The family secret

No family is perfect.  Every family has secrets.  Every family has demons.  My new family’s secret, besides they were dysfunctional, was that all the men were a bunch of drunks.  My father Jef, and both his brothers, just like their father and grandfather before them.  We can trace alcoholism back several generations in our family.  It was simply the way we handled our problems.  Now in my Dad’s defense he was never a mean drunk, unless he was on the hard stuff and Mom told him he could not have that in the house early on.  It is not my intention to shame my father into going to AA.  I simply want you to understand that being an adult child of an alcoholic is also part of my story.  It is nothing to be ashamed of, it is just fact for many of us.  I want you to see my father as I do, wonderful, intelligent, funny, loving, heroic and flawed. 

My Dad is what is called a Binge Alcoholic.  He would go a week or two of being sober and then pull a big drunk.  He once told me it took him at least a 6 pack to feel anything, and a good case before he got drunk.  Now you have to remember my Daddy is a big man, he is 5’11 and about 300lb.  And as a kid a lot of that was muscle.  Daddy is a happy drunk.  When he drinks he wants to dance and would put on his Motown records.  He would contemplate putting on his Barbara Streisand albums, and then he would say, “You know I love her voice, but I just hate her politics.”  Daddy is a dyed in the wool, Fox News loving, gun caring, Conservative Republican.  He is the definition of a good old boy and I love him for it.  All though he has never been homophobic and believes in a woman’s right to chose. 

I would inevitable get sick with Bronchitis and be on the couch with my vaporizer.  He would get drunk and come in wanting to hang out with me, drink and play music.  We passed many nights like that.  Later in my life I would share a glass of beer with him on these nights. 

My Dad’s brothers were his very best friends.  His middle brother, Drew and Ashley’s father, died a few years back.  He has really grieved his death.   I think he lost one of his real reasons for drinking, hanging out with his brother.  I also think he lost his best friend.  I remember the days of my uncles all standing around Daddy’s truck, drinking.  Each one took a side.  They had a cooler in the middle and they would talk late into the night, especially if the weather was good.  Sometimes I would go hang out with them, and listen to their stories. 

My personal favorite story is when Daddy would not come home.  Now this was in the days before cell phones kids.  We would call all over tarnation for him.  We would finally find him at one of his brother’s houses.  Daddy would get on the phone and say, “Yeh baby I’ll be home in about 30 minutes.  I’m going to drink one more beer.”  He’d show up 4 hours later.  I always knew when he was drinking ‘cause when he came home to kiss me, his lips were cold. 

Mom tried for the first few years to fight this.  We went to Ala-non trying to convince him that he should join AA. Mom never got that the program was for her.  We left the Big Book around for him to read.  That never happened.  She would have dinner hot on the table and ready for him when he came home.  We would wait, until long after he said he would be home.  Finally it would get cold, and it would be late, and we would be tired of waiting and we would have to give in and eat without him.   Mom finally quit that after a while and when she knew he was drinking, we would just go ahead, have dinner and go on with our evening plans.  I think she learned somewhere in there to just let him be.

No matter how drunk my Dad or my uncles got, every morning they got up and went to work.  They never called in for a hangover.  I think it comes from all those years of having had the dairy.  They had a hell of a work ethic.  No matter what they did the night before, come 3 o’clock in the morning them cows had to be milked regardless of how you felt or the weather.  People and animals were depending on you. 

My Daddy taught me to love books.  He eats books.  He can read a book in a day if you let him.  He probable reads 2 or 3 books a week.  He is very much like Jay in that fact and I love it.  They like many of the same books and often trade them back and forth, and introduce each other to new authors.  I don’t do that.  Yes I am a book worm, but I read for detail and often with a highlighter.  I like my mother prefer non-fiction.  I used to love fiction, but it is hard to find an educated, animal and livestock loving, country witchy woman who is not in bed with the hero by page 4 and is in command of her own life.  I am still looking for good authors.  I had hoped to be a fiction writer, but I am just no good a plot lines.  Stories don’t have endings, they just meander and change, like this paragraph.

I will never forget the first time Daddy took me to the library in Logansport.  I had never seen so many books, and the idea that you could read any of them you wanted just fascinated me.  I am still in love with libraries and book stores. I was still young enough and light enough to be picked up.  Daddy sat me on the counter and said, “Hey y’all watch her for just a minute.  I’ve got to get a few books.”   And they did.  Libraries frown upon such things now.  

My library was tiny. My little trailer probable has more square footage then that library did.  But it was a beacon and outpost of the world beyond for me.  Daddy and I would go and I would just get lost in the books. I also loved the librarians.  They were knowledgeable on so many subjects. If they didn’t know they either had a book they could recommend, had one they could get for you, or had a vertical file (news clippings) on that subject.  They were like compasses.  They could always point you in the right direction.

