Rebound: Life After Divorce & Addiction

by Matthew Andrews

By Thanksgiving 1998, the first anniversary of my new investment, the company was on a roll. We were attracting new customers in waves. On Wall Street, the Internet gold rush had begun as every Amazon doubter had been promptly run over by Internet stock prices stampeding for the moon. Everything you could attach a “.com” to was headed for an initial public offering, we planned our own for the spring.

Around the same time, I found myself sitting in a chair constructed for an eight year old, surrounded by thirty other men at a grade school classroom in South Boston. There was a halfway house across the street. Many of the men were part of that program, sober less than thirty days. I noticed the tough guy looks of some of the participants: tattoos, body piercings, plenty of white-guy-mobster gold chains. I felt like the only one without a gang affiliation in the room.

Frank, one of the leaders, began to tell his story from the front of the room. He talked about jail and hookers and drugs; family members who were dead after overdoses or shot during drug deals. The words came straight from his heart. There was no intellectual head game involved. Listening to him talk made me stop feeling sorry for myself in a hurry. I had a penthouse apartment and two healthy children. I had drank because of an inferiority complex. I had been a bad husband, absent father and ultimately got caught having an affair. But I had a roof over my head and plenty to be grateful for.

To get at the root causes of our alcoholism, Frank asked each of us to get a notebook and start writing: first about the symptoms of our disease, then about our conception of God, and finally to inventory our behavior to date. It was time to stop conning myself. Several weeks later, I was struggling and asked Frank to meet me for a quick dinner before the meeting. We ordered fish and chips at a fry joint. Sitting at a scratched Formica booth, graffiti scrawled across the table, our food arrived just as I started to complain about my ex-wife. He brought me up short. “I thought you told me you cheated on her, Matt?”

“Yeah, so what? She is still a complete bitch, accusing me of being a bad father,” I snapped back.