Each year at Christmas, nothing tickled my brother and me more than hearing John Denver’s ”Please Daddy Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas” (since remade by the ever-nauseating Alan Jackson). We laughed uproariously upon hearing, “You came home at quarter past eleven and fell down underneath our Christmas tree”. How hilarious! How delightful! A man so inebriated he could ruin a perfectly lovely Christmas scene. We didn’t think about the painful reality of it. It sounded so comical that we lost sight of the beleaguered mother holding back tears, trying to pretend everything was fine, sending the kid to bed while she dealt with the drunken consequences.
We were maybe five and three years old, if that, and we didn’t grow up in a household with a raging drunk, so the festive, jolly tone of the song masked the (repeated) tragedy (“every goddamn Christmas you do this…) of the song. But we weren’t far removed from this kind of life. My father had grown up with an abusive, alcoholic father, and we had seen glimpses of this man’s mania, his binges, his violence and threats, the way he became depressed and talked to himself – and terrorized everyone around him.
We did not understand then how simultaneously frightening and tedious it is to live with an addict. After all, artistic depictions of the alcoholic often veer toward the jovial: the drunken father coming home, wrecking the Christmas tree laughing and hollering “Merry Christmas!” as in the song, or film scenes in which a drunken rage is so heightened, unbalanced and berserk that you almost laugh, thinking this level of drama surely cannot be real.
A scene comes to mind from the fictionalized bio-series George & Tammy, about the tempestuous relationship between musicians George Jones and Tammy Wynette. In it, Jones comes home piss drunk and, as several media outlets (and possibly Wynette’s own autobiography) describe it, “chases Tammy around with a loaded gun”. This comes to mind possibly because (if I recall) in the series it happened to be set at Christmastime but also because the scene, while it should be terrifying, has the frenetic energy of something willfully comedic. These kinds of scenes on film often feel this way. Someone is fleeing for their life, but it’s almost like the equivalent of Benny Hill theme music is playing in the subconscious mind, possibly trying to square reality with the chaos that’s unfolding.
Watching such scenes in a film, or hearing John Denver croon, beseeching his father not to come home drunk this Christmas (unlike so many others), doesn’t begin to convey the exhaustion, the pain, the tedium, the heartbreak, the ache, the disappointment, the fear, and so many other emotions that living with an addict – in particular angry, depressed drunks – ignites.
The drunk person is insufferable, unpredictable, dangerous, threatening (to themselves and to you) but somehow he truly believes he is fine, normal, more than themselves, entitled and empowered by drink. Yet their self-loathing, bitterness, pettiness, nastiness erupts from them without ebb. And then suddenly, days or weeks later, in a fit of sobriety, they may apologize for what they did or said – but they don’t remember any of it and will repeat it, and worse, later. It’s a Jekyll and Hyde existence, and everyone else bears the burden and picks up the pieces.
In Douglas Stuart’s recent Young Mungo, which was good but struck too many similar chords to his earlier Shuggie Bain to be quite as original as I would have hoped, the strongest takeaway is the realism of the alcoholic mother and the fraught relationship with her children. While you did not get the same Jekyll and Hyde feel from the mother character, Mo-Maw, as you might get from real life alcoholics (I don’t recall meeting Mo-Maw sober in the book, after all), Stuart nevertheless comprehends exactly how the alcoholic lives the life of two distinct people:
“Mungo knew fine well that people had demons. Mo-Maw’s showed itself whenever she jangled for a drink. Her demon was a flat, eel-like snake with the jaw and beady eyes of a weasel and the matted coat of a mangy rat. It was a sleekit thing on a chain leash that shook her and dragged her towards things that she ought to be walking away from. It was greedy and it was cunning. It could lie dormant, wait for the children to leave for school, to kiss their mother goodbye, and then it would turn on Mo-Maw, throttle her as though she was some shivering mouse. At other times it coiled up inside her and sat heavy on her heart. The demon was always there just under the surface, even on good days. On the days that she gave in to the drink, the demon could be quieted for a while. But sometimes Mo-Maw could get so far in the drink that she would become another woman entirely, another creature altogether.”
Her utter hopelessness, selfishness and disregard for her own children is shocking, but worse than that – and this is the hardest part because I understand it so well – is how angry yet still loving the children are. She abandons them, she abuses them, she uses them, and yet despite their suffering at her hands, they keep taking her in and giving of themselves, cleaning up mess after mess.
Alcoholics and addicts will ruin your life and not think twice about it. And it’s a whole lot worse than a knocked-down Christmas tree.
