I grew up with a whole lot of non-alcoholics. I didn’t know any addicts until after I became one myself. This, I have learned, is unusual, since alcoholism and addiction are considered to be genetic.
I’d like to say I prove that theory wrong – but my grandfather was a falling-down drunk. I just didn’t know him; he died when I was a toddler.
Somehow I grew up in a mostly happy family. My parents were ridiculously nice and our only dysfunction came from the fact that they were barely legal adults when I was born. I was raised right. My two sisters and I were taught right from wrong; nobody lied, and we all did well in school.
So when I started to drink, it actually surprised my family. No one else in my immediate family ever had a problem with addiction.
When I started failing classes in ninth grade, everyone was shocked; I’d gotten straight A’s all the way through middle school. But then … I just quit trying. I got angry, and I decided that I was no longer going to follow my parents’ serene way of life.
To say “I got angry” sounds, now, like the understatement of the century. I raged for well over a decade. I blamed most of my anger on my parents’ decision to move me out of state when I was in 8th grade.
I’d lived in seven houses by 8th grade; I’d been to five schools. We’d been renting, but had finally bought a home. So I thought: we’re finally staying somewhere!
The new house meant I’d finally gotten away from the evil school bully, who’d made my life a living hell. There were kids all over my new neighborhood, and we skateboarded and hung out. I thought I finally had actual friends.
We lived there for six months. We left my beloved Westminster, Maryland just as I was finally starting to feel good.
So when I arrived in Blacksburg, Virginia, I stopped trying. I didn’t want new friends again. I didn’t want to go to yet another school. I went to a sixth school for the second half of 8th grade, and then – as luck would have it – I started high school in Virginia and graduated from high school in Pittsburgh.
I was pissed.
More than that, though, I was lonely. I was soul-crushingly, heart-wrenchingly lonely, and I thought my parents had taken away my friends. So I planned to “show them” – by destroying myself.
My parents’ first clue was probably the parent-teacher conferences where the word “potential” was used frequently. For the first time in my life, though, I decided not to try to live up to that potential. I somehow passed ninth and tenth grades with a slew of horrid grades; I retook math in summer school. Twice.
During the same years, I picked up my first drug and my first drink. Drinking let me wallow in all that anger, while simultaneously making the anger feel less obtrusive. And it made me feel like my potential didn’t matter. My grades didn’t matter. My life didn’t matter.
But drinking, when I started, also made me feel like my life was finally under my own control. I was finally choosing what I wanted to do, instead of following some script written by other people. I was making my own choices and taking my first step toward independence.
Little did I know that I was taking that first step at the top of a very slippery, million-foot-long, gleaming silver sliding board that was going to burn me the whole way down.
Even after I got clean, I never had a career. My excitement for jobs started with the interview and ended about three weeks after I’d started working. I didn’t stay anywhere for very long until I got sober – and even then, “long” meant “maybe a year.”
My first job, as a retail salesperson for The Gap, happened during the Christmas shopping season. I helped find jeans – then refolded and reshelved them – for harried, angry women. I hated this job.
But my second job was one of my all-time favorites: I worked at Kennywood amusement park. I sold french fries, pizza, fudge and candy, eating nearly as much food as I sold. Thrillingly, I worked “behind the scenes” at a place I’d always loved. Walking through the park before it opened was awesome.
After college I became a paste-up artist for the local Pennysaver, which was so fun – like playing Concentration all night. I was promoted to shift supervisor just before I was fired. (I couldn’t quite get to work by 5 p.m. anymore.)
Fortunately I was great at getting jobs; I just wasn’t very good at keeping them. The college cafeteria fired me because I threw away cake-covered forks instead of rinsing them. After a full year, ABC-TV fired me because I didn’t show enough enthusiasm in the mornings. The Gazette newspaper fired me – their star reporter – because I slept through a bank robbery. A local TV station fired me because I ran an old McDonald’s commercial instead of the new McDonald’s commercial (oops). And National Geographic Television fired me. I never really knew why.
It was easier quitting jobs than being fired.
I did data entry for many places. Once I left for lunch, got drunk, and never went back. (I never drank during work.) At another, I stayed for a year (sober). At still another, they required me to play video games for eight hours straight, but fired me when I called in sick.
Secretarial work suited me well: for years, I enjoyed working for Corporation for Public Broadcasting and The Carnegie Museum of Natural History. I also loved PAT transit.
