At this point I don't see it necessary to name names, identify who was drinking and who wasn't, or put a public face on anyone else's experience but my own (even though the alcoholic has now been sober for well over ten years, and has come quite public with their experience). For one thing, I really can't tell anyone else's story aside from my own. I just don't have the right kind of perspective. But I do have to tell what it was like for me, as a kid, growing up within an alcoholic environment. I can tell you, it was terrifying.
I was the oldest of two daughters. Born in the middle of summer, I spent the first six years of my life in relative peace and contentment. I remember my childhood home, family trips, kindergarten, and shopping with mom as fun things I liked to do. Things weren't always perfect -- they never really are -- but all in all, I felt secure and happy. I took the birth of my younger sister in stride (okay, so some relatives might say otherwise... *:) ), loved preschool, had a crush on the kid next door, liked to paint, and so on. I have lots of good memories from my earliest childhood. My very earliest memory is of celebrating my second birthday. I remember what I was wearing, who was there, and what my cake looked like. (I also remember a conversation I had with one of the guests regarding the exorbitant number of fingers I had chosen to give to a princess I'd drawn -- seems I was avant-garde even as a toddler. *:) ) Sometimes I got in trouble, too. But early childhood was a time in which the good outweighed the bad. I was a little kid, and life was still fun.
Social drinking had always been present in my family. Friends or relatives would come over for barbecue, or a trip to the beach, or whatever, and the adults might imbibe with a bottle of beer or two, a glass of wine, or a well-mixed cocktail. I'll confess that I was pretty oblivious to how much anyone might've been drinking at a given time, whether things remained under control or not. Being only five or so, I sure didn't have any clue what alcohol really was, or how much was okay to have, or how to know when someone had had too much. It was just present, and being used. Sometimes heavily.
Alcohol use didn't go completely out of control (and become alcohol abuse) until I was about seven. I suspect that it really exploded around then because that was when my family moved, and we were all under a lot of stress at the time. How did the grownups cope? By drinking more.
I haven't got the slightest idea if it helped them any. It sure didn't help me. The strange thing is, for a long time I don't remember having made much connection between the scary behavior of the adults around me and how much they'd been drinking, or even that they had at all. I simply knew that all of a sudden they were just being scary. I really didn't understand until much later, as a young teen.
Alcoholism and abuse often march hand-in-hand. Partner to the drinking in my house was verbal and emotional abuse. Suddenly, all the grownups were flipping out, totally stressed, and taking it out on people smaller than them (me). I began to hear, much more often than ever before, that I was ridiculous; and I began to be ridiculed regularly. I began to be yelled at much more often, and not with the firm sternness of an authoritative voice -- with screams and belittling. I began to be criticized, more and more, until I felt that I could do nothing right at all. The family that had previously nourished me was now a daily source of pain. The older I became the worse it got. Moreover, when I chose to talk about my hurt feelings, I was usualy blamed for being hurt in the first place.
I have experienced few things in life more terrifying than being at the whim of alcoholism - the rages, the irrationality - and realizing that there was no means of escape. I remember the fear of those years more clearly than anything else, because it was always there. Even during sober times, there was an undercurrent of foreboding, of the knowledge that things weren't always going to be peaceful (as well as the realization that the peacefulness was a facade, anyway).
I think I had good reason to be afraid. Suddenly, though I needed my family 100% of the time, they were only present and available perhaps 50% of the time. It was impossible to tell who would be happy when, and why, and whether or not I would be blamed or yelled at for their unhappiness. Or whether I'd be yelled at for any reason at all. I can remember feeling sure that if I did something wrong, my family would literally kill me -- not the concerned whine of "Oh, man, my [parent]'s gonna KILL me!" but the sheer terror of actual, impending, literal death. I really did think I was going to die.
I tried to escape from the fear by turning into a little chameleon, recoiling into the corner at every argument, constantly trying to suppress my feelings and not to speak a word, so that no attention would come my way. I didn't think this way at the time, it was just instinct: it seemed safer to hide. The ironic thing was that, the more time passed, and the more abuse and alcoholism occured, the more invisible I attempted to become -- but the more help I desperately needed. It was not permissible for me to become angry or frustrated at the poor treatment I received; neither was it safe to express the need for help. Doing so usually brought some kind of betrayal -- ridicule, embarrassment, criticism, or outright emotional blackmail. Dinnertime became hell: the given alcoholic was at their worst, picking on everyone, talking irrationally, sometimes yelling and sometimes laughing, always unpredictable. It was terrifying.
