My wife was an ex-junkie when I met her. It was a Halloween party out near Hoffman Lake (in Kosciusko County, Indiana). I arrived as a duct tape mummy. The front locks of her hair were dyed a kind of tan, she wore a skirt, ripped fishnet hose and a dirty punk rock t shirt – I can’t remember the band it advertised – and it was all over for me. I finally got to date a punk rock girl. I think I still assumed my life was a damned movie.

            There were ups and downs from day one, but I don’t doubt that when we started, I was in love. I was eager to consummate the relationship and when we did, less than 3 months after meeting, she got pregnant.

            So we had a decision to make and pretty quickly we knew we were keeping the kid and we were going to try to mom-and-dad her together. We got an apartment in a house split up into three on Fort Wayne Avenue in Warsaw, a kind of trashy street across from the railroad tracks near downtown, on the other side of which were the Dominos Pizza and the CVS. (214 N. Fort Wayne Ave. for you thrill seekers looking for literary landmarks ;).

            My ex-wife, Lydia Frances Henn, was a phenomenal artist. It breaks my heart that she didn’t really start painting in earnest until after we split up. She was unschooled, except for a few high school art classes, but her natural gifts were considerable. Sometimes I think the thing I did wrong-est in our marriage was not to steer her into painting earlier on, with more insistence, more earnestly. That could have saved us. We could have not been overtaken by our respective addictive tendencies, her to anything she could acquire and me, by the time we were together, to alcohol. We could’ve made a better home for our first ten years of child-rearing, and especially for the last few Lydia lived through, after we separated.

            Lydia adored our daughter Zaya in that little apartment by the tracks. She always put a soft cap on Zaya’s head at night, fearing she would get cold. It would be June or July of Zaya’s first year of life and she would be in the crib with a little soft cotton cap on her head, even as we only had a window unit for air conditioning. I wonder if this contributed to Zaya’s finicky sleeping habits as she got older. The bad dreams our bad relationship would give her were probably more responsible.

            You can always look back and find a reason. There were reasons we divorced. Pretty good reasons, I suppose. But there’s got to be some point in time pre-crisis, where the early decisions we made led to more disastrous, later decisions, and if we’d just been smarter, or more careful, we still could’ve made it. In my mind, the primary bad choices Lydia and I made concerned getting more involved in drugs and alcohol. We weren’t really intending to undermine our family’s wellness, but how could it be otherwise? I’ve heard a lot of stories about families and drugs and drinking since then, and none of the stories end up with the drugs and drinking making the family life so much better. I suppose it’s a stick-in-the-mud opinion that won’t make me popular at parties. It’s also a way to understand my lived experience.

            I was the first to start using alcohol in a blatantly unhealthy way. It really kicked in early – at our marriage, I got absolutely shitfaced and had to be carried from the upstairs bathroom of the American Legion, where I was puking up Killians and Rolling Rock, to my brother Mike’s car that would run us the mile and a half home to the house my younger brother Dan purchased near the house we grew up in, for the purpose of renting to Lydia and me. Soon enough a couple friends and I are having band practice in the basement and band practice, in addition to playing a kind of folk-punk garage band rock, involved lots of drinking. Sometimes we would work through the better part of a 30-brick of High Life at practice, then retire to Bennigan’s about three quarters of a mile away to have a “band meeting” which consisted of some ersatz planning (rarely followed through), some pipe dreams, and more drinking. At this time one beer made me feel good, and in most cases another and another made me feel better and better-er. In a steady development of increased consumption, over the course of our marriage I drank more and more – ironically, until I started exercising and drinking way less maybe a year before Lydia asked for the divorce.

            I’m trying to diagnose the marriage though, not only my own alcoholism. To see what made the marriage work when it worked, why it broke down. My own drinking played no small part. Somewhere in there, in my early years teaching, I began purchasing and using over-the-counter pseudoephedrine tablets because coffee didn’t seem to have any tangible effect on my mental state and I was looking for something to perk me up before I started my day. Lydia noticed me doing this. I don’t think we talked about it all that directly, ever. But I know she noticed, and I suspect this got her thinking about daily enhancers in an if-he-can, why-can’t-I kind of way.

