"It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself." ~Joyce Maynard
As I enter my 13th year in recovery the buzzards I set loose during my time in the fog continue to come home to roost. One of the great things I managed to accomplish, in spite of myself, was fathering four children over the last 51 years. I helped raise three others but it's definitely possible that they along with at least two of my biological brood, are dealing with the psychological scars of poverty, drug abuse and a life mismanaged, too.
Any moron can copulate a child, but being a father takes real work. It also helps to have a role model, like a father of your own, to help guide and teach you what being a good dad is supposed to look like, or at the least, what fatherhood is not.
Over the years I've learned that fathers are not supposed to be your friend, they are your moral and ethical compass, your source of learned responsibility. They are there to pick you up when you fall, but as they do so, they also help you see the reason you fell and provide a little loving guidance on ways to avoid falling again. They don't let their children get away with lying, and they aren't easily manipulated by them, either. They stand as a testament to living one's life honorably, with dignity while respecting the rights and differences of everyone else.
At least that's how I see a father's role; never having one of my own in my life, it's stuff I had to learn on my own over the previous decades.
But a life lived on the wild side has a price tag attached to it that doesn't really become visible until long after you've used the product, and that's not the worst of it, either. The goddam price isn't a fixed one but instead fluid, and it usually rises in direct proportion to the level of impulsive stupidity you allowed yourself to succumb to during those years in moron-man land.
You really never know what the final cost will be for your actions because it's impossible to predict how they are going to impact others. The first years in recovery, the vultures are in plain view and if you're smart, you'll take them out one by one by making whatever amends you can to them. All of them are a pain in the ass to appease, but some are obviously harder to rid yourself of than others; the "criminal record" buzzard has exceptional tenacity, as does the "Hep-C" and "bad credit" bird, and that pesky "spotty employment history" vulture takes a lot of effort to bury for good.
Those first few years you deal with a lot of them because you have to in order to progress with real recovery. The good news is that as the clean years begin to stack up in your favor, the buzzards become fewer and farther in-between. Sometimes you may even go for years without a visit and life is good indeed.
Then one fine day long into your life as a clean, sober and now model citizen, you're looking out the window and...what's that up in the sky? Why...it's a ....buzzard....and it appears to be homing in on your location.
During the past year of so, several have decided to visit me. The bastards have followed me across decades of tomfoolery and if I looked out the window right now, I'd see them, lounging on my lawn, licking their chops and snickering to themselves as their beady little eyes bore into my soul and they all have a good laugh at my earlier stupidities. I'm frankly afraid to look beyond those ambling about the yard because I know now that the potential for a flock that would impress Job may be lurking just over the horizon.
The procedure remains the same; you deal with them one at a time, the same way you did when you first entered recovery. But the interesting thing about the geriatric buzzards is that they seem to bring with them really complex and sophisticated baggage. No quick fixes here and some may even be beyond your capability to fix.
Perhaps the most painful of them all to have to work with is the dreaded "mirror" buzzard. The Mirror Buzzard is typically found roosting in one or more of your children and you know its come home when your child begins to do the same stupid things you did when you were that age. You see the cliff your child is now rushing headlong toward because you yourself plunged over that same goddam cliff years ago, and you can hardly bear to watch it happen. No matter how much you try to explain, advise, guide, critique, condemn, cajole, or demand that your child change his ways, that damned kid keeps a steady course for disaster. As your hope diminishes that you'll be able to make a difference in the life of your child, each time you look at himit's like looking into a...mirror, and the pain is almost unbearable because you know, you just fucking know, that it doesn't have to be this way and yet, you're powerless to stop it.
You can't kill the mirror vulture, you can't break it, you can't change the reflection and you can't destroy it, either. About the only thing you can do is to keep one hand cautiously outstretched to your child while you protect yourself as best you can from the pain that is coming to both of you as you watch that vulture settle in to roost.
Living life in recovery is not an easy task, and as I mentioned earlier, the level of difficulty is directly proportional to the level of stupidity you reached in living your life in active addiction. It is no wonder that the success rates for real recovery are so small; the buzzards have a nasty way of reminding you of just how bad your course through life was, and it takes a determined person indeed to stand in front of those buzzards with a naked, clean soul and take each flesh-tearing bite without turning to something to help ease the pain....
