lenses to the greatest heartache of my life. 

For my first seven out of ten surgeries, my dad was a constant presence. My dad got me to and from PT. My dad sparked my love of music. My parents divorced when I was three years old and one of my sisters and I lived with our dad. He was custodially the stable parent (something I'm sure I can thank my parental grandparents for). I don't remember exactly when I went from a child looking up to my father to caretaking for him, but there's a pivotal moment. 

One day when I was fourteen, my dad took me for a walk and told me that he was chronically Ill and expected the disease to kill him. From that moment on, I was anticipating the death of my father. Somewhere in my teens, the lines started to blur and I went from a child who grew up with too much knowledge of drug addiction, to a teenager helping my father manage the household.

As the years went on, my sense of responsibility for my father grew. On one hand, I had the freedom to tell him anything about my life and when I got in trouble I didn't hide it from him. On the other hand, he enabled some things that were overly permissive. The juxtaposition of that is how a lot of my choices were limited to what he needed from me. From how late I could hang out with friends, to how long I could be away for, to who I spent time with, and frequently my local proximity to him. He never wanted me too far away because he depended on me. I could speak freely with him but not everywhere else.

I've talked so openly about his addiction since he passed that I have to underscore that it wasn't something I talked about openly at all outside of my childhood home prior to when I had to share it with my closest friends out of necessity. There was a lot of shame, secrecy, and fear around that subject. But, in my home life, it was an open discussion. I grew up in the full knowledge that my dad was an addict, would always be an addict, that he needed daily treatment for it, that the treatment was something other addicts would steal for, that we didn't talk about it outside of the house, and so on and so forth. 

When I was twenty two, I went to college only twenty minutes away from home. I lived on campus by choice, even though I'm still paying for that decision. I needed distance from home. I loved my dad, but at this point I was feeling the weight of the responsibility a lot, and trying to plan for a career in ministry. I've mentioned before that my teens and twenties were a time I opted to let the role of my Cerebral Palsy sit in the background. I'm not sure if I really had the time to give CP the attention it needed. I was in college full time, interning with some churches, traveling to my dad's on the weekends, and building a new social network in between. 

When I was twenty four, my mom died and my new reality was abruptly disrupted by the original one. I never expected my dad to outlive my mom. The irony that my mom, who was a recovering alcoholic, died of a drug overdose; while my dad was a recovering addict, would live another thirteen years, and not die from the expected outcomes isn't lost on me. More than that, there was little avoiding my role as a codependent caretaker to my dad, but that's not to say I didn't try. After my mom died, I changed colleges, moved halfway across the country, and changed church traditions. However, it would take my dad having a significant accident, the intervention of family, and another move to the opposite side of the country to really change my role in the family.

Everything changed dramatically by the time I was twenty eight years old. I had one living parent. The question of how long that would be the case continued to linger. I was living in a new state and transitioning ministry gigs. Once my dad and I reached this phase in our relationship, things were as complicated as they'd ever been between us. We'd gone through tremendous conflicts for what seemed like forever. It took such a toll on me that I reached a point where people didn't want to hear about it anymore. From roughly age twenty eight to thirty seven, my dad and I lived thousands of miles apart and were only a fraction as close as we once were. There's a lot about this time in my life that I won't share here because I'm still working on some of that, but it was the transition from the life I always knew to the life I live now.

I'll say this. My perspective on just about everything changed in that period of time. My existence changed to something borderline unrecognizable to me in that time. My career changed in that period of time. My station in life changed. Some things were decided for me in those chapters and some things were conscious decisions on my part. In that season, I learned about codependency and resources for people whose worldview and way of living was caretaking for others. That would later lead me to a more specific resource for people like me who grew up with alcoholism and addiction in the lives of their parents. 

The biggest change of them all for me would come on Valentine's Day when I was thirty seven years old. I'll talk about that in my next post to conclude an unintentional trilogy of posts about life with my dad. This is Cerebral Palsy and Intersectionality and we're definitely in the intersection right now. Stay tuned for part three.