I didn’t enjoy the construction company, J.C. Penney‘s buyers division, the addiction treatment office, hospital radiology, any “associations,” the leasing office in Watergate, the credit union, the retirement community, the real estate office, the home security company, or the window-selling company. Ironically, I sold windows from an entirely windowless industrial building.
I worked in a factory for exactly one day.
I sold hot dogs, nights at “The O”, for exactly two.
My favorite job ever lasted only three days: I worked with a locations scout for a movie that filmed locally. I can’t remember which movie.
My online freelance writing position had incredible perks. I also spent years designing brochures as marketing coordinator for interior decorators. I worked as a nanny and as a dog-walker. I edited books and magazine articles. I wrote pet food descriptions for an online retailer. I worked at conventions and conferences. I transcribed court transcripts for immigration attorneys. I worked with Time-Life creating educational resources.
I had tons of fun traveling to public schools and giving fundraising presentations to the masses. I handed out flyers for a non-profit in the nation’s capital, which was dreadful.
I had businesses petsitting, babysitting, writing, proofreading and transcribing.
I got my teaching certification then taught at summer camps, daycares and preschools.
Today I work as a substitute teacher and as a DoorDash driver. These are excellent choices for me because I can work and quit in the same day.
Truthfully, that’s how I like it.
When my friend, Sherry, suggested that we raid her parents’ liquor cabinet, I was 15. So we created rum and cokes made mostly of Coke, and we sipped them like schoolchildren at a tea party.
They were sweet and yummy, except for the alcohol. The burning in my throat was unpleasant, but I had a second drink anyway. At some point, my head started to feel a little tingly.
I thought: Is this what “drunk” means?
My friends were laughing raucously, so I guessed they were drunk. My tingly head didn’t seem sufficient to warrant the kinds of guffaws and hoots that emerged from my friends.
We each drank a third drink, still mostly Coke. The louder my friends got, the harder I tried to be loud. I wanted to feel whatever they were feeling. I wanted to be wild and free of inhibitions.
But I felt just like me. As usual, I could only pretend to be wild and free.
My friend, Frances, and I left Sherry’s house and rode our bicycles home; she was swerving all over the place, so I swerved, too. When we got to my house, I wrote in my diary – for Frances’ benefit – “I am so DRUNK!” Then we laughed and laughed.
But I still just felt tingly.
I wasn’t even particularly fond of the feeling. It just made me wonder if I hadn’t drunk enough. I wanted to drink more so that I could be crazy and fun like my friends. But that didn’t happen.
Instead, Sherry – whose liquor cabinet we’d raided – got really drunk after we left. She smoked cigarettes in the house and she drank more. When Sherry’s parents came home, they were livid. They called my parents and blamed me for being a bad influence. They said I couldn’t be friends with her anymore – and she was my best friend in the world.
My parents, likewise, didn’t believe me when I said I wasn’t drunk. For the first time (to my knowledge), my mother decided to read my diary to get “the truth.” Yes, I’d been drinking – still illegal and improper – but I’d lied in my diary. There was no way to explain: I was just trying to be cool for my friend. My parents forbid me from seeing Sherry again; they said she was a bad influence.
The next morning, Sherry and I went into the girls’ bathroom and cried together; we were in so much trouble. How could our parents keep us apart? They couldn’t! They simply couldn’t! We cried straight through first period.
When second period started, we realized we could be caught skipping class in the bathroom – so we left school and went to the nearby 7-11. We planned how we would confront our parents and explain that we needed to be together, that it was vital for both of us. We strategized until after third period – at which point, we didn’t have anything better to do, so we went to school.
Somehow the school administrators didn’t believe our stories – whatever they were – when we both walked in together at lunchtime. The school suspended us both for skipping classes. And that didn’t go over well with our parents, either.
So my first drink landed me in a world of trouble with my parents, led to my first (and only) high school suspension, and threatened a treasured friendship. And all I could think afterward was: I wasn’t even really drunk. At least I should have had more fun.
And that imaginary good time is the one I chased for the next ten years.
My alcoholism didn’t start with alcohol. My first “high” was due, in large part, to a candy striper.
Candy stripers were hospital volunteers. Working with sick people – and for free – sounded dreadful to me. Worse, they wore candy-cane-striped dresses, and I have never been the kind of girl to purposefully wear a dress.
