i’m the child of an alcoholic. my father. it runs in his family. his father was an alcoholic too. so was his uncle. his father was also not much of a father at all. he basically grew up with just his mother and his sister. he was very close to his mom. so, looking back, it makes sense that his alcoholism intensified after his mother passed away.
when we were young, my sister and i were oblivious to this condition. even looking back, i can’t remember any incidents before middle school that make sense. we remember hanging out and eating baskets of popcorn and peanuts in bars, but we never thought anything of it. but apparently it’s something we just missed or was very well hidden by my mom. she’s told us stories about when we were young and my dad had been out with his friends late one night. when my mom woke up the next morning and saw that the car was banged up she confronted him and he didn’t remember even using the car. so i’m not sure if she had an idea of what was really going on before then, but that’s one of the earlier incidents she can recall. the first incident i remember was in middle school. at some point in the middle of the night my sister and i were both woken up by some loud thuds. as we both ran out of our bedrooms to see what was going on we saw my mom. she was standing at the top of the stairs, panicked, and once she saw us she began screaming at us both to go back to our rooms. she said my father had fallen down the stairs. she left out the part about it being in a drunken stooper. oh yah, and i think he was naked. even now, i don’t remember too many other ways that his alcoholism affected my sister and i very young. for me, it was high school that was completely over shadowed by his problem.
i can distinctly remember the scariest moment of my life. my father was out of work. partly because the company he’d worked his whole life for went under because of the lawyers, but also partly because he had taken up drinking as his new full time job after this happened so it was hard to fit another one in. there were plenty of days when i came home from school and he was loaded. lying on the couch. or yelling at me. these days i would call up S and she’d come pick me up. i always wanted to be in my house as little as possible. well this one day i remember coming home and he was in rare form. yelling. screaming. getting in my face. and i’m not completely innocent. i’m a fighter, so when he started with me, i couldn’t walk away. i never backed down. our argument (no clue what it was about) had escalated into a screaming match (not unusual) and somehow we were standing in the kitchen. at the height of the argument it happened. he grabbed a sledgehammer that was leaning against the wall (i have no clue why it was there) and lifted it above his head. it was at this moment that i remember thinking i was going to die. that was it. i’ve still never had that feeling at any point in my life other than that. and you hear people say that your life flashes before you eyes at these moments. and it does. but not in a way i can accurately describe. it’s not a slideshow of what you’ve done. it’s a flash of life. of wanting to live. of wishing that this wasn’t going to be the end. of everything that you are and have done up until this point. i’ll never forget that as long as i live.
and here i am. 8 months after my father’s death and this is a memory i’m stuck with. forever. i can push it down as much as i want, but it’ll never go away. it’s not the only memory, but it sure is vivid. don’t get me wrong, i have plenty of wonderful memories of my father. i really do love who he was. he was often the glue that held our family together. that was, until the drinking took over. that’s why i don’t have many of the great memories from later in life. for anyone who’s never had someone in their life who had an addiction, it’s nothing that can be described. it’s a way of life. living every single day like you’re battling against something, against someone. battling to be normal. battling to keep the details a secret. every addiction is different. every addictis different. my father was a belligerent drunk. a complete a-hole. vodka was okay, it made him pass out. but gin? well the gin made him violent. to this day, the smell of gin still makes my skin crawl. he was miserable and wanted to make every one around him feel worse than he did. he was always telling each of us how lousy we were. always yelling at my mom about what a terrible person she was (which is the furthest thing from the truth). always telling me what a disappointment i was. yelling at me and my sister because he wanted a boy. it was more my fault than hers, because i was the last chance at getting a boy. there were always threats. always promises of killing us. setting the house on fire while we slept. and the law? well the law is helpless against these people. it can’t protect you. you’re forced to sleep with one eye open, if you can sleep at all. if you’re married to this person and they threaten to kill you? well the police don’t care unless he actually does. i can’t even count the number of times i stepped in and had to physically fight my father to keep him from hurting/killing my mother. she never fought back. she never wanted to. i think part of her felt like if she responded to it then it was real, and i think the other part of her may have wished he would just kill her. this is what life was like when we lived as a family.
once my sister moved back from college my mom moved out. she had a secret condo for months before my father ever knew. and my sister lived there with her. i was stuck living with my dad. battling him on my own. i finally moved in with my mother and sister and my father was forced to get his own place. even then, he’d come banging on my mom’s front door for hours at a time. yelling all sorts of profanities. we always had to be quiet and hope he’d go away. he’s call all day and night. it’s only recently that my mother had turned the ringer back on her phone. if she coudln’t turn the ringer off, she’d just unplug the phone. the answering machine was always blinking with 67 new messages, sometimes more. he’d just call and leave threatening messages. she always tried to play them back for him when he was sober to get through to him, it never worked. he’d get mad and leave. but my parents never divorced. my mother never wanted to. she loved him. he was her soulmate. i know it sounds crazy but if you’ve dealt with an addict you know. the person they are under the influence isn’t them. and it’s night and day to who they really are. so the days when my father was sober, which became few and far between, he was a wonderful man. everyone loved being around him. but the days when he wasn’t sober. it was a nightmare. he stalked my mother. he called her work. he called her friends. he’d drive by her work and glare. he’d drive by my sister’s house over and over. he’d just drive around a 50mile radius trying to find my mom. he was drunk out of his mind, and i alays wanted to call the cops. but my mom never let me. she knew she’d end up paying for whatever the result was. my fear was that he was going to crash and kill innocent people. my biggest fear was that he was going to crash into the car with my mom, sister, and nieces and kill them. he had the most awful glare in his eyes when he was out hunting my mom. in fact, a terrible look would cross his face as soon as he began drinking. my sister and i could tell in a second. we could see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice. my mom never could. i think she just never wanted to.
anyway, being the child of an alcoholic will mess you up. dealing with any addict will do that. it makes you very nervous about the people in your life. you find yourself questioning everything every one else does. trying to figure out if they have the potential to be an addict. afterall, they say that the children of addicts are more likely to marry addicts themselves. it’s a very scary thought for me. because i want a famliy. but i don’t want my children to ever have to deal with something like that. i don’t want to deal with it either.
the people in my life who know about my family are always surprised. surprised at what a normal person i turned out to be. the way i see it you can go one of two ways. you can give up and find an easy way out, whether that’s your own addiction or another escape from life. or you can grow past it, be stronger than their addiction. it’s not an easy thing. i only know one other person who’s father was an alcoholic. i like having someone outside of my family to talk to about it. someone who understands it. and it’s good to talk about it now. growing up, i was grounded the one time i told someone, so i quickly learned that it was something to hide. i’ve thought about going to al-anon meetings, but i never have. i don’t struggle with this on a daily basis. not any more. getting out of the state helped. getting away from it helped alot.
my sister and i have had plenty of discussions about what we’ve gone through. and i’m blown away by how different we feel about it. i figured we were brought up exactly the same, so we’d have the same view, right? nope. we’re opposites. i’ll post about that tomorrow.
