As Serenity Travels

As Serenity Travels: Alcohol and Violence







The air is so bare you can hear his voice break through trees. Alcohol sometimes talks and it sometimes sings. And tonight he has been drinking; he has been drinking a lot. He is singing “exactly like Hank Williams.” Samantha, a young Ojibwa girl has just jumped out of a secret window and is running towards the woods with her five siblings. The children will spend the night under the dark press of sky, frightened and abandoned in the vast shift of reason. As a child, Samantha and her siblings have witnessed her father come home in intoxicated states like these, only to later beat their mother, literally pull her hair and pour alcohol down her throat, or chase the woman with an ax around the house. When sober, he is attentive and loving, but in intoxicated states he is violent and uncontrollable, endangering his wife and six children.

The run that Samantha makes will repeat itself many times in her life, through sexual abuse, foster care, poverty, young motherhood, her own alcoholism, detox, jails, love and death. But the race for safe havens, peace and stability, did not start with Samantha, it started with violence. Samantha’s father’s struggled with post-traumatic stress after being involved in hand-to-hand combat as a Marine in the Korean War. It caused him to drink heavily, often and abusively. He beat her mother, neglected his children, and was most likely so filled with anger and rage and fear that he could not perceive what he doing. The war of countries soon became the battle of Samantha’s everyday life, the instability and abandonment of it, the many dangers that embodied her household and stayed latent inside the walls, the fear of her father that has her now, in her heart, running from her window to safety in the woods as a very young girl after she hears his voice break into the miles between past and future. And she runs. She runs.

He was obviously drunk and obviously dangerous. Samantha can look back now and touch this memory as if it was an explanation for most of her life: she became an alcoholic herself, she lived under the fear and anxiety of her childhood everyday, she could still hurt when she recalled it later. There is an explanation there that still has no answers. There is a song that is an emotion more than it just music.

It is a song by Corey Hart playing on the radio and Samantha is now a woman, sober with two children. Bruce, the love of her life and father is dead of cancer. Bruce and Samantha met when they were young and they shared all that love is: beautiful at times, hard, comforting, a struggle, a reason to live. He stayed with her through all their breakups, her battle with alcoholism and the repercussions of violence, and she stayed with him as he lay sick and dying of cancer for many years. They had children together. They shared good and bad life moments together. Bruce was almost still there after he died, in her room, in the Corey Hart song, encouraging her to get up and live for him even as she was making plans to die through a drug induced suicide after he was gone. That was it; his death seemed like all she could ever handle. After molestation, domestic violence, addiction, losing her children sometimes to foster care, losing Bruce at times to her own doubts she could not take any more pain. She could not take the hurt anymore.

Alcohol and drugs by a guardian is involved in 7 out of 10 child abuse and neglect cases (Drug Strategies: Millennium Hangover, 2002). Statistically speaking in 75% of spousal abuse cases the aggressors were reported as being drunk (Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2002). Violence not only carries from adult to child, it extends, from the beginning of oppression, illusion and abuse to today, where on any given day an anonymous person is struck with the grave realities of violence in its many facades, alcohol and drug abuse being a major contributing factor to aggressive acts of violence and crime in the United States.

A drunk driver may not under normal circumstances injure innocent people, but may be found in a court case because he has hurt someone in a crash. An inner city kid who is a victim of poverty may not taken out of his environment be a criminal, but because drugs are illegal he is involved in a criminal situation, and has been sentenced to jail. As of December 31, 2006, 72% of the inmates under the New York State Department of Correctional Services custody were identified as substance abusers. Samantha’s father may be a good man while sober, but in drunken rages he became violent and hurtful, harming his wife and his children. The violence he once endured filtered to his children, who would get drunk when young and fight out their frustrations.

Samantha met Bruce when she was thirteen, and loved him into her adulthood. The couple had two children, a son and a daughter. The family later sadly resonated the hardship she her self suffered, both children being put in and out of foster homes while Samantha was charged with neglect. Bruce died and Samantha lay on his bed, planning to take enough cocaine to end her own life. Samantha struggled with alcoholism and cocaine addiction, domestic violence and sexual abuse, for most of her early life. When born, she had many forces against her. She is from the Ojibwa tribe, an Indian tribe around Minnesota, born into a family stricken with alcoholism, abuse and poverty. Coming from an endless cycle of violence and addiction, she often reacted to her rage with more anger, more addiction, more hurt. It is the same painful story that many families that come from addiction face, a revolving suffering that passes from parent to child until the cycle is broken.

Her father’s experiences with war led him into a more harmfully profound alcoholism, as he abused her mother, Samatha experienced the long effects of that kind of violence and used alcohol herself to relieve her from the anxieties and stresses that violent acts bring. But there is hope; there is hope in everything. Samantha became sober, she works as an alcohol counselor and shares her experiences with others that have suffered with addiction and she became dependent on a spiritual program to end the pains that alcohol once started. The past never changed but as she changed her future looked like something she might want to live for: her kids, her job, a good life, a sober life.

There is a song that reaches from then to now, from a deep source that harbors human sorrow to the liberation of harmony and spirit. It may once sing like Hank Williams, within a lonelier tremble of memory and sound, and begin again in a tired bedroom, the music finding you, hope belonging to just a few notes that match the enduring heart. Samantha is now sober. The promise of a future full of all its detailed sadness and beauty touch every moment in her life, it is a hope that helped many others who have struggled with similar journeys. Just a little more time is all we're asking for/ Cause just a little more time could open closing door/ So if you're lost and on your own/ You can never surrender. The violence must stop somewhere. But Life continues. New songs are forgotten and remembered, cried to or there to offer a sense of joy. Still there is a place that remains vacant. It is in today, taken from yesterday. It is in a better life. It is in hope.



HAPPY HOURS: Alcohol in a Woman's Life, Devon Jersild, Cliff Street Books, An Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers; February 2000