Then I met Tikki, a free-spirited, old-soul hippie – the type of person I both idolized and feared. I would never have known Tikki was a candy striper except that one day, hanging out by the lockers, Tikki pulled a teeny tablet of phenobarbital from her pocket.
I guess candy stripers had access to the hospital medicine cabinets.
“You can’t take a whole one,” she said, her long frizzy hair swooping down over her hand, making it hard for the three of us to see the pill. “We’ll cut it.”
So we did – and I took the tiniest sliver of a drug I have ever seen in my life. I rarely even consumed baby aspirin at home, so I was terrified. I hope I don’t die, I thought, then swallowed it and went to class.
I slept through the entire afternoon of classes. Somehow I got home and fell asleep on the couch.
At dinnertime, the family piled into the car – we were going out to dinner! This rare treat was especially sad for me; I couldn’t stay awake long enough for dinner. I crawled into the back of the station wagon and slept while the family went inside to eat.
I heard my mother surmise: “She must be really tired,” implying that I had been working hard in school.
My guilt was overwhelming. I wanted to tell her I was afraid I might die, that I couldn’t lift my head off the floor. But I was afraid I’d get into trouble, so I said nothing. When we got home, I went straight to bed.
The next day, I went back to school, finally able to stay awake. “Getting high” seemed pretty awful to me. I thought, I will never take another pill again.
Mere minutes passed before I decided that other pills might be okay. I spent two years stealing pills from random medicine cabinets just to see what they did. Other than codeine, which I learned later was the equivalent of alcohol in a pill, I experienced no pleasant sensations from pills.
Most of the pills I took, I never even identified. With no internet, I just randomly popped pills with no clue. Nothing was as drastic as the phenobarbital – until someone gave me a Black Beauty. They said it would be fun. Ha! My heart beat out of my chest and I couldn’t stop panicking long enough to breathe. One Black Beauty finally frightened me enough to stop taking pills.
I’d thought pills were a safe way to get “high” without any outward signs that I was using them. But pills were too unpredictable.
Oddly, I didn’t even think about the danger incurred by taking unknown pills. I just wanted to be able to safely alter my mood – and I couldn’t do that after consuming some random tablet from some random house.
So at the ripe old age of 16, I quit taking pills altogether. Unless it’s absolutely essential, like antibiotics, I still avoid medication today.
There aren’t a lot of people in the world who understand addiction. Even addicts don’t really comprehend the magnitude of what is happening. But recovering addicts, like me, who have no choice but to figure it out and recover – or die – we do our best to understand.
When I first got sober, I decided that my life’s goal of working in movies and television would best be served by working at a tiny video rental store the size of a garage. My 80-year-old boss ran it single-handedly most of the time, so we got to know each other well.
So when I started yammering on about being an alcoholic, talking about how hard it was to quit and how different my life had become in such a short time, I was shocked by his rather angry response.
“If you choose to drink, you can choose to stop. It’s that simple.”
His disdain scorched me. It was the first time I realized that many people just don’t understand.
It never occurred to me, at the ripe old age of 26, that everyone in the world wasn’t exactly like me. Because it wasn’t that simple for me. In fact, I didn’t drink for more than two years, but I didn’t actually get sober until the week before my 28th birthday. Because choosing to stop and being able to stop were two different things for me.
I could go days and weeks without drinking, without drugs, if I wanted to stay clean. I didn’t usually want to, and I was rather grumpy when I did, but I could do it.
My problems only started when I had a few sips of alcohol. Once alcohol entered my system, the rest of my life became irrelevant. I wanted more. I needed more. I had to have more. There was no telling what I would say, what I would do, who I would become, or where I would end up in my search for more.
I was young and poor when I drank, so I went out to bars. Being female allowed me to get hundreds – probably thousands – of drinks for free. I only had to discard my morals and every shred of my dignity to keep that liquor flowing. So that’s what I did.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, it’s referred to as a “phenomenon of craving” which feels like a simplification. Not everyone who drinks is an alcoholic – so not everyone who drinks understands this phenomenon.
But I do.
I know that I could be having a beautiful time walking down the street and admiring the birds and trees, and then I’d crack open a beer and all the good would disappear. In what felt like minutes, I’d be lying in a ditch, swearing at those same beautiful birds.
I know that I woke up every day with a hangover that would only go away if I used a mood-altering substance to get out of bed. And that I never had anything left by morning so this became a horridly vicious cycle.
