FormerDoormat

I remember a little boy who walked to the local saloon to spend time with his alcoholic father.

I remember a five-year-old child who's father succumbed to alcoholism leaving his mother to care for five young children.

I remember a mother who worked as a cook as her first job and worked as a receptionist in a doctor's office as her second job and struggled to feed her five children.

I remember five young children who stayed home alone tending for themselves while their mother worked and worked and worked.

I remember a little boy who'd find his mother sitting at the kitchen table crying inconsolably after peaking inside every cabinet and finding all of them bare and weaping at the thought that soon five little faces would be looking to her and expecting dinner.

I remember a young boy who was tied to the front porch as a form of punishment while all the neighbors walked by and said, "poor boy," yet did nothing.

I remember a young boy who delivered newspapers every morning and gave every cent he earned to his mother to help put food on the table.

I remember a young teenager who worked summers as a landscaper and was asked to wait outside in the back of a pick-up truck while the other white landscapers went inside to eat.

I remember a young man who saw signs on restaurants and bathrooms and drinking fountains that said "whites only."

I remember a young man who society treated as less than human.

I remember a man who struggled for equality, who was denied equal rights and equal pay.

I remember a man who came to believe that he was less than a man.

I remember a man who found his youngest sister dead at the age of 18 in a hotel room after an overdose of drugs.

This man learned how to ease his pain in the only way he knew how. He drowned out the pain with alcohol.

Then one day, along came a woman, 15 years his junior who had a priviledged, carefree, and happy childhood free from addiction of any kind. A woman who's only knowledge of segregation came from old TV clips and books at school. A woman who'd never struggled for anything in her life until, that is, she struggled to understand her man's need to drink.

That man was Richard, my alcoholic partner for the last 24 years. A really special and wonderful man who many would ignore and perceive him as less than equal and missed out on knowing a truly gentle, loving soul--a soul that's much too fragile for this world.

This is the pain he feels when he's sober, and this is the pain he tries so desperately to sooth with alcohol. I wish I could reach back in time to the 1950's, long before I was born, and hug that little boy and tell him that he's worthy of love, equal treatment, a good job, respect, and happiness. But I can't do that any more than I can reach beyond his alcoholism and tell him that he is perfect just as he was and just as he is.

That's the best explanation I can give on what it must be like to need alcohol to survive.