Hi All,
Just thought i'd share my experience of being the child of an alcoholic mother. I was adopted, so anything I have is not genetically based but is purely a following of the behavioural patterns I grew up with - and they are destructive.
Anyone who is an alcoholic or has a bad drinking problem and has children should understand that the children KNOW - and they don't have to be old. I was 6 when my mother started drinking heavily. I knew something was wrong, I didn't know she was drinking, but I knew something bad was happening.
I assumed (as all children do as they are the centre of the universe for a while and good for them) that it was in some way my fault. Subconsciously I have felt like this for the rest of my life. I excelled at school, did everything right, never (well hardly) got into trouble, and still she drank. What a failure I felt...
In my late teens I started to fight back at her - to return abuse for abuse. I never knew what I was coming home to. I had to call home to see if a friend could come home with me in case she was drunk.
Every time I approached my front door I was scared.
And then there was my father. He firmly believed she was drinking to get at him, so when she sobered up he punished her by not speaking to her for weeks. So it was my job to run between them, to comfort my mother and beg my father to forgive her so we could be "normal".
At 15 I refused to do what I had been doing for years, answering her calls and saying that she was sick. I told a friend of hers that she could not come to the phone cause she was drunk. All hell broke loose - one parent angry that i'd betrayed her, the other that our family's "dirty little secret" was out. I never did it again.
I begged with her to stop, I spent hours listening to her post-binge remorse and actually believing her, thinking that she would stop - oh the optimism of childhood.
I grew up too fast, I was a little adult, they used to brag about that. I became the carer- or tried to be - the one to make everyone "happy" so it would all stop. In some ways childhood ended at 6 years of age.
One counsellor I saw told me that growing up with an alcoholic is akin to growing up in Belfast (this was a while ago) - in other words you are always looking over you shoulder, you don't trust, you never know what's going to happen next.
These days I crave certainty, i despise change, i feel guilty when i think i've failed at something, and unbelievably at 38 I am still trying to make my parents happy - I ring them to tell them when I get praise from my boss, I send them chapters of my thesis that my supervisor likes, I don't tell them (or at least try to hide from them) if I am sick, or not at work for some reason.
For anyone who drinks and has children - and I am guilty (though never on my mother's spectacular scale) remember how you can harm them. You behaviour will harm them, your remorse will harm them, and your unpredictability will have them searching for stability all their lives and then not understanding when life changes that it is not all disaster.
Children need parents, not to be parents.
Cashy
Just thought i'd share my experience of being the child of an alcoholic mother. I was adopted, so anything I have is not genetically based but is purely a following of the behavioural patterns I grew up with - and they are destructive.
Anyone who is an alcoholic or has a bad drinking problem and has children should understand that the children KNOW - and they don't have to be old. I was 6 when my mother started drinking heavily. I knew something was wrong, I didn't know she was drinking, but I knew something bad was happening.
I assumed (as all children do as they are the centre of the universe for a while and good for them) that it was in some way my fault. Subconsciously I have felt like this for the rest of my life. I excelled at school, did everything right, never (well hardly) got into trouble, and still she drank. What a failure I felt...
In my late teens I started to fight back at her - to return abuse for abuse. I never knew what I was coming home to. I had to call home to see if a friend could come home with me in case she was drunk.
Every time I approached my front door I was scared.
And then there was my father. He firmly believed she was drinking to get at him, so when she sobered up he punished her by not speaking to her for weeks. So it was my job to run between them, to comfort my mother and beg my father to forgive her so we could be "normal".
At 15 I refused to do what I had been doing for years, answering her calls and saying that she was sick. I told a friend of hers that she could not come to the phone cause she was drunk. All hell broke loose - one parent angry that i'd betrayed her, the other that our family's "dirty little secret" was out. I never did it again.
I begged with her to stop, I spent hours listening to her post-binge remorse and actually believing her, thinking that she would stop - oh the optimism of childhood.
I grew up too fast, I was a little adult, they used to brag about that. I became the carer- or tried to be - the one to make everyone "happy" so it would all stop. In some ways childhood ended at 6 years of age.
One counsellor I saw told me that growing up with an alcoholic is akin to growing up in Belfast (this was a while ago) - in other words you are always looking over you shoulder, you don't trust, you never know what's going to happen next.
These days I crave certainty, i despise change, i feel guilty when i think i've failed at something, and unbelievably at 38 I am still trying to make my parents happy - I ring them to tell them when I get praise from my boss, I send them chapters of my thesis that my supervisor likes, I don't tell them (or at least try to hide from them) if I am sick, or not at work for some reason.
For anyone who drinks and has children - and I am guilty (though never on my mother's spectacular scale) remember how you can harm them. You behaviour will harm them, your remorse will harm them, and your unpredictability will have them searching for stability all their lives and then not understanding when life changes that it is not all disaster.
Children need parents, not to be parents.
Cashy
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