For me, understanding addiction comes down to one basic principle: once I start, I don’t want to stop.
Period.
So, for today, I choose not to start.
It’s been a long time since I started writing this blog. Dylan was in middle school, Shane in elementary, and both are now in college. So it’s been about nine years. In all that time, I tried to concentrate my efforts on writing about parenting and my experiences living with children with learning differences. I thought it would be helpful for other parents to hear about my ongoing struggles since both boys have issues.
But so do I.
With my empty nest looming and my site renewal complete for another three years, I am once again faced with a decision: do I keep this blog going? And if so, do I keep rambling about whatever is on my mind?
The thing is: my kids are the same age now as I was when I was terrorizing the household as a full-fledged alcoholic. So I have been thinking a lot about that. I think about what my parents survived, what I did to them, and what happened to me. I think it’s amazing that any of us got out of it alive.
I am an addict and an alcoholic; the terms, for me, are interchangeable.
Having just celebrated my 30th year of sobriety, it’s hard not to look back. At the same time, I realize that most people – probably 90% of the world’s population, actually – don’t have a drinking problem, and therefore don’t understand what it’s like to be an addict. Alcoholics and addicts are generally viewed as weak, sad troublemakers who should be able to control themselves.
Most importantly, even in active addiction, addicts are expected to stop hurting the people who love us. And I bet that there’s not a single addict in the world who doesn’t want to stop hurting people. But most of us don’t know how. We hurt other people without intent; we only hurt ourselves intentionally.
Most addicts haven’t figured out a new way to live – and denial in active addiction is powerful stuff.
Non-alcoholics generally believe that if they say the right thing, do the right thing, act the right way, live in the right place, spend more (or less) time with, or simply give more to someone in the throes of addiction, it will help an addict to recover.
In fact, it’s the complete opposite: no addict can recover as long as someone is trying to help. Every little thing done to “help” enables the addict to keep going, to keep believing that life can stay comfortable and sane in spite of the chaos they’re creating.
Basically, I had to be dropped on my head in order to get clean. It was the only way. It is the only way.
Of course, it’s only my story that I can tell; the rest of the world’s addicts will have to tell their own. So rather than randomly shift the focus of my blog from parenting to blabbering about my opinions, I thought I might give my six devoted readers some insight into what’s coming next. I plan to blog, now, about my alcoholism, addiction and recovery.
I am also giving my parents (two of my six devoted readers) a chance to run away, quickly, so as not to relive – or inspect – my alcoholism in this way. It wasn’t pretty. But I plan to blog about it and hope that it helps someone, somewhere.
I know it will help me. I’ve always thought I should write a book about my life, but I don’t have nearly enough self-discipline. So here goes: blog shift! I hope it works out okay.
If I stay sober today, tomorrow I will celebrate 30 years of sobriety. Officially, in my mind, this means that I’m an “old timer.” And being an old timer means I get special applause at Alcoholics Anonymous conventions. This was my only goal in sobriety, that someday I would get the special applause.
Newcomers often ask old timers, “How did you get 30 years of sobriety?” And old timers say: “You don’t drink and you don’t die.”
Quite honestly, that is how I got here. At this point in my life, I believe it was much easier to stay sober than it was to stay alive. It’s not that I’ve had so many (sober) brushes with death, but I’m kind of a hypochondriac.
So I didn’t drink and I didn’t die for three times longer than the bulk of my drinking. I was plastered between the ages of 15 to 25 – 10 solid years – and then I spent another three years wrestling with relapses.
In my head, this much sobriety can’t be possible. My mind races every day with things that happened to me during those 10 years. I have flashbacks; I have vivid memories. I never, ever, ever forget where I came from.
Remembering my past does not keep me from complaining about my first world problems – like a restaurant giving me the wrong pizza. In fact, remembering where I came from only means that I feel pretty grateful, underneath all the complaining, about 97% of the time. The other 3% of the time, I am so distracted by my complaints that I forget to be grateful.
I am reminded though, every night, that my life is a miracle. It’s really, truly a miracle. And I thank God for that.
Thirty years is a long time. I could never have stayed sober for that long. The only thing I did was stay sober for one day. And then the next day, I managed to do it again. I got a lot of help from AA, family and friends, but mostly from God.
Other than divine intervention, one simple principle saved my life: One Day At A Time. I can’t stay sober for my entire life! It’s unbearable, the thought of doing anything for my entire life. But for one day, I can do almost anything.
