Beyond Addiction

The insights in this week's column are a gift to me from my children on my 50th birthday.

My daughter, Nancy, 12, got dressed, made her own breakfast and brushed her teeth and hair without being told.

Thomas, who turns 15 in a couple of weeks, enveloped me in a big bearhug, which required no supporting words.

And Henry, no longer an awkward teenager though he is not quite 17, grabbed the keys to my car and drove to school with his siblings in tow, leaving me with nothing to do this quiet morning except go for a long run through St. Paul, Minn., and review the first half of my life. (Yes, I do plan to make it to the century mark.)

I always have been sentimental to a flaw. With it comes occasional melancholy, dashes of regret and too many "what ifs," which can drive me crazy if I seek answers that aren't already the truth. But being sentimental has its advantages, too. I have a keen memory for the specific details of exact moments that have been formative in my life, birthdays included.

When I turned 10, I went to the annual Memorial Day fair in my hometown on Long Island. I tossed a pingpong ball into a fishbowl and won the solitary goldfish swimming around inside. I took it home, and it promptly died the same day. It was my first lesson in the reality that winning is the easy part of life and the rest of it is usually a lot tougher.

On my 20th birthday, as a sophomore in college, I contemplated being halfway to 40. "That's old," I told my friends. And then we went back to drinking beer and smoking marijuana while playing countless games of backgammon in the haze of Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones.

Ten years after that, in 1989, I was the center of attention at a surprise 30th birthday party.

I drank too much that day and made a fool of myself, even though the guests thought I was funny, sort of. A little more than two months later, my world fell apart when I crashed headfirst into the wall of addiction. I hit bottom in a crack house in Harlem and ended up in a psychiatric ward. Thus began the arduous journey called recovery.

I thought I had it all figured out by the time I turned 40, in May 1999. My wife and I lived in a fine home in Minnesota. We stayed busy changing dirty diapers, keeping the three tots fed and in clean clothes, and shuttling them to play dates with little friends or back and forth to school. I also found my station in life, becoming a public advocate for people like me who needed and deserved help. Much success at home and at work followed, to the point that I never thought about that goldfish.

I was clean and sober during my entire 40s. But the past five years have proved to be the toughest of my recovery — and perhaps my life. And I enter the first day of my 50s like an iceberg drifting into warmer waters; formidable chunks of what I've been are fractured, and pieces are sliding off or melting away. I don't like some of what's happening. But the alternative is to run away by getting drunk or high, and that's not an option anymore. So I go through the pain stone-cold sober. Ouch!

The gift of this birthday is in the clarity that comes from comparing it with all the others ending in zero. While I have no idea where my life is heading, I know exactly where I am today: sober, 50 years old and the father of three children, who still need me because they'll learn from their father's life about what happens after they win the goldfish.

William C. Moyers is the vice president of external affairs for the Hazelden Foundation and the author of "Broken," his best-selling memoirs. Please send your questions to William Moyers at William@WilliamMoyers.com. To find out more about William Moyers and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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