Deciding to Live Sober in My Alcoholic World

By Kathleen Anne Miller

Her personal story is a searing account of a painful childhood, followed by two divorces. She is the survivor of sexual abuse by her first husband. In this important book, Ms. Miller combines funny and sad stories into a riveting memoir, filled with insights from her life experiences in an alcoholic family.

Ms. Miller writes from her heart. She tells what positive decisions she made, and why. This book is a must read for adult children of alcoholics, and female victims of abuse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 31, 2007
• ISBN: 9781462842339

Kathleen Anne Miller

Kathleen Miller is an adult child of an alcoholic who decided to break the cycle at age 10, when her drunken father was viciously beaten nearly to death after closing a bar in Detroit, Michigan. All three of her siblings are alcoholics, as were her father and grandparents. She grew up on a lake in Michigan, sailing, swimming and ice skating. At age 21, Ms. Miller moved to Washington State to climb mountains and stayed. She and her ex-husband have successfully raised a healthy, athletic teenage daughter. Ms. Miller lives in Eastern Washington and has several novels in mind. This is her first book.

Book preview

DECIDING

TO LIVE

SOBER

IN MY

ALCOHOLIC WORLD

Kathleen Anne Miller

Copyright © 2008 by Kathleen Anne Miller.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

NOTE: Names have been changed to protect the guilty, as well as the innocent.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

40384

Contents

1

Skating on Cracking Ice

2

This Kid Is Defective

3

Getting Love I Needed

4

Europe Embarrassment + Farmer’s Wife?

5

Music Was My Salvation

6

Initial Lesson: Love Hurts

7

First Marriage: Sexual Abuse

8

Bad Timing and the Love of My Life

9

Parents Eloped at Seventeen:

Crazy-Making Behavior

10

Risk-Taking Behavior

11

Second Marriage

12

Claire is Born

13

Another Troubled Marriage

14

Fun with Claire

15

Second Divorce

16

Willy

17

Karate Saved Claire’s Life

18

Another Failed Relationship

19

Painful Relationship with Sister Leah

20

Leah’s Second Wedding: Redneck, Ignorant, and Proud of It

21

Mom’s Life after Dad Died

22

Throwing Out John: Retaking the Fort

23

A Brutal Trip Seeing Mom Helpless

24

Family Cutoffs Continue

25

Partners in Crime: Fun with Cousin Coy

26

Sewing for Claire and Mom: Lessons in Patience

27

Match.com Madness

28

Teenage Hell: Aging Ten Years When

Claire Was Fourteen

29

Claire Turned her Life Around

30

Drama, Drama, PAIN

31

Rejecting the Alcoholic Life

32

Going Home

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It goes to show how one with the right attitude and mentality can and will succeed in being sober. Although Kathleen has some traumatic period of her life, she so positive and is my inspiration when I’ve been overcome some equally difficult times. I hope that whoever reads her book will come away with awe and admiration, as I feel whenever I get to see her happy and smiling face. I thank God for us blessing with her story.

Maria Garcia-Hernadez

Work Source Interviewer

"Your book certainly touched a chord in me since I also grew up sober in the same kind of family. Your work is heartfelt, very accurate and transparent. There are thousands and thousands in American that need to hear what you have said. Congratulation to both of us for surviving. Congratulations on a great effort!"

Robert Gray

Publisher

Your book is easy to read, chatty style of writing and it is written from your own broken heart not from your head. Open and honest, not covering up or denying your pain.

James B. Morris, M. S.

To my daughter, Claire: I love you. You bring me pride and joy.

To my loving mother, who calls me her shining star.

and

Other abused women and adult children of alcoholics.

I have lived on the lip of insanity,

wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens.

I have been knocking from the inside.

—Persian poet Rumi

1

Skating on Cracking Ice

Growing up on a lake in Michigan with an alcoholic father provided excellent cover for being hyper. At age fifteen, I slipped outside at midnight, ice skates in hand. It had rained the day before, turning the lake to glass. Late winter/early spring, it was highly unsafe to be on the ice.

Drawn by the full moon, I skated in the moon’s reflection, glittering in a silver path across the ice. cRAAACK! the ice shrieked beneath my feet.

I’m lightweight, I thought and skated faster. Jagged cracking ice chased me over the lake.

I skated faster and faster in the moon path, exhilarated by speed, danger, and exquisite beauty.

No one knew where I was. My dead body could have washed up in a neighbor’s backyard in the spring—maybe never.

Don’t tell me that now! my mother Jean the Denial Queen protested after I told her that story at age thirty-five.

Now my daughter Claire is age sixteen. I cringe to think of her teenage sense of invincibility. An only child, she never grew up with siblings to torment her. Lucky Claire.

