Giving Up Drama

Growing up with drama was a big part of my life. My family lived in the inner city with addicted parents. My mother was on pills while I was growing up, and my father was a weekend alcoholic, according to my mother.

As I got a bit older, I started to have a lot of fun with kids' play and theatre. It was something that I did daily. And I included my younger siblings. Then, when my father, a welder, fell off a building and died on my tenth birthday, that was traumatic, and I struggled with depression since that time.

Memories of myself before and then after were dramatic, and now I would help my mother raise my siblings, and I lost much of my play time. I remember thinking it was all my fault my father died, because of singing the song about death. The "Hearse Song" - "the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out."

This experience reminded me of just how much drama was a part of my thoughts.

My youngest sibling at that time was five months old when our dad died. I had a sibling five years younger, three years younger, and eighteen months younger.

As an adult woman, even now, when training or public speaking, I will often still refer to my siblings as my children. I catch myself and laugh as the living siblings are in their sixties.

I was engaged at sixteen and then married at age seventeen, and my life was always drama. My husband was an alcoholic, and many in his family were as well. We had a party house as I finished high school, and then a party house when we were in college.

It was always drama. Fighting. Separating, and finally a divorce, when our children were just babies and I had gotten into recovery. We were together fifteen years and married thirteen years. My husband was in and out of treatment five plus times. Before he died at age 46, he thanked me for raising our children.

Entering a second marriage with a husband in recovery, he would make a comment about how when we were in a disagreement, I would want to "Throw the baby out with the bathwater" when it came to our marriage and difficulties.

It took me a long while to get that, but sometime at the end of our marriage I figured out that he was exactly right. Husband number two went back to his primary addiction and switched addictions, and we ended our marriage after being together 14 years total and married for ten years.

So what I decided to give up in 2000 was Drama, after some twenty years without drugs or alcohol and twenty four years in recovery from the family illness.

November 2000

Dear Drama,

It is time to give the drama up. My life has settled down, and I don't wish to continue being so dramatic about everything and anything that comes up in life. It is frankly tiring.

Remembering all the times that every little thing became such a big deal. How much stress followed. How much panic, how much pain. How much the drama affected me and others around me. I supervised staff and affected everyone with my drama.

Everything was a big deal and needed to be addressed right now. I spent days and weeks paying attention to how drama was a part of my life and made some decisions to change.

I announced in a staff meeting, with people that I supervised, and that was helpful. A few days later, a staff domestic violence counselor who I thought did similar things with drama approached me, asking if I could just talk her through some drama with someone on her caseload.

She said, "I know you are not doing drama anymore, but could you just listen to this situation?" We laughed, and I explained that I was working on my own, not anyone else, and I realized that I can help listen to others without going into the drama with them.

Thank you for allowing me to back out of drama for hopefully the rest of my life. I had too many years of this and wish to have no more. I know it is an old habit that may be tough to let go, and for today, I am letting go one day at a time.

Sincerely,

Denise Estey Lindquist, an ex-drama queen.

~~~~

My life is different today. The drama is almost non-existent. I am in my marriage for the long haul and we are doing well. My relationship with family and friends does not include any drama.

I would still like to be involved in theatre and maybe at some point I will do that and allow some drama through that venue. For today though. No drama for this elder woman, as I have given it up.