ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Chapter 193: The Hand-Me-Down

I didn’t know anything about addictions when I married Ernie, who stopped drinking eight years before we met. I didn’t know that addictions are often handed down from generation to generation. I didn’t know that any substance or behavior we become addicted to we use as a numbing agent — to block emotional pain.

Back then I thought alcoholics carried an x factor in their blood that made alcohol both poisonous and addictive for them. I thought this x factor was handed down in the genes. I worried that our son would inherit this x factor, as had Ernie and Ernie’s father and Ernie’s grandfather.

Ernie’s grandmother ate to excess. Food was her booze and church her comfort zone. At DeHaven Baptist Church, she gave witness to her husband’s drinking and her children’s wicked ways. At this very minute, my husband is at home playing the piano and singing so loud even the neighbors hear. My oldest son and my oldest daughter drink to excess, and my middle daughter has married a Catholic! Please pray for them.

Ernie’s grandmother didn’t ask for prayers for her own addiction because she didn’t acknowledge it, yet she over-ate for the same reason her husband and son and daughter drank: to numb out, to run away from whatever emotional pain she didn’t want to acknowledge or feel.

What’s the answer, I ask myself, to my own relationship addiction?

Get to the source of the pain. Feel it.

My pain? Abandonment. The pain of feeling unloved and alone.

Ernie wrote as one way to sustain himself. “Without it, I would turn to dust and blow away,” he wrote in his memoir. I guess I’m doing the same thing. Except I hope this writing helps me acknowledge and, little by little, release my emotional pain and somehow begin to love myself.

Because Ernie’s not here to love me.