(Adapted from “A NEW AMERICAN FAMILY: A Love Story,”
Published by University of Arizona Press, 2011.)
Published by University of Arizona Press, 2011.)
Every story needs a context. The memoir from which this story is adapted establishes that context in rich detail; a few paragraphs here must suffice.
In the 1960’s my wife Pat and I adopted six children, all born in California between 1962 and 1968. Teresa and Linda are American Indians; Krista and John are African-Americans (of mixed race); Paul is of Hispanic- American and Germanic-American heritage; and Lora is Anglo-American. Pat and I are both of mixed European-American stock with a little of the Indian blood that can be traced in many multi-generational families of the American West.
Pat and I went to high school together in California and married in 1955, both nineteen. After a good many years taking turns going to college, we both became educators, Pat in elementary education and I as an engineering professor who began at UCLA (when the kids were adopted) and progressed through Columbia University (as dean and then provost), Lehigh University (as president), and finally The University of Arizona (as president).
In our mid-seventies now, Pat and I celebrate the triumphs of our children over many adversities in their lives; our children in their forties are still a close family, each one finding his or her own pathway over life’s obstacles. For three of our six children, alcohol and other drugs put their lives at risk. In the case of our youngest son (John), schizophrenia contributed additional complexity to addiction.
Pat and I know that we can live out our lives in peace, secure in the love of our family. We have decided to tell our family’s complicated but beautiful story in the form of the memoir from which the following article is adapted, hoping that other families might draw inspiration from ours.
Although Pat and I both had experiences with alcohol use and abuse in our childhood years, we were not well prepared as parents to cope with the influence of alcohol and other drugs in the lives of our children. Both my father and Pat’s stepfather were probably functioning alcoholics, although I didn’t live with my father sufficiently to be sure that his continuous drinking truly implied dependence and Pat’s stepfather drank only rarely but then uncontrollably.
When we grew up in the 1950’s, “good girls” didn’t drink but boys who got drunk at parties were not condemned as their sisters would have been. Alcohol was generally not perceived as an addictive drug; only “weak” people became alcoholics. Other drugs, such as marijuana, were the stuff of stories about other people, not high school kids where we grew up in Santa Cruz, California.
Pat did not use alcohol until after high school, and then only sparingly. Until my relationship with Pat got me back on a straight path, I acted as though I was determined to demonstrate with alcohol that I was “one of the boys,” despite sterling grades and my high visibility in athletics and campus politics. Twice I ended up in jail for underage drinking before I was sixteen.
By the time I was sixteen, however, and serious about my future with Pat, all this nonsense was behind me. College still offered fraternity parties and alcohol, but never again did I lose control as I did too often in high school. Probably I consumed more alcohol before I was twenty-one than in the fifty years following.
With memories of my own youthful indiscretions with alcohol, I thought I was ready to be a father for teenagers. I was, however, not ready for girls using alcohol and totally unprepared for the drugs other than alcohol that entered my family life.
(To be continued in subsequent blogs.)