But I couldn't hide everything. I could shrink away at the dinner table, spend hours in my room nursing an ever-growing depression (I first wanted to die when I was 9, had a plan when I was 13), dress all in black and write morbid poetry, but I couldn't really contain the rage I was feeling at how unfair my life situation was. It wasn't horrible 100% of the time, but it was horribly unstable 100% of the time. I was never sure if I would be greeted with a smile or a scream. I was never sure if anyone would be there for me if I needed them. I felt totally unloved, and I longed for someone to come and rescue me from my life. I absolutely hated myself, and I felt as if everyone I really needed hated me -- but deep down, I knew that they shouldn't, and that it was totally unfair that they acted towards me the way they did. And I resented it.
Something had to give. Years of alcoholism and abuse, piled onto a kid, led in my case to years of my own anxiety, rage, depression, and a degree of acting out. Especially as a teen, when everything was a total mess anyway. Hormones, peer pressure, further abuse, social situations, a whole slough of stress just piled on, some of which was normal (all teens go through it) and some of which was extreme. When I reached middle school and began to feel that I wasn't being loved, I started seeking out boyfriends to fix it. In highschool, while I wasn't particularly promiscuous, I did exchange sex for love (see Rites of Passage and Loss of Innocence), with predictably disastrous results. I was suicidally depressed most of the time. I was full of anxiety at having to keep such tight control over everything I did and said, and yet I still managed to say and do the wrong things no matter how hard I tried. The only thing I was really good at was academics -- I did very well in school. (Interestingly enough, that was where I got the most support from my family. Gee, could there be a correlation there??)
I was sent to a child psychiatrist a few times, but each time I felt a lot of pressure to stop going, and never really did more than scratch the surface. An alcoholic family is only as healthy as its sickest member -- the emotional environment conspires to keep everyone as sick as possible so that things don't change, and no one else finds out. What amazes me, however, is that so many adults regard the acting out of a child as the child's problem, and not the symptom of a family problem. That just boggles my mind. Children, even older children and teens, really only have so much control over themselves and what goes on in their family, and they really don't have the resources (within themselves or without) to deal with life's problems. If your kid has a big huge problem, do take them someplace where they can be helped out -- but when you're looking for the source of the problem, look at yourself first. Take the whole family in for counseling. Don't just assume that your kid is The Problem. Because a child will take on the labels that you assign to them.
Which is I think, in part, what I did. I got the sense that the adults around me were Absolutely Certain that all teenagers were sexed-up, irresponsible, out-of-control demons who needed to be kept in line above all else. They were sure that the only thing I was interested in was sex, and that I'd have it the first chance I could get. They seemed equally certain that I was going to rebel, and that rebelling was BAD. I can't even begin to relate how many times I was browbeaten for doing or saying something that was construed as rebellion. The irony of it is, rebellion is a teen's business. In some teens it's extreme, in most it isn't -- it's simply one of the ways in which teen-agers separate from their families -- something, I might add, that they're supposed to do. How frustrating, then, to find myself being abused for doing something which was probably normal and necessary.
Truth be told, I really wasn't primarily interested in sex. On reflection, I really don't think I was particularly out-of-control, either. I wasn't the kind of kid to use drugs or alcohol, I didn't really do stuff like sneak out at night, I wasn't really interested in being a big problem, I mostly just wanted to get along with people somehow, and I mostly wanted to get my needs met. But even though I wasn't really the way the adults labeled me, I didn't fail to conform to their labels. It seemed to be what they expected, and seemed to be the only kind of behavior they would take as being genuine.
And when the drinking ended, the abuse didn't really stop. The abusive behaviors that had developed over the years, during the time of drunkenness, remained stubbornly in place when sobriety arrived. So despite the sudden absence of alcohol abuse, the verbal and emotional abuse remained, a bad habit formed after years of following the same behavioral path. And old habits die hard.
So if you read these accounts, and think to yourself, "Man, was she screwed up!" I'll have to say, yeah, I sure was -- but it wasn't because of me. I was a kid trying to deal with an alcoholic family. That'd screw anyone up.
The trick now is to deal with it as a grown-up.
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