Euphoria for an Addict’s Daughter Pt. II
Apology without accountability, amends without boundaries.
cw: addiction, manipulation, suicide
It’s taken me over a week since the second special episode aired to process and get to the writing-point, so you’ve had ample time to watch, but in case it needs to be said: SPOILERS AHEAD.
Co-written by Hunter Schafer and Sam Levinson and filmed in our new COVID world, this special episode of Euphoria centers Jules’s character in the painfully vulnerable, honest way that few other shows manage as well as Euphoria. A large part of the episode is a long, beautifully acted therapy session between Jules and her new therapist. There are heart-rending moments and relatable quotables about Jules’s experience as a trans* teen, a womanchild, and her relationship with Rue. The most surprising part for me as a viewer, though, was the revelation that Jules’s mother (conspicuously absent, but alluded to through the first season) is also an addict. Apparently this had been insinuated in the first season (according to Reddit, so who knows), but I missed it.
To be clear before we move on, I have written about my father, his addiction, and Euphoria before, right after the last special episode in fact. In the space between episodes, I reached out to him and he responded. We agreed to email each other as a first step towards restoring some sort of relationship. It has been exactly three weeks since I sent the first email. I have yet to receive a response, though I have been tagged in a corny “daughters” facebook post. I say this to update you in case you are invested in this journey and to let you know that I am not a hardened heart who rejects the possibility of growth for addicts. As I said in the last piece, I am a student of abolition adamantly trying to incorporate the sentiment espoused by Tourmaline and Dean Spade (amongst others) that “No One is Disposable.”
When I was eighteen my grandfather placed the responsibility for my father’s sobriety and potentially his life on my shoulders.
I was spending a weekend home from college as I often did that first year. While my peers bought tables at clubs and went to hungover brunch, I was assessing the current familial damage and trying to stay upright on shifting sand beneath my feet.
My dear grandmother, my father’s mother, called me to say my grandfather wanted to speak to me. I was surprised. He was far and away the grandparent I was the least close to. I couldn’t remember a single one-on-one conversation between him and I. Still, he was my grandfather after all, so I borrowed a car and drove “up the mountain” to their simple, white-sided two-story in a town so small that until the 90s their address didn’t contain a street number. The mailman knew where everyone lived.
I smiled at the familiar green astroturf on the back patio and the laundry line my grandmother insisted on keeping though she’d had a washing machine for quite some time now. My grandparents were traditional in almost every sense. My grandfather was the head of household and my grandmother was truly a “homemaker.” She had worked as a secretary at the local high school for years, known for always having a pencil when you needed one, but her highest priority always seemed to be her children and grandchildren. I can’t remember a single visit without something sweet and freshly baked from scratch cooling on the kitchen counter. She kept a pantry of canned goods and always brought up some peaches for me without me ever having to ask. If I try hard, I can still hear her voice cooing how much she missed me, though she passed over a decade ago after being killed by a drunk driver.
That day, my grandmother was unusually reserved and the house had an air reminiscent of their protestant church: solemn and stern. There may have been small talk that I’ve forgotten, but in my memory my grandfather got straight to his point. Uncharacteristic tears loitering along his lower lids and voice cracking, he looked me in my face and told me I “need[ed] to forgive” my father.
I hadn’t spent enough time thinking about the dynamics of this particular branch of our family tree to understand what was happening. Eighteen and in the throws of the most difficult era of my life, I was getting well practiced at withdrawing into myself (a therapist a decade later would let me know this was called disassociating). From this interior space, I heard him continue to tell me that if we lost my father — he was never far from self-inflicted harm in those days — and I hadn’t accepted his apology, I would feel guilty for the rest of my life. His eyes, full of desperation and blame, met mine, vacant and unmoved despite my racing heartbeat.
