Slow Motion Sharks

What it's like to love an addict

Kara S. Anderson

Jan 19, 2025

TW: addiction/alcoholism

I had a dream last night that I had to choose between keeping an arm or a leg.

Both were injured and doctors could only save one and so they asked me to choose and I hated them for it.

Can’t you do this one thing, I wanted to scream.

Isn’t this part of your job?

Can’t you see that I’m scared and hurting? That I’m in no position to make choices?

Part of the problem was my husband had hesitated in taking me to the hospital after some horrible but nonspecific hazy dream accident.

He waited because he didn’t know how to help me.

How to save me.

He couldn’t figure out what I needed and so he did nothing at all.

Something happened this weekend, and I don’t know how to talk about it yet, because my default is to protect people I love, even when they don’t deserve it.

Even when it breaks me apart.

How is this:

~~A family member outside my house who I love very much started drinking again after a long stretch of sobriety.~~

Writing that, it occurs to me that my son doesn’t really live here anymore, so that phrasing doesn’t work.

So how do I preserve anonymity, but still share just how much this is shredding my heart?

Do I refer to this person as “extended family?”

“Non-nuclear family?”

Therapy circles like to use the phrase “family of origin.”

I first heard that term from the same therapist who told me that the average alcoholic tries to quit 8-11 times.

That was around 2010.

My kids were 3 and 6.

And it had already been 17 years since the first time I told this person I thought they might have a problem with alcohol.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to help this person quit drinking.

The last time was probably the most desperate. They almost died.

After navigating the chaos of the emergency room, asking a nurse to check blood alcohol levels and seeing the doctor finally connect the dots, I spent days sitting next to a hospital bed.

I tried to feed this person like a mama bird feeding her baby - offering tiny bites of soft food; only to hear I ruined everything because their spouse was finally coming to get them and would be angry that they wouldn’t be hungry for take-out.

The nurses never saw that spouse. Neither did the team of doctors who checked in with me once a day.

Following yet another tearful one-man intervention, and days of calls trying to navigate insurance and learning rehab centers are mostly an option only on TV shows, an occupational therapist tried teaching me how to help this person walk around the house using a belt with an attached safety tether.

I understood the confusion - I was the one who was there.

Certainly I would provide aftercare, right?

But I hadn’t been inside this person’s house in years.

Not until yesterday, when I found myself in their entryway, sobbing and unable to form words. Unable to articulate the timeline that had made me suspect a “slip.”

We talk all the time, but when had I first noticed something was off?

Was it mid-December? Earlier?

I don’t know if “slip” is the technical term for an addict starting to use again.

I tried three different Alanon groups and for me, they felt like circles of defeat.

A former friend in another state said Alanon saved her marriage, though.

Who knows. I haven’t talked to her since 2020.

Either way, I know that a slip is more than that.

Another friend once shared this quote from her recovering alcoholic father-in-law:

“If I have a drop of vodka on Monday, it’s a bottle of vodka by Friday.”

Because alcoholism is an addiction.

It’s a disease, although as Chris Rock famously said, it’s the only one you can get in trouble for having.

But I want to tell you what it feels like to me, loving an addict:

It’s like watching a slow motion shark attack.

Your loved one is swimming, when from your spot in the sand, you see a shark in the water.

And so you race along the shore like a nervous dog, shouting, yelling, gesturing, feeling the waves lap your toes.

But you can’t swim.

You don’t know how to do this.

Still, you step into the water, inching into the sea, and that’s when you realize that there are sharks everywhere.

It’s like Shark Soup.

And so you scream and cry, and gulp at the air. You step in and out of the water a thousand times.

You summon the courage to enter the churn, but you have so many wide-open wounds.

You are chum.

Instantly, the sharks are on you and you have to run back to shore, so you collapse on the beach trying to press numbers into your phone, missing, redialing.

You alert life guards who seem annoyed - it’s not their job to fight sharks, they say, as if everyone knows this but you.

So you call the coast guard, and they tell you that’s not how this works.

You’re wet and freezing, and yet you can’t stop - it’s more sharks than water now and where is everyone?

So you call in a boat, then a helicopter.

You do everything you can while the person you love floats.

They ignore the boat captain and his outstretched net.

They tell the rescuer dangling from a chopper to mind his own business, even though rescuing people via helicopter is his exact business.

You watch this. You watch as a fin brushes their cheek and you are baffled now as they reach out to the shark like it’s a kitten.

You scream for them, on their behalf.

You tear at your own arms and you ask yourself what more can I possibly do?

There are two, three, four sharks - right at the shore and you’ve stripped down to nothing, ready to sacrifice your own life, when you hear your children calling for you.

