I suspect it is a siren song for many alcoholics, because most of us cherish an impossible dream. Perennially immature as long as we drink, we share with true children an unshakable faith that, if only we find the magic word, we will get the moon for Christmas. Like children, we are prone to tears and tantrums when we don’t. Our tears and tantrums require special medication—and all the prescriptions contain a high percentage of alcohol.
In the motion picture “Days of Wine and Roses”, the alcoholic wife is unable to stop drinking because, she explains, the world is so ugly when you see it sober. I had no trouble identifying with that excuse.
During the years of my sobriety, I have been one of the lucky ones who seldom think of a drink; but if I like, I can remember what drinking did for me in the early days, the good days. I can remember the release, shyness dissolving, love welling up toward everyone, even myself. I stopped judging and criticizing; the self-defensive chip fell from my shoulder and left me weightless and free; the moon was mine at last, shining silver in my arms and worth whatever it cost!
The only trouble is that inflation sets in early in the impossible-dream market. Too soon, for alcoholics, the price skyrockets; the modest hangover escalates to a day home from work, to several days home, to lost job, lost family, accidents, hospitals, jails.
“Why don’t you just stop drinking?” our nonalcoholic friends ask when they see our situation. We shrug, and we smile with the charm most alcoholics can muster when necessary, and we change the subject quickly. But in the dank miasma of the pre-dawn sweats, when we lie sleepless and sick in the rumpled sheets, we ask ourselves the same question, and we cannot reply.
In my opinion, there is an answer—an answer we don’t want to face because sobriety also has a high price tag: We must give up the impossible dream.
For each of us, the impossible dream differs. For one, it may be great wealth; for another, a dramatic rise to fame. For me, it was a world in which love, joy, beauty, and truth (to name a few things) were the rule, not the exception. But for all of us who cherish the impossible dream, it has one common denominator: It is, as the name indicates, a totally unrealistic demand for perfection in one form or another, and it requires of its disciples a fanatical devotion that permits no compromise. We will not settle for less, and we are proud of our refusal.
We look with amused or bitter condescension at the lowly earth people who actually enjoy the mediocrity of their surroundings, their friends, their jobs, their children. Not for us, we say (going to mix another drink); at least we have the perception to spot the manifold flaws in our environment and the sensitivity to be miserable over them. Never let it be said that we are so lacking in discrimination that we would permit ourselves to enjoy imperfection. So we stagger through the dreary drunken days in pursuit of the impossible dream, worshiping with narcissistic preoccupation our steadfast rejection of the world around us.
Listen to the words of that song the next time you hear it. If they still move you—as they sometimes do me—watch out! Unless you happen to be a nonalcoholic masochist, you are heading for trouble.
After a reasonable number of 24 hours, I have begun to realize certain truths. It is not admirable to rush in where angels fear to tread; it is stupid and self-destructive. It is not heartwarming idealism to hate life for its imperfections; it is rank ingratitude. It is not intellectual superiority to single out the shortcomings of the world; it is self-inflicted, selective blindness. Throughout my drinking years (and for the first arrogant months of my sobriety), I had a field day judging, condemning, and hating. I had to get drunk to escape being poisoned by my own venom.
Eventually I had to free myself from the impossible dream of a perfect world in order to love and accept the real world. Judged by human standards, life is not perfect; to demand perfection of it is asking the impossible. Life is an incredible totality that ranges from good to evil, from beauty to horror, from bliss to agony. One extreme cannot exist without the other. There would be no music if high C were the only note, no art if spectrum red were the only color, no joy in pleasure if pleasure were the only feeling—and, paradoxically, there would be no perfection without imperfection.
What does this mean to me? Well, first it means that I don’t have to be perfect. All I have to do is grow at a pace natural to me—and that is all I have a right to expect of others. If I can remember these truths, then love—real love, as opposed to drunken sentimentality—is finally within reach. It is not stupid to accept myself and others complete with our imperfections. It would be stupid not to.
It means that I am free to like and enjoy what I have. I don’t need to exhibit my high values by hating my rowboat for not being a yacht, my house for not being a palace, my child for not being a prodigy. In all aspects of my actual life, there is room to grow. More important, my appreciation of what they are now has room to grow. Perfection would limit me; imperfection offers me the freedom of a million potentials. All the excitement and interest and wonder of adventure are mine to explore, ever-new, ever-changing, ever-becoming.
Thank God, as a result of AA and sobriety, I am liberated from dreaming the impossible dream and free, finally, to start living the possible dream.
J.W., Islamorada, Fla.
Children
March 1980
Last night, our meeting took a turn into a familiar subject: our kids, the monsters. I had gone to that meeting hoping to raise the topic of our children, but in quite another context. I was thinking about my daughter, prompted by a magazine article I had read concerning alcoholics’ children who grow up looking good and acting perfect and then, later in their lives, begin to fall apart. What seems at first to be their healthy self-reliance proves to be unhealthy loneliness brought on by a parent or parents who could never be trusted. I was hoping we could discuss this—see, perhaps, whether there were danger signs in our own children, ask ourselves what we might do to heal such an injury. The meeting never did get around to this; but for me, the topic was far from closed.
When I came home, my wife told me, with some emotion, of a conversation with our six-year-old daughter earlier in the evening. She had asked our little girl to be especially kind and patient with Ben, her fellow first-grader, who lives on our block. Ben’s mother, she explained, has a crippling disease that keeps on getting worse, and she cannot do most of the things that other mothers do. Ben has talked about his mother’s sickness, and he knows that she’ll never get better. He probably thinks of it a lot and gets sad and frightened, and that is why he seems to be hurt so easily and cries a lot.
Our daughter seemed to understand immediately, and this was her response: “Oh yes, I know. Remember when Daddy was sick and you both would argue so loud at night? I would go into the bathroom by myself and just cry and cry—and I was so scared!” And then, after a thoughtful pause: “It sure is lucky that you both had things you could get better from!”
I had no idea that such a thing had ever happened even once, let alone repeatedly. But that is not so surprising, for in my drinking, I had become totally insensitive to everyone and everything about me, and the blackouts wiped away what few thoughts I had. But we were surprised that my wife had not seen the child run from the room to hide. And why had she waited all this time to say anything about it? It hurts me to accept the obvious explanation: Her memory was triggered because her feelings on those awful nights were as terrible as those she thought Ben must have at seeing himself being left more and more alone, looking with dread toward the time when that abandonment would be total.
These thoughts came tumbling out, along with a flood of painful memories. Painful they will always be, but thank God, they are kept from being bitter memories by one thing—the new life that the AA program has given to all three of us. My disease has been arrested. As my daughter said, it is something I could “get better from.”
I don’t pretend to have a perfect understanding of her young mind on this or any other topic, but last night did give me a fresh insight. On our vacation last year, I spent one of our precious evenings in Paris getting to a meeting at the American Church on the Quai