As a six year old, I didn’t’ see the problems that my family faced.  My world was big and full of wonder in the eyes of a curious little boy, but having alcoholic parents made my world a lot smaller.  I could never put into words how scared, embarrassed and annoyed I was at their drinking.

 I learned quickly to figure out what my parents were thinking and feeling.  I needed to know what I was coming home to.  At some point, my parents split.  I stayed with my dad most of the time because my mom’s drinking was really bad.

 One time though, my dad left me and my friend on a Friday night to go out and didn’t come home.  We went to my friend’s house; I remember his mom was real nice about it.  My dad didn’t come home till late Saturday; he didn’t leave me any money or anything.  He came to pick me up at my friend’s house and I knew he was hung over.  He didn’t talk at all on the ride home and he went right up to bed as soon as we got home.  The next morning he acted like nothing had happened.  The thing he really forgot about though was that day was my birthday – he never even mentioned it.

 Daniel

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            I was young so I really had no clue what was going on with him.  I just knew he would come home drunk every day, fight with my mom and ruin everything.  I always tried to keep the other kids out of the way.  I would make dinner for them and then take them upstairs to do homework – out of sight, out of mind kind of thing.  The fighting would go on until he eventually fell asleep.  I would hear my mom on the phone with her sister afterwards, she would cry and swear she was going to leave him, but she never did. 

            In the morning, the house would be very quiet.  My mom didn’t get out of bed so I would have to make breakfast, pack lunches and get everybody out the door on time.  All this while trying really hard not to wake up either my mom or dad.   This went on for years.  My dad never did quit drinking and my mom never left him.

             When I grew up, a friend convinced me to go to an Ala-non meeting.  I really didn’t want to go and didn’t think I needed to talk about any of this because my dad was no longer around.  Boy was I wrong, I had a lot to say and a lot of feelings about my having to pick up the slack for my parents. It really did help simply to tell someone else my story.

 Anonymous, Ohio

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My father was what some would call a “raging” alcoholic, hitting my mom, swearing at everyone, picking fights.  We learned early on to try and stay away from him when he would come home drunk.  There were times when I just wanted to take care of him, make him something to eat or help him get out of his work uniform but he would just get angry, swear and yell and chase us away.  We never really talked about all this.  My mom would just beg him to stop drinking and threaten to leave and eventually after many years, she did.  She would say that the happiest day of her life would be when “the old man is six feet under”.  I couldn’t believe she would wish my dad dead.  When my dad did die, my mom was a wreck, it turned out not to be the “happiest day” for her.

 I mostly just remember always feeling afraid 24/7….what would happen next.  I still feel afraid a lot of the time for no special reason.  You just get use to feeling that way.  I feel sad a lot too especially when I think about growing up in that house.

 Suzi

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Anyhow, my dad was never, ever a part of anything – I actually don’t have a single memory of him as a little girl other than my mom sending us little kids up to the neighborhood bar to try and make him come home…which, of course, he never did until the middle of the night. We would find him asleep at the kitchen table when we got up to go to school in the morning.

In high school, I never, ever brought friends to my house – I didn’t know then why – but since then I’ve figured out that on some level I was “hiding” my dad from everyone.

Right after I graduated from high school, my best friend’s parents took me and her out to dinner and over dinner, my friend’s mom asked if my dad was alive…..I remember being TOTALLY shocked by this stupid question, of course, my dad was alive. It took a few years to figure that one out but because I had never, ever even mentioned my dad – they assumed he was dead.

Speaking of graduation, that’s a story in itself. I had a lot of scary times with my dad – like the time we found him laying outside in the snow in the middle of winter in Cleveland – he was coming home from the bar late at night and had fallen – I found him along with my sister and we thought he was dead. Anyhow, I have one really sad memory and that was the day of my high school graduation – I worked hard in school – wanting to get good grades. I was Class President much to my surprise because I was pretty quiet and kept to myself. So on graduation day, I got to walk in the procession first and wear a special blue tassel. My dad had said he would come…but he didn’t and all I can remember is seeing him passed out on the couch when I got home. Not sure why, but that one really bums me out still.