I’m on my way from the Great Northwest to visit my stroke-fallen mother in Georgia, where she lives in the world’s fanciest nursing home. I’ve never seen so many french windows in my life. This is the woman who ate low fat, raised us on skim milk, and exercised religiously. My teenage boyfriends openly lusted after my voluptuous mother sunning in a revealing bikini.

My mother lived with alcoholics all her life: as a child with her father and stepmother, her husband, then her hateful live-in boyfriend John of twenty years. All were alcoholics. Mom had a massive stroke within a year of my throwing boyfriend John out of her house. I was the only one of my siblings with the moxie to do it.

My heart is filled with dread. I hate visiting my family. In my twenties, it was great living two thousand four hundred miles away from my nearest relative. All three siblings are alcoholics. All have cut me off. Because I’m not an alcoholic, they mocked me, saying, Who do you think you are… better than us? because I refused to pour brandy in my morning coffee. I’m not willing to join their crowd to gain approval.

Your getting counseling just continues your self-absorbed behavior, my sister Leah once told me. And she also said,

Don’t come to me if you can’t remember your childhood.

No wonder you live alone, Leah said when I told her I’d bought a conga drum.

Stick in the knife and twist. Visiting my family is traumatic; it’s not a vacation. I return exhausted. Why does her criticism hurt so much?

This time Leah refuses to pick me up at the Atlanta airport. I have to fly twelve hours, rent a car, and drive, trying to find my mother’s nursing home with misspelled Southern signs. During Leah’s second wedding in Georgia (to an alcoholic), I made fun of misspelled signs until Leah told me to shut up.

Family patterns of the cracked ice of my family, alcoholism, criticism, and rejection began before I was born. Let’s start at the beginning.

2

 This Kid Is Defective

I was born seven weeks prematurely, with one uninflated lung. Only one lung worked. Nineteen fifty-three was the first year that Kalamazoo, Michigan, had an incubator. My parents stopped visiting me because they thought I was going to die.

Nurses slapped my tiny feet to make me scream to exercise my lungs. I refused to eat—a failure to thrive baby.

Welcome to the world, Kathleen Anne Miller, the second child of Jean and Richard Miller.

The nurses had never seen a baby with such tenacity as you, my mother told me. Your head was the size of an orange. You raised a furious fuss until you got what you wanted.

I learned to go through life like a clenched fist—that I was alone in this world. I feel that way today.

My parents brought me home after two months in the incubator. The plan was to get me up to ten pounds, so the doctors could remove my lung.

You looked up at me with your big brown eyes and clamped your mouth shut, my mother said. You sensed my nervousness and refused to eat.

My parents kept me in isolation at home. I remember watching, through the bars of my crib, Mom, Dad, and Leah standing in the doorway to my room, wearing face masks so I wouldn’t catch a germ.

Sing to her, the doctor said. Mom rocked me and sang. I finally began drinking the bottle. As an adult, Mom’s beautiful soprano moved me to tears.

At six months and weighing ten pounds, Mom took me to have my lung removed. The doctors found that my lung had spontaneously inflated. Mom grabbed me up and rushed me home. I finally joined the family.

Oh, what a difference that made! My six-month baby pictures show a joyous, exultant child, twirling her arms, delighted with life. My mother recorded my weight gains in one-fourth ounces in my baby book.

All the attention paid to me as a baby fueled big sister Leah’s resentment of me. We are only fifteen months apart.

Hyperactivity began early.

With me in the high chair, Mom would turn to fill the spoon, turn back to me, and I’d be gone—slipped down and escaped.

One day, Mom put me down for a nap. Standing at the kitchen sink, she spied a toddler waddling down the middle of the street with a loaded diaper and flies buzzing after her.

I’m glad that’s not my child, she thought, and with a closer look, she said, That’s Kathy!

Little brother Tom was born when I was three. One of my earliest memories was leaning over his cradle when he was brought home from the hospital. Dangling a blue plastic angel on a white ring, I waited for him to grasp it.

This kid is defective, I thought to myself when Tom didn’t grab the toy.

When I took tap dancing lessons at age six, I found out I was born to tap. I tapped on every horizontal surface, until one night, my tap dancing shoes mysteriously disappeared.

Lauren was born two years after Tom. Lauren has been crabby since birth. We have a home movie of Leah walking along a sidewalk, holding two-year-old Lauren’s hand. Lauren dropped her teddy bear into the gutter. With the camera rolling, Leah picked up the bear, handed it to Lauren, and Lauren hauled off and punched Leah in the nose.

Boy, oh boy, was Tom hyper. Together, we raced around the house, breaking things and getting into trouble. Depressed Leah and Lauren huddled on the couch, watching us.

My parents had four kids in a two-bedroom house.

I screwed myself out of my house! my father told his musician friends in a bar. Dad got a lead on a lakeside home in Union Lake. My parents bought the fourteen-room house in the summer before I went into third