Ice That Gathers…

 “What is this ice that gathers ‘round my heart?

To stop the flood of warmth before is even starts.

It would make me blind to what I thought would always be.

The only constant in the world for me.”

~Lyrics by Toad the Wet Sprocket

Fourth of July, 2020. Holidays are normally rough in the household where an alcoholic resides. Like most other days, the other residents have no idea what to expect. It all hinges on the whim of a brain disrupted by alcohol.

We weren’t having fun that day. It was in the middle of a pandemic. We couldn’t go anywhere. The alcoholic was busy getting drunk and then getting increasingly mean. At some point later in the day he asked me to bring him to get cigarettes. This happens a lot. Once he’s too drunk to drive. I become the errand girl.

“Go get me cigarettes!”

“I want candy!”

“Everyone wants ice cream, just go get it!”

It doesn’t matter if I want to go or not. It doesn’t matter if my kids don’t feel like getting dragged back into the car. If I refuse to go, he will start spewing hateful insults and verbal abuse. 

That Fourth of July, I refused to go. He started screaming that I was a bitch and a cunt. And this was the day he said the thing that forever altered how I felt about him. He said

 “Your father died without anything to be proud of you for.”

For the sake of making it stop, I got my kids into the car, the alcoholic went to get into the car, and ended up breaking the trunk of my car in the process and continued to verbally abuse me all the way to the store, and all the way back. 

I dropped him off at home and went to the only place I could think to go…

My father’s grave.

I sat sobbing over his grave stone on that Fourth of July, while my kids played in the dirt of an adjacent freshly filled grave. The remains of the physical form my father used to inhabit lay in a coffin 8 feet below me. The man whose help I needed most unable to help me. 

I stopped suddenly. The lyrics I quoted at the beginning of this post running through my head. I began to feel this deep, dark coldness. One of the very few people I told about this incident said:

“You’re father was there, Samantha. There to inspire you.”

If he was there, it certainly was not to inspire me. It was to push me into the deadly, calm, cold rage that I would need to stand in the face of the demon I lived with and not crumble. To fortify me with the the coldness and detachment that I would need to protect my children against the Mr. Hyde side of their father. 

I gather that ice to defend myself against any moment of warmth I may feel for the alcoholic who is trying to destroy me.

I will not go down, and neither will my children. I have enough ice gathered to withstand whatever fires he tries to start.