When you understand you can't go back ho

I turned 15 years old the month before the Thanksgiving Day of that year and had been living on the streets since the previous April when my father, drunk, drove a knife into my leg and tossed me out of the house where I lived with him, my mother and nine brothers and sisters. I stopped years later asking why my father did what he did to me because the "answer" would not have undone it or repaired the ruins and, as a matter of truth, became irrelevant after my own years of drinking and finally getting into AA and beginning the brutal process of recovery (at least it was for me). But, at age 14, I learned that alcohol suppressed the inhibitions I had against doing what I also learned I could do to survive on the streets - including whoring myself to women and men for a place to sleep or something to eat. And if I had to give myself sexually to whoever picked me up and offered a bed, so it was for the cost of survival. And in using alcohol as a means to an end, I understood years later that, at age 14, I had established a psychological dependence on booze - by clinical definition, an addiction.

Even at age 14, I received mail and, not long after I hit the streets as an "orphan," I filled out a change-of-address form at the post office to have my mail sent to the home of my aunt - my mother's sister. For reasons of her own, my aunt was jaded by "family holidays" and, divorced and with no children of her own, she treated holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas as just another day. I went to her house that Thanksgiving Day after I left the house of a guy who picked me up the night before and had sex with after I bolstered myself with three or four shots of whiskey he gave me. At my aunt's house, she handed me a week's worth of mail and, in it, I found something intended for my father. Strangely, instead of leaving or tossing my father's mail, I remember even now thinking it might be something important and decided to walk to my old house and give it to him. Before I left her house, my aunt told me in her tell-it-like-it-is "diplomacy" that I reeked of booze and body odor and to come back for a bath and something to eat.

I walked the approximate five miles from my aunt's house to my old home on that exceptionally cold and blustery Thanksgiving Day and, when I got to my old house, my mother let me in. My father was sitting in a recliner chair with a plate piled high and some of my brothers and sisters were huddled around a coffee table in the living room watching TV with my father and eating what looked to be a traditional Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy and so on. From the night I left them seven months earlier, I knew my mother was shattered that my father threw me out but couldn't protect me because of the physical threat to her and her other children. Some of my younger brothers and sisters seemed genuinely happy to see me that "family holiday," but the older ones were non-reactive. My father said nothing to me, and I simply gave my mother his mail that had been delivered to me with the request that she give it to him. It wasn't until my mother invited me to stay and have some dinner that I became aware of how I felt standing in my old home for the first time since I left it with a knife in my leg and my father's drunken screams that I was a "f**kin' faggot" and had "better be in a goddamn casket" the next time he saw me.

"No, thanks," I answered my mother's invitation to stay and, at the same time, feeling for the first time that the house where I grew up in was, indeed, no longer my home, feeling that the people still living there were not my "family." That moment when a person is slapped with the truth of any reality, in my case in the old saying that "you can't go back home," can be, I suppose, devastating. For me, however, it was coming face-to-face with a cold fact simply to be dealt with, an affirmation of a feeling I had since the night I hit the streets that there would be no going back home, that I would never again live in the house I grew up in and, even if I did, that it wasn't "home" anymore. I stood in the doorway of my old house - no longer a home - that Thanksgiving Day for no more than a couple of minutes and left with the feeling - factual knowledge - that I had lost a home and a family. Even today, years later, I remember leaving my home and family for the last time and, curiously, feeling nothing, no emotional sense of loss - just another fact in my life to be acknowledged - that I could never go back home again.

And I never did. When I ran into my parents and my brothers and sisters, we interacted as people who simply knew each other, never as "family." As the years passed, I got off the streets and into my own series of apartments, and any feelings I might or should have had about how my life had gone up to then became insignificant because of my own drinking; by age 24, I had long before become alcoholic and it was at that age when the only way I knew to stop drinking was by attempting suicide.

Today, both my parents and all my brothers and sisters are dead and, by the time most of them began to die, by the grace of God and AA, I had a number of years of sobriety under my belt. I was even in the hospital rooms when my mother and some of my siblings died and, most recently, in January 2008 in my older sister's home when she succumbed to her three-year fight with breast cancer. She was the last of my 10 brothers and sisters to pass on. I ran into my father in the mid-1980s at a shopping mall; we said nothing and simply passed each other, and I only learned of his death some 16 or 17 years years later when my sister phoned me to tell me he had died.

In my advice today to alcoholics who are still drinking and reach out to me for help, I warn them that they still have much to lose when they tell me they have nothing left to lose. If they have kids and a spouse, yes, I say, they have more to lose than they realize and, once they are lost, even if a reconciliation comes somewhere down the road, some of us cannot go back home.