            Lydia started drinking more frequently, usually red wine, and eventually there were things going on that she was hiding from me. By the time she had turned loose and started going out on her own to do God-knows-what with God-knows-who, Zaya was getting up in the middle of the night asking where Mom was, and I’d lie to her, mommy’s okay. She’s just out with friends. One night Lydia was gone all night and came home freaked out and exhausted, saying she’d let a man drive her out into the country in her own minivan and when she understood he meant to harm her she pushed in the cigarette lighter, pretended to start to light a smoke, then jabbed the lighter in the man’s neck and pushed him out the driver’s side door. She came home saying “I need help” and this is after I’d already called my mom and said I don’t know where Lydia is, can you come over and watch the kids while I go look. That was the first time we had to drop her off at the behavioral health facility in Fort Wayne.

            You could probably argue what may have been obvious to others when we got together but wasn’t obvious to us – we were a clusterfuck waiting to happen. We would have to have been very careful, we probably would have had to have been chemically abstinent, to avoid the eventual problems with substance abuse. When I began drinking freely, at first Lydia counseled me to take care, to not go overboard, but eventually it turned into something that I did, that my doing gave her permission to do too. It was true I treated it like drinking was a problem for her and for me, it was a lifestyle or personality trait. And it was true that she would more often get wild when she drank, while I’d just get happy. Hers was a tripwire alcoholism, ready to tip over into oblivion from the beginning, whereas mine was a slow burn, the disease having patience with me until I reached the point of no return.

            She always quit the booze when she was having babies. Thank God for that. By the time we had our third child, things got sketchy. I think sometimes, though she loved being pregnant, she wanted to renege on being a mom but being a mom’s just not as temporary and inconsequential as a hand of euchre. Anyway, Lydia didn’t play euchre.

            We really did try, especially early in the marriage. I was less considerate about Lydia’s lot doing constant mom duty than I could’ve been. I think she began battling the urge to run by the time our second daughter, Frances, was 2 or 3. The solution, obviously, was to have another. Being pregnant did something to Lydia, hormonally or psychochemically it had a net positive effect on her psyche, her emotional and mental well-being. Of course it couldn’t’ve hurt that while pregnant she wasn’t using any illegal substances or alcohol either. Lydia was consistently happiest when a child was growing inside her, most content in anticipation of another arrival.

            The marriage probably ended for her, symbolically at least, when I got a vasectomy a bit after our son was born. Our fourth baby. Lydia had in the past articulated a desire to reproduce the big, sprawling, ten-kid, constantly-impoverished family of her childhood. When I would object that it wasn’t possible on a teacher’s salary with her rarely working, she’d say I just didn’t know how to be poor. One could get government assistance, for example. That seemed not only irresponsible to me, but just obviously un-doable. I was raised modestly but not foolishly.

            My mom didn’t have a lot of money in my high school years, after my dad died. She worked as an elementary school teacher at the local Catholic school, which paid much less than the public school system did. Still I was basically raised in a middle class setting. My dad was an accountant, when he worked. It was just taken for granted that everyone in the family was going to college. That was the default position. My mom, in my high school years, made it possible for me to do school and soccer. She insisted on little more than a summer job from June to August while she made dinner and did the laundry and provided a stable, if emotionally reticent home. I never could talk to her honestly about how I felt but I don’t know if that was more her fault or mine. Anyway, there’s nothing I blame my mother for. She started out with a husband, and lost him, and I know, as sure as she does, that no single parent knows what they’re really signing up for.

            Lydia had a different upbringing. Her early childhood was at a farmhouse out in the country near Nappanee. The kids were often left to fend for themselves, and the older ones would kick the younger ones out and they’d go play in the fields or the woods nearby, where they’d fashioned a swing onto a tree. The family often had little to eat. Lydia remembered government cheese, and government peanut butter, and when she was older and went to live with an older couple who were involved in 4-H and owned a llama farm, they would make fun of the dish she had so often growing up that it was a disgusting punchline – hamburger gravy. She mentioned her mother getting the worst cuts of meat of a cow from the butcher, because they were so inexpensive, and using them for dinner.