Some months later, my grandmother would tell me in brief that my grandfather’s mother was an alcoholic as well. She did so in order to express her concern that I be careful around alcohol myself. Maybe this is why my grandfather felt it was his place to tell me what he did that day. He didn’t give me any justification for his insistence, so I’ll never know. No matter the reason, even then I knew his words were both inappropriate and untrue. Long before that conversation, I had already experienced my father’s first rehab, leaving me a nine-year-old, newly appointed co-parent of my two siblings. And more than once in the three months prior to that day in the living room, I had been a part of or conducted interventions with my father. I was exasperated, broken-down, and done.
“We have to be careful with him” were my grandfather’s parting words as I sleepwalked towards my car, eager to escape.
I spent the rest of that weekend at home (and many more including Christmas and other holidays) being the difficult child who refused to play house, making everyone else uncomfortable.
“She’s been clean for nine months,” Jules’s father, David, says as he tries to convince teenage Jules that she should meet with her estranged, addict mother so that her mother can perform the ninth step of Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step programs, “make direct amends.”
“I’m allowed to be skeptical,” Jules replies.
Later in the episode, David and Jules’s mother, Amy, ambush her as Amy is waiting in the living room when Jules comes home.
Everything about the scenes that follow quakes with resonance for me:
The stunned blink, the scanning eyes, the heavy footed, quick escape up the stairs.
The memory flash of a small blonde child screaming and pounding that familiar glass and mesh window in a heavy, institutional door.
The way that Jules is angry at Rue (and arguably her mother) for the burden that is placed on her to be “available” to her so that Rue can maintain her sobriety, no matter the cost to Jules’s well-being.
Even the scene in which Jules finds out her mother has killed herself is relatable to me, though my father is still alive. I have spent fourteen years waiting for a phone call like the one her father receives. I have spent more hours imagining it and philosophized about it than I can count. I did not need my grandfather to plant that seed. It was lodged beneath my skin long before.
This is part of the salt-in-the-wound question that adults fling at children of addicts that stings the most. “How will you feel if something happens to [them]?”
No one has spent more time thinking about this than we have.
Understanding addicts’ behavior can be difficult for anyone, and the closer to one you are, the more harrowing and painful trying to can be. Imagine if you are their child. Within my own family, my siblings and I have a wide variety of responses to my father’s addiction. While one of my siblings once said, though they’ve since changed their mind, “a shitty father is better than no father at all,” I elected years ago to get off the rollercoaster ride of hopeful lifts and inevitable falls. For me, dealing with my father and the dizzying pinball of rehab, prison, I swear I’m clean, broken parole, prison, rehab, repeat was immensely harmful and I chose to remove myself from it. I, too, was allowed to be skeptical. Certainly there was enough evidence.
The ninth step of AA (and consequently NA and other twelve step addiction recovery programs) is to “make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.” This chapter in the book “Alcoholics Anonymous” is only 5 pages long. It is written to people in the throws of addiction and centers them. While to some degree this makes sense given that it is a self-help book for addicts, it is indicative of the entire problem with the experience that many loved ones of addicts have with the process of amends. Forgiveness becomes its own addiction and yet another entitlement where the addict and their needs are centered and prioritized. Though the chapter contains quotes like:
“We must be sure to remember that we cannot buy our own peace of mind at the expense of others.”
“We can pay, or promise to pay, whatever obligations, financial or otherwise, we owe.”
“Amends at this level should always be forthright and generous.”
…not once is the idea of asking the harmed what they are ready for or need from the addict mentioned. The onus is on these unreliable narrators to write the story of what “harm” and “injury” is or isn’t. When the right time is. What their obligations are. What generosity looks like.
The book promises that “The generous responses of most people” will “astonish” addicts. What high expectations they have from us, the harmed.
What a mess.
I believe in human potential for growth and change and, thus, I believe in abolition. I do not, however, believe that any of this is possible without true accountability. I believe that accountability can only be defined by the harmed and that there is no timeline for forgiveness — certainly that timeline is not nine months. Finally, I believe that forcing amends on people even if, as Jules says, “it’s fake,” is the worst thing we can do for addicts. The last thing they or their loved ones need is more lies or more selfishness on the part of the addict.
So, the next time you hear the story of an addict emailing their ex, or calling their child, or working that ninth step:
