Love – Adult Child of An Alcoholic - Story 2
I am the adult child of an alcoholic.
My mother was the one who struggled with alcohol. By the time of her death, she was also using a substantial amount of prescribed medication for her various ailments.
Despite living with my mother, over time it had deteriorated into such a “broken home” situation that it felt more like we were strangers just co-habiting the same building. We lived in a small council house and my mother was a hoarder – not rubbish, but documents. Every letter or piece of paperwork she ever received was “filed” away somewhere in the house (mainly the lounge) and eventually it got to the point where the lounge was not really habitable.
After losing her final job, my mum spent most of her days on the lounge sofa just watching TV or on her laptop. After I finished further education at the age of 19, I went into part-time work and spent as much time socialising with friends as possible just to keep out of the house. At the age of 21 or so, I started working night shifts full-time so I would generally sleep from 12:00-20:00 or so, and would barely see or speak to mum despite us being in the same house.
I think the trauma of the whole thing has caused my memories to blur quite considerably and I’ve lost track of any sort of timeline, sometimes not even being able to pinpoint events by year. The first time I knew there was a problem was probably in around 2002 or 2003. Up until this point, life had been fairly normal for me and I was not aware my mum had any sort of alcoholism problem.
One evening before a night shift I woke up and came downstairs to find mum vomiting quite badly in the bathroom. I asked if she was OK, to which she replied yes, so I put it down to her having a stomach bug or something. I went to work as usual expecting her to be fine by morning.
When I got home that morning, she was not there, so I assumed she had recovered and gone to work. But when I woke up in the evening for work, she still wasn’t there, so I thought something may be wrong. I went to work that night feeling worried but not knowing what about. In the morning after work, I decided to call the university department where mum worked to ask if she was there. They said they had not seen her for a couple of days.
I started to go into a small panic. I got a phone call from someone at the local hospital. She had been admitted to A&E after attempting to take her own life with an overdose of prescription medication. Thankfully she had failed. I rushed to the hospital to see her and we immediately burst into tears when we first saw each other. She kept saying she was sorry and tried to hug me – I didn’t know what to do or say. My mum had just tried to kill herself for reasons unknown to me.
Once she was discharged from the hospital, our home life got pretty awkward. We would barely speak or even occupy the same room in the house for any more than a few minutes. She never worked again after this point and started claiming benefits. She was overtly drinking a lot of alcohol – mostly cheap cider (approximately 9 litres at least per week) or a mix of vodka and blackcurrant juice.
I owned a cheap car, she called me once saying she needed help because she had hit a kerb and the engine had cut out and wouldn’t start. When I arrived there with a mechanically-minded friend of mine, it was obvious that she had mis-negotiated a mini-roundabout and slammed nearside into the kerb hard enough to burst the tyre and activate the engine emergency fuel cut-off. Thankfully there was no major damage. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I suspect now she had been driving under the influence of alcohol.
There were times when I would avoid being honest in order to protect my mother. I think that’s a trait that has somewhat passed on to me from my mum. She would constantly ignore phone calls, letters, even people at the door. She had a loan from a doorstep loan company and sometimes when they called to make repayments, she would make me answer the door and lie and say she was not in. I was used to it.
I was concerned about the fact I knew she was drink-driving regularly with no licence and no insurance and the thought of her injuring or killing someone weighed heavily on me. I knew I couldn’t just stop her from taking the car keys because ultimately, I was living in her house. One time I submitted an anonymous report to Crimestoppers with the vehicle make and registration number saying this person is an uninsured drink driver. I was hoping she’d get caught and get some sort of punishment that would dissuade her from doing it again, but nothing ever came of it.
I found it extremely difficult to communicate with my mum – when she was drunk (which was virtually all the time), it was almost impossible to talk to her. I obviously had friends of the same ages, and I had been to their houses where they had stable families, and I had seen the way the children and the parents interacted. I never really had anything like that.
I also had to do things myself from a young age. This may sound quite self-entitled, but I think it’s generally accepted parents with children living at home with them will still carry out most of the parental tasks. When mum was alive, we never owned a washing machine. We used the laundrette once a week. Because I was a fussy eater, mum rarely ever cooked for me, so I had to sort out my own food most of the time.
As well as this, because of the state of the house, I could never bring friends/girlfriends round. I didn’t even want them to see where I lived because the house looked awful. It was completely neglected on the inside – partly my fault, but mostly because of mum’s hoarding. After she died and I cleaned out the house, it took two loads of a large trailer to take everything to the tip, and that didn’t include the kitchen appliances. The amount of paperwork I found was incredible, it was as if mum never threw away a single letter. Which leads on to the next thing…
Mum was in a tremendous amount of debt, which she had been successfully hiding from me for a long time. I knew that some of her benefits were reduced or stopped in the past because I was an adult living in the same house and earning too much money at my job. But I was paying mum £200 per month towards the rent, which I think was unfair considering none of my friends at the time were paying anywhere near that amount of rent to live in their parent's homes, and especially not ones as horrible and decrepit as ours.