Every day, I make the conscious decision not to drink or do drugs. And I’ve made that decision for 10,956 days.
Sometimes, though, I had to break it down into smaller sections. There were days when I would watch the second hand go around on my clock – TICK TICK TICK – sometimes for hours. I watched that second hand not until midnight, because I wasn’t waiting for a new day. I watched until 2:00 a.m. because that’s when the bars closed.
That’s when I finally felt safe. From 2:00 to 7:00 a.m., I could rest.
I am aware of the insanity of such desperation – the near inability to hold myself back from consuming a substance that, for me, is poison. Fortunately I learned, as the days went by, how to be less obsessed with alcohol and more concerned with learning how to live without it.
For 30 years, in fact, I’ve been learning to live without alcohol. “Learning to live” – changing, growing, adapting, adjusting, fighting hard to grow up while not losing my childlike wonder. It’s been an awesome challenge.
Still, not dying was much harder. That’s the part over which I have absolutely no control.
Pizza and movie night – a time-honored tradition in our home – didn’t work out so well last week.
I splurged for “real Italian” food since their gluten-free pizza is the best around, and I am highly gluten-intolerant. Since Bill is trying hard to do less gluten himself, we ordered two gluten-free pizzas from an Italian trattoria 35-40 minutes from home. Bill picked it up on his way home from work.
Meanwhile, Shane – who was dog sitting – had to feed the dogs before picking up his own glutenous pizza at a shop much closer to home. I ordered it for him at 6:10 so that he could pick up at 6:45.
But when he arrived to pick up the pizza, it was after 7:00 – and the pizza was not there. Staff had never put in the order. The guy who answered the phone took my credit card number then, apparently, left for the night.
After a very convoluted phone call, we were able to get 50% off the price of the pizza that started cooking a full hour after it was ordered.
Bill and I were getting hungry by the time Shane got home at 7:45 – so we tossed our pizza into the microwave and sat down to eat. Bill, as always, had 42 toppings and melty cheese. My cheese, however, was not melty. In fact, it wasn’t right at all. I got a white pizza with no toppings and four kinds of cheese, so it should have been plenty melty.
I ate a whole piece, complaining about the cheese the whole time, before I realized that my pizza was not gluten-free. I hadn’t purposefully eaten gluten in years, yet I didn’t recognize a difference in taste. It was the thick, gooey texture that alerted me.
By this time, it was almost 8:00. I called and got the pizza for free, but I have to admit: I would have rather paid for the pizza and eaten it. Instead, and again … Cheerios were my only quick option.
By this point, I was nearly in tears over pizza.
Eventually I got sucked into the movie – Kimi, which was great – and forgot about my pizza. But afterward, while walking the dog, I had one recurring thought: Food can’t be my reward.
For two glorious days leading up to The Pizza Incident of ’22, I had eaten well. In fact, I’d eaten nothing but fruits, vegetables and nuts for two full days. And I ordered that pizza as a reward for good behavior.
So when my pizza arrived destined to make me painfully sick, my first thought was: I’ll go get ice cream.
But after two days of eating and feeling well, pizza and ice cream are not going to make me feel better. They are going to taste good and raise my cholesterol. They are going to ensure that I don’t lose a single pound no matter how much I exercise. Pizza and ice cream are not rewards. They are just foods, and they are foods that make me feel lousy.
But if feeling good were enough of a reward, I could just eat fruits and vegetables forever. Why do I constantly reward myself with something that makes me feel bad? I would really like to change this behavior.
When I was a kid, we had an enormous console stereo – six feet long, as big as a desk with speakers built into both ends. I’d carefully open the six-foot long lid and inside, miraculously, lived a radio, an 8-track player and a truly beloved turntable to play the albums that my dad brought home on special occasions.
At least twice, my dad brought home new Olivia Newton-John albums: Don’t Stop Believin’ and If Not For You. The liner notes included lyrics, which my dad would excitedly remove from the sleeve as the music started. Then he would read and sing along, as would I, from the beginning of Side 1 all the way to the end of Side 2. When Saturday came and Dad was home from work again, we’d repeat the process. I was 10 or 12 and I treasured these moments with all my heart.
I don’t confuse my love for my dad with my love for Olivia Newton-John, but growing up with her music added an emotional component to the way I felt every time I saw her name, watched her movies, or heard her speak. I watched Grease countless times, wanting to be Olivia, wanting to have that Australian accent, those leather pants, that blonde hair, that shy/sly smile.