            When we talked about growing up, I barely shared a thing, and Lydia returned often to three memories that made an indelible impression on her. The first, a good memory, was playing with her brothers and sisters unsupervised, out in the woods, while mom and dad worked. That was a bunch of memories glommed into one memory of the innocent fun they had and the childish rituals they invented in the woods. The second was when her dad drop-kicked a cat off the front porch. She was a lifelong animal lover and to her this seemed the height of cruelty. The third was when she sat at an open second story window of the farmhouse, and, she says, a voice told her to jump. Even into our marriage she was telling me she heard voices. You don’t mean voices, I’d protest, not wanting to address the implications of such a symptom. I’d say, that’s just you talking to you.

            We did have our problems growing up, most notably issues with fathers who distanced themselves from us the older we got. Lydia’s dad smoked crack in the barn after work. For most of my middle school matriculation, my dad was away, hospitalized for “Depression/Anxiety” as my mom would term it. But the darkness did run deeper in Lydia’s family. There were issues of sexual abuse it’s not my business to elaborate on here. There was the time, once they had moved to Boggs Addition in Warsaw, that Lydia’s mother fell on Lydia in a rage and had to be pulled away by Shekinah, the sister who was more of a mom to Lydia than her own mother was.

I related to the dad stuff – when I was having a horrible time adjusting to my own developing sexuality and my place socially among my peers in seventh and eighth grade, my dad just wasn’t there, and I was too angry and reticent and anxious and scared to open up to my mom. Dad came home a time or two or three from wherever he was. He was often in a foul mood, not really wanting to act like much of a father. Once my mom tried to cheer up a bad situation in the car by suggesting we stop for ice cream and that turned into her running into the local grocery for a brick of vanilla and some Hershey syrup. My younger brother and I drowned our feelings in big bowls of ice cream the way we used to when we were littler, this time joylessly. Those were hard times. I didn’t feel like anyone was really willing to fully parent me. I had a travel soccer coach who took an interest but after we went to a Petra concert to celebrate our championship season and I refused to be saved by Jesus, his interest cooled. This is so typical of adults in Warsaw, IN, it makes me want to puke.

            So we both had mentally ill parents, essentially, and Lydia would be diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder near the tail end of our marriage, and my re-diagnosis when I stopped getting my anti-psychotic from a family doctor who would write anyone a prescription for anything and went back to a real psychiatrist – the second winter of our separation – was Bipolar with Generalized Anxiety. I’ve just recently been tested for and identified as ADD. You could win a round of Wheel of Fortune with my acronyms.

            After she’d been in therapy for a couple months, Zaya was riding home from South Bend with me in the car and said, Dad, I really don’t think mom should’ve had all these kids. Which means Lydia and I shouldn’t’ve had all these kids. Which means we really didn’t think about what we were getting ourselves into, which is probably true. I can’t deny that we built a family haphazardly, on whims and impulses, like a couple of addicts would. It didn’t much occur to me as we expanded our family early on, that perhaps we weren’t the best candidates to raise 4 kids, much less to pass on our genes. But we did it. Now it’s done. I got sober a few years ago, in January 2017. I know I’m here to write, and I’m here to make it right with our kids. The kids are the best gifts we gave to each other. The gifts she left behind when she died.

            It can be difficult living in the present when so much happened and so much went so wrong, in the past. Nothing that happened can be changed. I’ve grown in the three years I’ve been sober but I’m about as emotionally stunted and maturity-challenged as one might expect a 44 year old man who drank heavily for 15 or 16 years to be. The summer before I met Lydia, in 1999, I attempted suicide. 14 years later, Lydia would take her own life. I’m not even sure how I made it this far, but I’m determined to see this all the way through – without willfully cutting it short through drinking or anything else blatantly self-destructive. For my kids, yes. And for Lydia, yes – to be the Dad to our children she would want me to be. But also for me. I’ve got something to prove to myself. On my last birthday Zaya, now an art student, gifted me an illustration she made that included the words: “Congratulations! You’re still here!” And how terrible it must be for my daughter to understand, given my experience and her mother’s death, what that means to me. And how grateful I am, and do my best to be, daily, that there are things yet to be done, and that I am here to do them.