And suddenly it’s so clear.

You have to stop watching this.

Because even if you did somehow miraculously survive this current rescue, the person you’re trying to save might just wander back into the ocean the next day or week or month.

And so you grasp your kids’ tiny hands, knowing you have done all you could.

Your children need you.

You can’t sacrifice your life throwing life preservers at an adult who refuses to grab them.

Besides, you don’t want your kids anywhere near sharks.

They are fresh and new and don’t deserve any of this.

And now here you are, years later, still paying in tiny increments for all the boats and helicopters you rented, accepting accrued interest because you’ve prioritized groceries and shoes and braces and college.

Your wounds have scarred over. They’re hard, and some days they hurt for no reason at all.

But you wear pants and long sleeves and all things considered, you think you’ve done a pretty good job hiding them, and walking around like a regular person.

Sometimes seemingly random things split you open again.

And you patch yourself up alone, closing yourself off in dark spaces. It’s like a scene from a movie where the hero is secretly nursing a gunshot wound, gritting her teeth while stitching herself back together without anesthesia.

Your kids ask at the door if you’re OK, and you sing-song back that of course you are. It will be just a minute.

And you collect yourself, and smile as you shut the door behind you.

And every day, you do what you need to do, and every day, you hate yourself more and more for not being a real happy, competent human; for being a broken-hearted pretender who is almost always quietly terrified.

Yesterday, I tried so hard to be gentle, choosing my words carefully.

(This is my 400th rodeo.)

But it never gets easier and following vehement denials they asked: “Will I always be suspect?”

That was when I reached 100 percent certainty that they were drinking again.

During the long drive to their house, I was 98 percent sure.

My concern hit 99 percent when they refused to open the door.

And then with that bitter question, I was sure.

The version of this person when their brain isn’t altered by the ongoing intake of alcohol doesn’t say things like that.

That’s what gets me, having seen them so clear for weeks and months and then a year and then almost two years …

It wasn’t slurred speech or alcohol-sweat that gave them away.

Those were clues. (That came with excuses.)

It’s that drinking alcohol, even if it’s not coursing through their system at high levels in a given moment, makes them a different person.

Apathetic.

Dramatic.

Egocentric.

Avoidant. Inconsistent.

Abstracted. Inconvenienced.

Both circumlocutory and covert.

Both pitiless and performative.

So back to my dream of having to choose an arm or a leg, knowing losing either would hurt and hinder me for the rest of my life.

I say I was 100 percent sure they were drinking again, but I left their house and went to Walgreens to pick up a test. I didn’t know over-the-counter alcohol tests existed. My adult child told me after I broke down and sobbed, trying with everything I had to hold myself together.

(I feel like I did 100,000 sit-ups yesterday.)

The kind of test I was looking for shows if the person has had alcohol in the past 80 hours.

I needed proof again. The kind I’ve gotten at hospitals, even as this person looked me in the eye and told me they hadn’t had a drink in days, weeks.

A piece a paper with the number 0.38 saved my sanity once.

But then standing in line at the pharmacy counter, I saw my friend … at this pharmacy I’d never been to in a town not my own.

I rushed at her and hugged her, and I knew that whatever I believe now, after all these years of spewed hatred and spiritual heartache, that she was there at that moment, somehow, to save me from myself.

I don’t need proof that this person is drinking.

I was crying in a Walgreens.

That’s enough to know that I am not crazy, despite looking quite crazy.

And so I walked back out into the sun, and I drove home.

Once inside, I hugged my husband and each of my kids.

I found my mittens, and grabbed my keys.

I needed a walk, I said.

But really, I needed to hug my friend Dave and his new-old dog.

When I got home, I dug out my Saint Jude bracelet, because religion doesn’t make sense to me anymore, but hope still does.

And I sent a text:

I love you. I love you so much. Please, please, please be safe.
If you need anything, I will help.
I love you.

I didn’t want my last words to be “okay, I just … okay,”through a flurry of denials.

I wanted them - I want them - to be I love you.

It was hard to get to sleep last night, and then my dreams were twisty, scary, plentiful.

My cat slept by my side.

And when I woke today, for just a second, I was still trying to choose - my arm or my leg.

My family, or my other family.

But then I stretched and moved.

My cat nudged my face, and I remembered:

I already made that choice years ago,

on a beach,

when I reached for my children

and hand in hand,

we walked home.

P.S. I’m still working on my moon journal for us. The first lunar event of 2025 is Jan. 29, so I have a little time. I’ll update you soon. I promise it’s good and I don’t usually say stuff like that. 🙃