It physically hurts to think that no one will ever see that incredibly bright smile again.
In the 80’s, Olivia had a slew of pop hits. The controversial Physical made #1 on the charts, but Make a Move On Me was my favorite from that decade. In homage to days gone by, I taught myself to play I Honestly Love You on the guitar – something that was incredibly difficult for me, since I am no musical genius like my kids. But that song touches my heart in a way very few can.
I know she didn’t write all of her own songs, but I remember thinking Have You Never Been Mellow was the solution to my friend, Bonnie’s, ailments – and then realizing that it was the solution to mine.
When Dylan was born, and again with Shane, Olivia’s Warm and Tender played on repeat – a full album of lullabies made especially for infants. I doubt that Dylan remembers his first year cradled in her music, but when the news broke that she’d died, Dylan texted me within minutes. His favorite ONJ song is Don’t Stop Believin’ – which he knows by heart, having been raised with the CDs of my dad’s albums.
We all knew she had cancer, that she was doing well, that she was in remission, and that it returned, that she was doing poorly, that she was a trooper until the very last moment of her very beautiful life of giving to those of us who did nothing but soak in that beauty.
Still it seems wrong, somehow, to outlive this person whose music was such a strong soundtrack for my life, for so many lives. It seems like she should have outlived us all. She gave me so much for so long.
There’s a line from A Thousand Conversations that made me cry when I was 12, when I thought my childhood was over and that I’d never be able to go back – which, of course, was true even then. I’d sing this song to myself at night, crying myself to sleep.
I suppose it’s more appropriate now than ever before.
“Guess it’s finally goodbye – seems we came so suddenly to the end of childhood dreams and the way things used to be.“
When Dylan was still in elementary school, we found a personal ADHD savior by the name of Kirk Martin, the man who founded Celebrate Calm. We learned that Dylan was built by design to be exactly like he is: brilliant and bouncy and extraordinary. Finally, we found an answer to parenting Dylan: allow him to be him, and stop trying to force him to be like everyone else.
This was hard for me – not because I didn’t love Dylan being Dylan, but because I am who I am. I am detail-oriented and organized and those characteristics have gotten me through many years of social confusion. It’s how I live, how I survive in a chaotic world; I take control of what I can.
I watched Dylan struggle in school because he forgot to do his work and then, when he did do it, he left it at home, lost it in his own backpack, or simply never turned it in. So I tried to help by introducing all the ways I knew to survive these issues. And Dylan, after many years of my attempts to help, decided that I was the problem because I was forcing him to do something that did not come naturally.
But I had Celebrate Calm in my back pocket. I introduced him to work-as-play. I taught him that it’s okay to be who he is, to do what is important to him. I spent years fighting the school system, explaining that he just needed to stand up and move around sometimes. I fought with principals and teachers and even other parents. I fought for the right for him to do things his way, while instructing him on how to play the game – even though he did things differently.
Dylan didn’t see me fighting for him. He didn’t see me stomping my feet in the front office. He didn’t hear my conversations with the principals. He didn’t watch me scour the internet for hours for answers that would allow him to be him. He didn’t do hours of research on private schools. He didn’t read the emails to the teachers. He didn’t go to the IEP meetings.
Now he doesn’t remember the times I gave him the ultimate freedoms to be himself, to learn to love himself for who he is, to do the things he loves most. He doesn’t remember the years we toured alternate schools, or how much he hated the private school that – finally – allowed him to be himself.
Dylan doesn’t remember begging me to let him go back to public school. He only remembers me telling him to do his homework and turn it in.
He doesn’t remember the four years of cheeseburgers, water parks, horseback rides and segway tours, when we were “looking at colleges.” He just remembers being forced to sit still, again, once he got there.
This might explain why Dylan said to me, while we were exploring Italy on our glorious two-week vacation: “Mom, would you back me if I dropped out of college? I just want to drive boats or work on a farm or something.”
I told him that I would back him no matter what he decided. But I reminded him that he is on track to graduate next summer, even though he took a semester off. And I reminded him that he might want to have that degree when he’s done driving boats and working on farms.
Dylan has decided to go ahead and finish college. Maybe he will actually drive boats afterward. I don’t care what he does; I just want him to have one more year to transition.
Dylan doesn’t know yet how hard it will be on his own.