I was always a good student, but my Dad demanded excellence out of me.  Homework was a priority, and to be done right after school and my snack.  My parents helped where they could.  Math was always my weakest subject and I suspect that along with my ADD I have Dyscalculia as well.  I am always turning numbers around, not letters, unless I am really tired.  I remember bringing home my grades and C’s went on the top, then B’s and then A’s.  Didn’t matter how many A’s you had.  You were going to be fussed about the C’s.  Daddy told me an A is an A, a B is like a C, and a C is like an F.  And when he was done fussing and me about my grades or my report card, then it was time for my Grandpa, Novelle, and my uncles to fuss me about them.  High grades and great things were expected out of me.  I often feel guilty that I have disappointed them. 

So the feeling of never being good enough, never measuring up, and striving for perfection were drilled into me from an early age.  My guess is the family hoped by doing so, I would not have to live the way they did.  Instead it made me self conscious, and terrified of disappointing them.  I still feel that way.

I knew from an early age my family expected me to go to college, just like my Dad and his brothers had.  My Grandpa was a “self made man,” and had left school at about 16 or 17 to go to sea.  We all believed the lie that if I went to college I would have a better life.  Go study what you love.  You can be anything you want to be, they told us.  I just wanted to be a Mom, but that was not good enough for anybody.  So I was encouraged to study.   I am naturally pretty smart, so I did good in school.  I excelled and won awards, but I was never smart enough to get into our gifted and talented program.  That’s what I always wanted, but it didn’t happen.  I had the grades but not the test scores.  I am not the best tester.  I have too much anxiety about the time aspect.  You know back in the day before you could get a waiver for such things. 

What we should be telling our kids, is that long before they decide what they want to be in school, they should decide where they want to live.  If you are a woman and a want to live in Louisiana it is best you do something in the medical field or teaching.  Despite what you may want, these are really the only two industries that want to hire women.  Even today there is little else for women here.  If you are a man and want to live here, you must have a strong back and be willing to work long hours.  What work there is for people here, is not what we would called skilled.  People who wish to live in Northwest Louisiana should also consider a trade: electrical work, truck driver, plumbing, contracting, mechanic, dog grooming, vet tech, etc.  Nothing that requires you to have a 4 year or more degree.  Even people we educate here, cannot get work here. 

If you do feel such an urge to obtain a college degree, you need to go ahead and be ready to leave this state for work in another place.  Louisiana puts no stock in it’s young people and there is nothing here for us but heartache, and trying to scratch a living out of the dirt.  It is always feast or famine around here.  When I was a kid there were plenty of jobs in the oil field, most of the fields are played out now.  Even the great boom of the Haynesville Shale is almost over with. 

It is simply a fact of life here.  Our smart and different people must move away to make a life for themselves in places like Dallas, Austin, or Houston.  No one comes to Louisiana, except New Orleans, (and that might as well be Mars for all most Louisianans care) voluntarily.  If you are in Louisiana you are here for a few reasons.  You are from here and got stuck here.  You came home for family.  You married someone from here.  You got stationed here.  My prayer is may you never be smart, and stuck in Louisiana. 

As for me, why did I stayed?  I got stuck, and I stayed to be close to my family.  I am an only child and know I will be the only one to care for my parents as they age.  Why move away, have a life, home and career and know I would have sell it all to come home and take care of my family?  As much as I talk smack about Louisiana I am also very much in love with it.  No, not the Louisiana you see on post cards, books and television.  I am in love with North Louisiana, all it’s terrible and wonderful flaws.  I love it’s people, who are warm and giving, as long as you are a certain type of person.  Even if you are not, they would give you the shirt off their back, and hope they could lead you to the Lord. 

I feel in love with the towering pine trees, the wild flowers, the muddy red waters of the river, the deer, the possum, and the armadillo.  I feel in love with the green pastures of Keatchie, its stately old buildings, and its Holstein cows.  I even love the smell of cow shit on a warm day.  It smells like home to me.   I love Louisiana in all her seasons: hot, warm, cool, and back to warm again.  I even love it here when it is 110° with 90% humidity.  Louisiana gets in your blood.  It is in my blood, my family has been here for so long now.  What every way you want to trace my family tree, my family has been here for more generations that anyone cares to count. 

Yes I have lived in larger cities, and I like the slow path of life here.  Like my Dad, passing time standing around his truck, drinking beer, visiting with his family and watching the world go by.  Does it get any better than that?

I must say though I hate our state government.  Most of them are so crooked, and have screwed the Louisiana population and land so much, “They are going to have to screw them in the ground when they die.”  I hope, above all hope that with each passing election, my state will get better and a little less screwed.  Never happens.  I guess I will eventually have to give up that ghost.

Ilsa