I feel sad a lot and I think a lot about how kids should just not have to grow up that way. I realize now that a lot of the time growing up, I was just totally embarrassed and afraid about what would happen to my dad.

-Sally

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What I remember most clearly about being with my dad and his wife was the overpowering sense of dread. It was a feeling that should come out of the gut—that’s what people always say, “I have a gut feeling”—but for me, it hovered somewhere above me, and as my dad and his wife got more and more out of control, it would unfurl around me like a curtain or a cloud. Sometimes it traveled into my gut, but I tried not to let it get that far. I remember that feeling more than any particular episode: the feeling of What’s going to happen this time? What will my stepmother do this time? What will set her off? I was seven years old when my father married his third wife, and until the day she died, she never lost that ability to instill heart-stopping panic in me. I was probably in my twenties by the time I learned the term hypervigilance, a skill I had mastered before I reached adolescence. It was actually a little game my dad and I used to play; each time I’d come to their house for a weekend visit, he’d take me through and ask me what was different—a new knick-knack somewhere, a few pieces of furniture rearranged, that sort of thing. He was always impressed by the way I noticed the tiniest change in any detail of their house. It had nothing to do with the decorating, and everything to do with being preternaturally attuned to everything that happened there, always on watch for the earliest signs of trouble blowing in.

That was the way of life at my dad’s house: watching, and waiting. My stepmother was an angry drunk, and the person she got angriest at was me. At seven years old, I became the target for her keenest resentments, most of which were directed at my mother. My stepmother didn’t cook, so we ate in restaurants almost every night. The restaurants always had bars, and there were always Manhattans for my father and vodka martinis for my stepmother. At lunch, there were Bloody Marys. They would drink, and we would talk, and somewhere along the line my stepmother would get mad. She would get louder, and angrier, and people would stare, and sometimes she would get up and shout in the middle of the restaurant—about me, about my dad, my sisters, her daughter, whatever was on her mind. She knew all my most sensitive buttons. “Your father knows you don’t love him,” she would say, to a second-grade child who already believed that all of her father’s unhappiness and the failure of her parents’ marriage rested on her shoulders. “All you care about is what he can buy you!” she’d scream, as though she hadn’t filled her own walk-in closet with more shoes than most people own in a lifetime. She’d hurl accusations at my mother, and insults at my sisters, none of whom would be there to defend themselves. Rarely would my dad intervene in these scenes; if he did, she’d turn her fury on him, despite the fact that she clearly believed herself to be his only defender. She’d call him spineless, a coward, and he was those things, but more than anything he was an alcoholic like her. He was never one to rock the boat, and two failed marriages had apparently left him unwilling to take any chances. His strategy was conciliation, so instead of telling his wife to shut up, he’d ask me never to mention my mother when I came to visit. It was clear where his loyalty lay.

Whenever my stepmother had a particularly ugly blow-up, my dad would come find me later and give me some sort of explanation. Sometimes she’d be passed out when he came to talk to me, other times she’d still be wide-awake, throwing in her drunken commentary from another room. The explanation usually involved a brief recap of all the troubles my stepmother had endured in her life, edited so as to make it appropriate for my age—her teenage pregnancy, her abusive first husband, her dead second husband. The problem was that the details of this story changed with every telling, so it wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I got the story straight. This information was apparently intended to help me understand why my father’s wife behaved the way she did toward a helpless child, but it did very little to soften what became, by my adolescence, a seething hatred.

Over those first ten years or so of my dad’s third marriage, when things were the worst between his wife and me, what stands out is just how much everything stayed the same. Every dinner out, every weekend on the boat, every visit to their house was marked by the same patterns of increasing tension, explosion, and relative peace. Very little changed, except for one night out at the yacht club, when it was my dad’s turn to blow up. It is one of my clearest memories from childhood. But that is a story for another time.

Vikki

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