Once the child of an alcoholic, always the child of an alcoholic

It would be naïve, foolish of me to think that dad’s alcohol abuse didn’t have a profound impact on me as a young child and teenager, and have a starring role in my evolution as a human being.

But until relatively recently, I naively thought that the alcohol abuse part of my history was neatly locked away in a box labelled ‘dealt with’.

It was when I visited a counsellor nine months ago though, triggered by what I thought was an unconnected cumulation of events that I started talking openly, within those four walls at least, about dad’s drinking. I squirmed on the sofa when words like dysfunctional, chaotic and traumatic were used. My instinct still to minimise. To make a joke and brush it off as all being in the past.

I discovered though that while the bulk of those counselling sessions were focused on the here and now, they kept going back to my teenage years. Not in terms of the ‘what’ but looking at those years as a way to explore and understand why I behave, react and respond to situations and people the way I do now, as an adult, and had led me to that sofa.

These conversations gently loosed the tight knot that had been keeping that box firmly closed. Once open, I started to tentatively Google Al-anon under the auspices of researching my memoir. I found myself worrying that someone might find out I was looking at the AA and Al-anon websites and judge me for it.

Judge me for what and why I don’t know, but to use the words of my counsellor, it was information for me to think about. I guess what it told me was that the shame associated with alcohol abuse runs deep, even if you’re not the drinker.

But now and for various reasons I’ve found myself a repeat returner to those websites, the past week especially. My fingers hover over the keypad on my phone, the Helpline phone number blinking on my screen, alongside details of a local Al-anon meeting. These black and white numbers and words triggering decades old memories when our world crumbled time and time again under the weight of hidden vodka bottles, lies and denial.

If anyone had challenged me over the intervening decades, stared me in the eye and questioned my brushing it off I’d have probably crumbled a little. Because deep down I knew that while I could, if I chose to, say the words, ‘my dad used to drink a bit’ and if I was feeling really brave, ‘dad was an alcoholic’ before crediting my parents with my early adoption of the ‘one day at a time’ mantra thanks to their relentless attendance of AA & Al anon meetings, I’d never really dug much deeper and explored what it meant now.

I was – at a push – able to release swallowed words about dad’s decades long sobriety but trying to describe the chaos of losing our home more than once was another thing. The empty fridge and food cupboards. The ‘but where are we going to live’. The petrol gauge permanently on red. The borrowed furniture and hand outs that kept us afloat - just.

Dad hid his drinking expertly and he was never violent. He never raised his voice. He just sank and disappeared into himself but we felt and still feel the impact of his drinking deeply.

I figured though that just surviving those years, the fact that I was here as an adult, married, with children, working was evidence enough that I had dealt with it.

The reality was that I didn’t want to spend any more time talking or thinking about alcohol. Too many years had been dominated by alcohol and I’d had enough. I resented that alcohol and then AA and Al-anon had taken both my parents away from doing their job – being my parents at a formative time of my life. And I thought that my familiarity with words like ‘one day at a time’ ‘rock bottom’ ‘denial’ ‘sobriety’ and my ability to repeat the serenity prayer without blinking was evidence that I could and would navigate anything life threw at me as an adult.

But I was wrong.

Because I lurched into adulthood, pretending I was ok and that I knew what I was doing. I put all my energy into creating this ideal family life vowing silently to myself that I wouldn’t repeat my parents mistakes. That I wouldn’t inflict the damage they inflicted on us on any children of mine.

 I thought I could control life. That somehow this early life experience would insure me against making the same mistakes I thought my parents had made. That I’d already had my share of life’s difficulties and was now due a break.

Around 2012 life started unravelling - illness, redundancies and relocation - but it still took another decade before I checked out Al-anon and AA, and started seriously thinking about the impact of those childhood years. I started searching up images of previous homes thanks to Rightmove, Google and Zoopla. I’d study maps of Buckingham and the outlying villages we’d moved to in mum and dad’s attempt to find work, a home. Live I guess. I pulled out old photo albums and recreated timelines to reconstruct those years and start putting them into some kind of order. It’s a start.

         My parents died eight years ago, a few months apart. Maybe I’m doing this now because they are dead. There are times when I wish I could ask them all the questions I never asked about dad’s drinking. But maybe I’m doing it now because they aren’t around because I want to look at his alcoholism without their bias and perspective. I need to do this now, for me.