The power of addiction

I think we all know how powerful addiction can be but Mary Karr describes it in a unique way in her chapter titled, " No Mom is an Island." In this part of her Memoir she reflects on how she battled the same addiction with alcohol that her Mom tangled with daily. Mary describes wrangling with her disease and losing the tussle time and time again. Her denial was powerful. I guess we all battle with denial when it comes to painful things about ourselves that we don't want to face. I love her candid honesty. Mary reveals how she chooses booze first before caring for her sick son.

On page 160 she recounts a time when her infant son was very sick. But how her sickness was even greater. " But before I change him, before I squirt the syrupy acetaminophen into his mouth, I haul him whooping down the stairs to the kitchen. I open the stove where a near empty bottle of Jack Daniels squats like the proverbial troll under the bridge. Needing neither glass nor ice, I press my lips to the cool mouth, and it blows into my lungs so I can keep on." Mary wanted so badly to stop the elements of the disease but it was as if she had no control over her impulses. The alcohol ruled.

To hide her abuse from her husband she would often drive around at dawn dumping bottles in various trash cans in her suburban neighborhood so he could never fully realize how much she was consuming. As she continues to want to quit she finds herself trapped in a cycle she can't exit.

On page 171 she describes the power of this addiction,"I keep getting drunk. There's no more interesting way to say it. Only drunk does the volume crank down. Liquor no longer lets me bullshit myself...it shrinks me to a plodding zombie state in which one day smudges into every other- it blurs time." Later on this page she writes, " I'm surprised by my own shitfaced state...I once more, with feeling-take the pledge to quit drinking. Cross my heart. Pinky swear to myself. This is it, I say, the last night I sit here.

But of course this is just the start of her stopping. She's stuck against the power of addiction and denial.