My mum’s alcoholism also meant that any time I was involved in any sort of conversation about parents, I always tried to shy away from it or just flat out lie.
I spent a lot of time researching ways to end my own life, and once or twice I came pretty close to doing it.
There was a short period of time where mum went to a residential rehab. It was clear the rehab was working, and for that short moment I actually felt like we were a family again and things would one day return to normal.
Mum was supposed to stay in rehab for a year or so but suddenly after just a few months I got a phone call from her asking me to pick her up. She told me not to question it. She asked me to take her to Morrison’s to do some shopping. I went in with her as it was not too busy. It just seemed like a normal shop until we got near the alcohol section and she put two large bottles of vodka in the trolley. I sighed and said “are we really doing this again? You’ve just got out of rehab” and she simply said, “don’t start”. Some large 3-litre bottles of cider were added too, and my heart just sank. It was at this point I realised that all that time in rehab had been a complete waste, and on her first day out she was buying more alcohol in one day than I would drink in a typical year.
Sometime near the end of January 2013, I noticed mum’s face didn’t look right – her skin and the whites of her eyes were like a yellow colour. I called an ambulance, when they arrived, they basically said that I should have called them a long time ago.
It turned out she had severe jaundice. She was taken to hospital immediately. Once the ambulance crew had departed, I started crying and went into the kitchen. I found all of the bottles of cider and vodka I could and poured them all down the sink. I was never going to let mum drink in this house again because I wanted her to live. I wanted her to be a normal parent and see me grow up and get married and have kids and do all the things normal parents do with their children. There was no way I was going to let her drink herself to death while I was in my early 20s.
I was so used to her going into hospital now, I didn’t even bother going with her this time, and I prepared a bag of essentials and took it to her the following day. I expected she would be detoxed and released a couple of days later. However, when I got there, she looked quite unwell, and was barely able to speak, although she at least acknowledged I was there, with a tear and a touch.
I fully expected to be taking her home in a few days. Little did I know, that I would never be driving her home again. On the evening of Friday 1st, February 2013 my mum sadly passed away.
She was just lying there, all bloated like she normally looked after drinking a lot but her face was just a pale yellow. They had already removed all lines and everything going into her body so it was as if she was bare and just lifeless, with nothing but a hospital gown to cover her modesty. I put my hand on her forehead and gave her a small kiss and told her I loved her and then left the room. That was the last time I ever saw my mum’s body.
Do I ever think that I was to blame for my mother’s alcoholism? The short answer is yes. I sometimes have a recurring nightmare about it. One vivid memory I have from when mum was alive was a time when I was cooking pasta. There was a plastic tub of sealed packets of cheese in the sink (which I think were defrosting after being in the freezer.) For some reason, I decided to drain the pasta and water through the colander right over the cheeses instead of moving them first. This obviously caused some of the cheeses to melt and arguably may have ruined them. I finished making the pasta and went upstairs, and a few minutes later when mum went into the kitchen for something she saw the cheese and started shouting and swearing about how much of a “fucking idiot” I was. Then she launched the whole tub of cheeses across the kitchen - they slammed into a wall and flew everywhere.
I don’t think I was the root cause, but it forever haunts me to this day that I somehow worsened it due to my previous actions.
In terms of what more can be done to help children of alcoholics - it’s a difficult question especially for schools because I think a lot of children that live in households with an alcoholic won’t want to discuss it. They’ll want to be as secretive as possible, and that kind of knowledge among their friends at that age could be harmful.
If there were a confidential service in schools whether a child could say “my parent has a serious drinking problem” and it could be dealt with, with the least amount of distress to the child. I think that’s a good start.
When mum died, I was 23 and I think because of my age, I was seen as old enough to simply deal with it. A couple of support groups were mentioned and a few people suggested I see a therapist, but good therapy is expensive and I was not on good money at the time. I was suddenly an orphaned 23-year-old with a 17-year-old sister to take care of, and I had no idea how the world really worked.
I think the main issue is that children are emotionally attached to their parents no matter what, and if they seek help from support services, it may end up with the children separated from the parent.
I have never tried to seek help for myself. As insensitive as this sounds, so much time has passed now (9 years) since my mum died that I barely think about it anymore. This year I even missed the anniversary and her birthday (they are only 3 days apart) because I simply forgot. I suppose because our relationship was so difficult; we were not close; I do not feel as much attachment to her as one normally would for their parent. During the final years of her life, it did not feel to me like we were family. I hate myself for feeling like this.
Deep down I believe she loved me and my sister, and she did her best to give us a good life, one that she definitely couldn’t afford to give us, at her own detriment.
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