Source: Bravo TV

Sometimes the power of a bad example is as powerful as a good example. I’m thinking of Kim Richards, one of the housewives on The Housewives of Beverly Hills.

My daughter got me hooked on that show when she came home from college on winter break.  There was a time – not too long ago – when that little intellectual dilettante in me would have dismissed such a show as a complete waste of time only to be watched by the mindless, vapid masses. Thankfully, I shut that little dilettante up and now I’m watching all the re-runs – thank you very much.

Watching Kim’s slow, self-destruction over this last season is good for me. I am, like Kim, am a single, somewhat middle-aged, mother whose child has grown up. We are both trying to keep our hair blonde and minimize our wrinkles. I am not going to pronounce Kim an alcoholic, but let’s just say there was a day – before I got sober 13 years ago – that I would have partied with Kim in a heartbeat.

“Brace yourself,” she said.

It seemed like any other Friday morning. I went to the gym, took Dog to the park, made lunch and drove to work. I parked in the same spot. Swiped my security card at the same door and said “Mornin’” like I do every morning.

My co-worker, Carol looked like she had been crying.

“Layoffs.”

Three in my department – 24 overall.

The layoffs and buyouts began at my company about three years ago. The company has offered generous severance packages and had always let us know when layoffs were looming. Not this time. Although they still offered generous severance packages, we had no warning.

Way back in the 1970′s, when I was a teenager, the only depression we knew about was the one in 1929 that made our parents and grandparents tightwads. Back then, teenagers with depression either hid it (like I did), self-medicated (like I did) or were loners – kids who did not fit in.

So when I heard a local couple who had lost their son to bipolar was underwriting Johns Hopkins’ ADAP program at local schools, I had to ask…”What if this had been around when I was in high school?”

The Adolescent Depression Awareness Program is brilliantly simple. It’s common sense at its finest. ADAP provides teachers with a curriculum to use on on how to teach their students about depression.“Through education we will increase awareness about depression and the need for evaluation and treatment.”

• Interactive lectures and discussions
• Video of teenagers describing their experiences with depression and bipolar disorder
• Homework and video assignments to reinforce key points
• Group interactive activities to teach the key message that depression is a common, treatable, medical illness.

This should not be controversial but teaching teens anything about their health can be absurdly controversial. Just say the word”condom” in in some parts of the country and you’re just asking for an inquisition by the PTA.

Recovered alcoholics have two birthdays. Our belly-button birthday – the day we took our first breath – and our sober birthday – the day we took our last drink. We get presents for both.

I’m telling you this not because my sober birthday is coming up – August 27 is 13 years without a drink – but because we live a life divided. Our sobriety has given us a new life but it comes with price. Secrecy. Anonymity. I am speaking about the life we lead among our clan of fellow recovered alcoholics.

We have sayings – “Keep coming back it works if you work it” – and we have tokens of devotion – colored poker chips to denote lengths of sobriety. We have clubhouses and private meetings. But there are no dues for membership.

I am not knocking any of this. I love my sober life. I am telling you this because this is not always an easy way to live. Especially if you are a dual-diagnosed recovered alcoholic. For many of us, we have spent much of our lives either denying we had a problem, convincing ourselves that we could handle it, ignoring all of it and covering our tracks.

Among my many dubious talents is my breathtaking ability to screw up a relationship.  Few girlfriends/fiances/wives have my innate sense of bad timing, poor taste and raging co-dependency. Seriously. Give me a medal or something.

I have married and divorced twice. The good news is that I got a daughter out of one of the marriages and I handled both my divorces pro se, saving me and my exes thousands and thousands of dollars – although I don’t think they looked at it that way.

It’s not that I don’t like commitment or falling into the toilet because someone left the seat up. I just don’t know how to do relationships.  I could blame my co-dependent mother, alcoholic father, bipolar or alcoholism. Might as well blame the nuns and my camp counselors, too. When I’m done with all the blaming I am left with this undisputed fact: I suck at relationships.

Perhaps my picker is broken or there is some freaky magnetic force emanating from incompatible men. I am especially attracted to alcoholics and addicts. You could do a line-up with a dozen guys and without any of them uttering a word, I can pick out the alcoholic/addict among the bunch. He is the only guy I am attracted to. I have no interest in the others no matter now much money or good looks they have. It’s weird.

I don’t know if it is because “likes” attract: I am an alcoholic and subliminally I want to be around alcohol so I pick an alcoholic. But I have no doubt that alcoholism, sprinkled with a healthy dose of depression, are not attractive characteristics in a woman. Throw in some wrinkles and gray hair and you’ve got a real peach!

Good Lord, what have I come to? I spent Sunday night toggling back and forth between writing this blog and TMZ’s live minute by minute web feeds from Charlie Sheen’s show at Radio City Hall in New York City.

What is WRONG with me?

Every time I think of Sheen with that smug look on his face I think of his father, Martin Sheen, and brother, Emilio Estevez. I saw one brief interview with them. Martin Sheen talked about how his son, Charlie, is sick and we must treat him like a person who is sick, as though he has cancer. Emilio said nothing.

This must sound crazy to someone who has never loved an addict or alcoholic and sought help in a 12-Step program. It is in these programs that alcoholism and addiction are presented as illnesses:

“An illness of this sort – and we have come to believe it an illness – involves those about us in a way no other human illness can. If a person has cancer all are sorry for him and no one is angry or hurt. But no so with the alcoholic illness, for with it there goes annihilation of all things worth while in life.”  (Alcoholics Anonymous, Chapter 2)