A Prayer for my Daughter

A light saber.  That's what she wanted.  Just like on Star Wars.

She unwrapped her present and started waving it around, flicking it out and doing yoga poses with a waving wand light saber.

Hazel turns five today.  She is shiny-eyed and tall and strong - a warrior woman with blue eyes and (her own words) golden hair.

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When Hazel was born I was in the midst of alcoholism.  Smiling and patiently waiting through the times when we needed to see the doctor - knowing I would be not too far away from bring drunk again and back to normality.

Even the day she was born, a champion effort by her mother, my wife, (and me there in hospital greens counting down the time to get back home to start drinking syrupy shiraz until collapsing on the lounge room floor) I was distracted by drinking.

A slippery perfectly new human in my arms and fuck me if I wasn't thinking about getting out of the theater and back to the numbing safety of a wine glass...

*

That life has changed.  Hazel is now a vibrant young girl with nothing holding her back except an alcoholic father.

For now, it is my responsibility to be accountable for her, to introduce her to the world and share my favorite things.  So we can have a constructive, positive relationship that gives her the best chance of making the most of the opportunities that life presents her.

But she must know, at some point, that I am alcoholic.  I want her to know - she must sort of notice that what she used to call "Daddy's wine" isn't around any longer.  And that she doesn't get caught in the crossfire of when I used to be drunk and have to defend being drunk as somehow OK.

So happy birthday - and here's to being all too aware of the dastardly genetic inheritance you have been gifted and how it has brought us all a step closer to self realization and simply accepting life for what it is and forgiving ourselves and others for who we are.

I am grateful for my daughter and urge myself to be kind enough to let her only know me as a sober, wise 'old man'.  Not so much the fumbling fake sober, where I would be hiding my drunkenness and drinking, but a real light sober, which is I guess, getting close to the best I can be.




You're One of My Kind

There were times when he was going to die and it was clumsy and cluttered with hastily made plans and the best of intentions – all somehow subconsciously designed for him to delay it just long enough so that he wouldn’t actually do it. 

And after all the drama and theatrics and planning – nothing happened.  He woke up somewhere, in summer under some tree or during winter on some lounge, and he blinked and clicked his jaw a couple of times – yawned – and realized he was 'just' alive.

Now being 'just' alive is an almighty relief when he had spent the week building up to not being around much longer and toured his town with the indulgent sentimentality of someone leaving for quite a while.

But being alive brings with it the responsibility of actually being someone and doing something and all that shit.

And that was the problem.

What to do, who to be, what role to play – as though he had not yet chosen his role and the theatre of life was rolling on regardless.

He wanted it to slow down a little.

All Pilots are Alcoholics

My neighbor is a pilot - he flies for a big commercial airline and in between times pops over to Afghanistan on little lucrative missions he can't talk about much.

I have asked him and he says simply "I CAN"T say anything - if it gets out I lose my job - again..."

Last time he lost his job he was drinking into oblivion in a theme bar in Barcelona and was talking drunken trash talk about dying and death and how it was all a random occurrence that we were even lucky enough to be conceived


So the guy he was telling this to, who happened to be the deputy pilot or whatever, called the police and said my neighbor was suicidal.

The Spanish Police crashed through the door of his hotel suite and arrested my neighbor and took him off to the pysch unit in Barcelona.

He was there a few days before the Australian Consulate lifted him out - then the interminable scrutiny of an official investigation by the airline's Human Resources - it lasted months and he was drinking all the way through.

"They want me to prove I'm not an alcoholic," he'd say, holding my forearm as I walked out to get into my car for work of a morning, "And I'm in the middle of proving that no matter what happens it's not me, it was just drinking and ..."

I forget what bullshit he was telling me after that.

I was a couple of months sober and my tolerance for drunks was low.

Anyway - he lost his job with the airline, like $270k a year, gone, for being a loquacious drunk.

Now, he pops over to Afghanistan in six week stints and comes back humbler and I don't see him leaning over his balcony with a drink in his palm so much.

He says Afghanistan is like Mars - red, hot and out of this world.

He can't tell me anything else, he says, otherwise he'll lose his job.

She Lives with a Broken Man

I nearly threw it all away today - I had to look my wife in the eye and tell her that I wasn't going back, that it was sort of over and that the anxiety of fronting up and being humble and penitent was simply too much for me. 
And I just wanted to get it over with so I could get drinking somewhere out of the way where if I got caught drinking it would be too late anyway cause I would already be drunk.

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But she talked me through it and said I had to have courage and just front up and explain what had happened and come to some sort of a compromise. 
And so I went for a long run, round the beach, up and down hills till my shins hurt. 
And I realized it was as simple as slowing things down and showing some courage. 
Times like this define the whole year, your whole career, and you either step up and get a result or you slink away and basically stay drunk.
*
I know I am a broken man, but things don't have to stay broken. 
I can choose to put them back together a day at a time.