Reality

As most parents of college age children know, this is an incredibly stressful time for the entire family.
Bob and his brother were Stanford Grads and so were some of their cousins. His daughter was very smart and spent every summer going to summer school just to make sure that her GPA was really high. A method that I never knew about before.

If you take classes in summer it's easier and faster to complete the essential classes and during the school year you can do all the extra curricular stuff that is so important on your college applications.

Well Bob's daughter had her mind set on going to Brown. She fell in love with it.
She did not get in, but she did get into Stanford.
One morning she called her dad and asked him if he could please call her grandfather to find out if she had been accepted. Her Grandfather had been a large contributor to Stanford and had asked someone high up in admissions to keep track of her application.
Bob called his dad and that's when we learned the great news. His daughter had been accepted into Stanford. He immediately phoned her to give her the good news. It was only hours before the mail had come so she knew a little bit in advance.
The entire family was so happy.

Her Grandfather was having a Passover dinner the next day and we brought balloons to the house to congratulate her achievement. Well, instead of being happy, she of course was upset. She told us all that we should have never given her the news of her acceptance. I was stunned. We did not offer to find out in advance. She called her father and asked him to find out.

She told me that her mother was upset by her father telling her. Whether she admitted to her mom that she called him I will never know. This was normal behavior for her. Her dad did what she asked of him and then she would turn it against him.
This was not the first time that the tables had turned against Bob. Right before his daughter turned 16 her mom was out of town so she asked her father if he would take her to look for cars. He was really happy she wanted him to take her.
It was agreed that her grand-father and her father would get her the car of her choice. So off they went to look.

I got a call later that afternoon and Bob told me he had made a great deal on the car that his daughter picked out. We were all so excited. His dad had agreed to pay a certain amount so it came to a little over that and Bob just paid the rest.

They got the car to her house. We were all thinking that everyone would be so excited, but not in this family. Her Mom and step dad were really upset with him. I guess her step father wanted to go pick out the car and just have them pay for it.

When her Mom called I told her it was no problem we would just keep the car in our garage and then they wouldn't have to deal with it, if they were so upset. I never heard another thing about it. But for the rest of the time she had the car, a brand new Toyota Celica, convertible, they referred to it as the piece of shit car.
What ingrates. I know they wanted her to get a BMW, but they forgot that it was his daughter's choice not theirs. She picked it out her Dad didn't.

So when everyone was so upset with the news of her admittance into Stanford we should have not been surprised that there would be conflict once again. He could do nothing right, no matter what it was, and she always sided with her mother's opinion not ever caring how it affected her father.

How could such a wonderful moment be turned into a bad thing? That was his daughter in a nut shell. He could do nothing right in her eyes. On several occasions I tried to find out what the hell she was so upset about. I think it always came down to whatever her mom said. If her mom didn't agree, she held it against her father.
I guess no matter how book smart a person is, the ignorance is still there.

She simply could not separate one parents opinion from the other. One's opinion was written in Gold the other's was nothing except BAD. I now know that there is so much more to the anatomy of this kind of thinking. It is the product of a very confused child that needs help figuring out how to think for herself without anyone swaying her thoughts. Years of therapy have not been able to accomplish this either.

After a while it all calmed down, but this event left an indelible mark on our lives.
It was now so clear that even though Bob had not had one drop of liquor pass his lips he still had not been forgiven for past "Sins" nor would he ever be. He started to distance himself emotionally from her. It was etched into his brain that all she needed was cash to buy things and do whatever she wanted that her Mom didn't want to pay for. It is when the phrase "The Human Credit Card" started to be thrown around by Bob when referring to his daughter. He would say, "I'm just a human credit card to her. He was right.

She never called to see him to just hang out with him,but she would call me at times and ask me if I wanted to go shopping with her. That translated into getting whatever she needed, put on her father's credit cards without him having to be there to annoy her. I admit most men don't want to stand around watching a teenage girl try on clothes for a couple of hours, plus we had our son along always and he didn't have any patience after a while. How terrible of me to go along with it. I'm ashamed of myself for not doing the right thing.

I simply was tired of fighting with Bob about his family. At various times things would come up and I was always defending someone in his family to him. It was never ending. He began to have major resentments which was definitely not good for his sobriety.

I loved his family and I could never begin to heal his demons about his past actions and how they affected everyone around him. Even his years of sobriety had not gained him the respect I think he wanted more than anything from his family. It was never going to happen. He lost their respect many years ago. He had slipped from the "Golden Boy" the the family waiting for him to get drunk again.

He would sit on the sofa in our room night after night and chain smoke. I could see the wheels turning in his mind. Lost in his thoughts sometimes not even able to hear me call him or ask him a question. Our son and I used to laugh and say "Earth to Bernie" as I like to call him. Lights were on and no one was there. Many nights he would call his daughter just to hear her voice. But what he really needed was a real relationship with her. She wasn't really interested in spending time with him.

This was the beginning of him dropping his cigarettes and burning holes in the pillows, the sofa and even one night he started the bed and the carpet on fire.

At the time I did not realize what was going on. He had started taking Valium, given to him by his doctor for a very serious back problem. He had gone through a major back surgery and he was still in a lot of pain.

We had turned a new chapter in our lives. One that is even more insidious than the drinking. It is non detectable, you can't smell it. Bob wasn't stumbling around but make no mistake, he was not Sane and Sober.
Because of his addictive personality, the pills just started to replace the alcohol.
He was now obsessed with his pills. We couldn't leave the house without him counting how many pills he had in a little bottle just in case he needed them.

Later I would learn that he had several doctors to give him duplicate prescriptions.
What most people don't know is how easy it is to get several doctors to give you whatever you want when you have a real issue. His bad back was real. So was his addiction. He needed more and more just to feel better. There was no shortage of doctors willing to give him what he wanted.

At this time Bob was working on his Black Belt in Karate with our son and a friend of his. They rented an office at the Studio and went in several times a week. They were writing a screenplay together. His friend was very high strung and Bob would say that he needed the Valium just to be around him. Then he would say he was tense around his Dad and Brother. There was always a reason to take a Valium.

He would get hurt during Karate Classes and started going to the Emergency room afterwards for a cracked rib, broken nose etc. I begged him to stop karate. We fought about that a lot. I saw a pattern taking shape here. Get hurt, go to a doctor or hospital. Get a shot of Demerol or whatever and get sent home with pain pills. It is not a new thing. Many people have figured this one out. Doctors are like legal drug dealers to some addicts. They get what they want and they cannot get into trouble with the Law for it.

No one was taking into consideration the damage all the pills were having on Bob's memory, moods or even the fact that his body seemed to be creating more pain so that he could take more and more pills.