have any of posters here had to deal w/parents as described in the article? I ask as we are mostly of the age to be caregivers to family. My folks were mostly teetotalers. Maybe a glass of wine at a party. My dad drank a few beers every night after getting of work (Construction contractor) That lasted a couple years. My inlaws were not drinking much by the time I met them. Based on stories told FIL had a "problem" but by the time I knew him (in his 60's) he drank very little. After he passed MIL gave me all the old bottles...not one of them was any good
My mother and father were both alcoholics. My mother was a non-functional, falling-down-drunk alcoholic, and my father was what was described for decades as a "functional" alcoholic (eg, he continued to practice as a psychiatrist for decades) despite heavy drinking every night.
My parents divorced when I was 7 (my sisters were 5 and 9). My mother had what were supposed to be "supervised" visits every year (supervised by her parents) but my grandparents left us alone with my mother on more than one occasion.
On one of these visits, when I was 11 years old, I awakened at 1:00 am to my mother drunk out of her mind, crying on the bathroom floor - she had cut her foot on a broken bottle, and there was blood everywhere. I can clearly remember (age 11!) thinking "It's my job to deal with this, and I mustn't wake my younger sister, because she is just a child." (I was 11 going on 40.)
I tried waking my older sister, but she ignored me and pretended to be asleep. After trying unsuccessfully to stop the bleeding and clean up the blood, I called my grandparents, who must have been in their sixties at the time. They arrived and dealt with the situation; we were whisked away to their house and I think that was the last time they left us alone with out mother. For years afterward both my sisters refused to make the annual visits. I continued to go because I loved visiting my grandparents.
I recall my father and stepmother had "cocktail hour" every night, which lasted about two hours, where they just drank and drank before dinner. She was also a working psychiatrist, by the way. Eventually they divorced and he married for the third time.
My mother smoked heavily, and she died at the age of 62, three weeks before her first grandchild (my sister's daughter) was born. Cause of death was complications of alcohol poisoning and COPD.
My father never stopped drinking entirely - it would ebb or flow, depending on which wife he was married to (or in the throes of divorcing). He eventually divorced the third wife as well.
He developed diabetes late in life, and he cut down on the drinking, but he never gave it up completely. He died in 2007 at age 85.
My mother was a sad drunk, and my father was an angry drunk.
My older sister followed directly in my mother's footsteps - she married and had three children in quick succession. She had started drinking to excess in her twenties; she drove drunk with two of the children in the car; she faced zero consequences for that. The police appeared time and again over the years to scrape her up off the floor and temporarily remove her children.
Eventually she was divorced and to my knowledge she now lives on public assistance in subsidized housing somewhere in New England. Every couple of years she blasts out an email to me declaring that I am the cause of all that has gone wrong in our family for three generations (alcoholic families love scapegoating). I have a spam folder specifically set up to capture these missives; I stopped reading them years ago.
The last time I saw my younger sister (about 20 years ago) she was heavily dependent on alcohol, although not to the extent of the other family members.
The only silver lining to this saga is that my two nieces and nephew appear to have escaped the alcohol curse; they are all living and thriving and doing well.
I cut off all contact with my family long ago. I refused to enable or excuse anyone's drinking, so they were glad to see the back of me.
I have never had a drink of alcohol in my life. I'm not saying this to brag - I simply looked around at the age of 7 and decided that I wasn't interested in ever having to be scraped up off the floor in a drunken stupor - I figured there were better ways to live my life, and it turns out I was right.
Some situations are so toxic they can't be fixed; the best you can do is save yourself.
