I aged a decade for every night I dealt with my parents
I remember the day we managed to finally escape from my father. He had been made redundant for the third or fourth time, gone on a violent, volatile binge for several weeks.
We had yet again sought solace at my grandparents’ house, my mother, my brother (~15) and me (~12).
Yet again, our belongings in bin bags, making a run for it in the dead of night, feeling both petrified and utterly relieved to be there in the safety of someone else’s home. Relative safety: my dad had beaten their door in to get to us a few years before during a previous similar episode.
My mother was shaken but settled us in, fussed around us, helped us unpack, busy-bodied herself through the crisis. Gave us each a kiss, said to be good, not to answer the phone, or the door, to help out as much as we could while we stayed indefinitely.
She would stay with a friend and we would return home once an injunction was granted. She’d pop by tomorrow.
As she picked up her handbag to go, I begged her. “Please, Mum. Please make sure this is it. Please don’t drink anymore. We’re free”.
“Of course”, she said, “don’t worry. I promise”. We talked in hushed voices so her parents didn’t overhear.
It was supposed to be the end of what already felt like a lifetime living with one alcoholic parent. Instead, one replaced the other and a new chapter began.
A new chapter began
After a few years homeless (mortifyingly, in our hometown), a very public drink-driving offence, an attempt to burn down our house and a divorce, my father – amazingly – did finally manage to get sober.
I had a few bittersweet years with him after his recovery. I was desperate for a stable parent figure – albeit an alternative one – and we slowly rebuilt our relationship, his cosy tiny flat offering somewhere to go while my mum got worse.
After a handful of relapses here and there, his final slip was when I was 19, immediately after a peaceful alcohol-free Christmas, just my brother, my father and me.
In our last conversation, I asked him why he did it: after years of Christmas horrorshows, he said, he’d had such a lovely time that year that he couldn’t bear it, and picked up a drink. I never quite worked that one out.
My mother’s drinking got worse
My mother’s drinking, however, got progressively worse in my teenage years as she struggled to move on from the separation. It’s hard to know whether my father’s drinking masked hers or drove her to it, setting the blueprint for how to survive adulthood through a fog.
It felt like such a betrayal: after fighting a demon together with her my whole life, she chose (it seemed) to continue our nightmare, the monster now herself.
As weekly episodes became daily, twice-daily, she started getting in trouble at work, the moments of sobriety became fleeting, and I mourned the loss of the wonderful woman I had known. I threw myself into school before taking the enormous decision to leave her, and start my own life at university at 18.
Almost twenty years later she passed away too. During that time she’d had one serious stint clean after her liver failed, but I came to learn after her death that her sobriety was peppered with relapses, even when she told me she was doing ok.
In my grief as an adult, I felt an utter fool for believing her at the time. I should have known. I also felt so terribly sad for her that she hadn’t managed to get free from it, neither the booze nor the denial, even for that short time.
The toll it took on my life
Writing all this out in a few brief paragraphs feels somewhat ironic now. When I was a kid, those few paragraphs felt like an eternity. For every night dealing with my parents, I aged a decade.
The unpredictability, the secrecy, the dread, the humiliation by association, the sixth sense/second guessing, listening for any creak of the floorboards to indicate ‘they’re awake!’. Two decades of the wrong kind of adrenaline. All while trying to learn how to exist as a good human being.
I would get up, go to school, try my hardest to do well, be a school prefect, deputy head girl, try to be top of the class. Most people were none-the-wiser about what was going on at home. It was too embarrassing to say we went through it once, let alone twice.
It was exhausting. I thought it would never stop. Even a good day or two felt too good to be true: I felt like a mug for hoping things would get better, only to be proven wrong yet again each day.
And then, eventually…it did.
The light at the end of the tunnel
It did stop, ultimately, when each parent passed away. The sheer relief knowing that it couldn’t get worse for us, for them. That I was genuinely free to live my life outside of the shadow of theirs, years after I had already grieved their loss.
Yet, when I look back now, even before then, it started to stop just a little bit when I took my own steps to escape. Graduating from university with a degree, a ticket to a new life of my very own.
Getting into uni and moving away that first time. Before that, getting a part time job, earning my own income, carving my own identity as a young employee, seeing the result of my own hard work. It almost started to stop in those moments.
Before that, doing well at school, getting good results, having my own wonderful set of friends. Each time one of them invited me to crash for a few days, when their parents invited me round for dinner, when aunts and uncles opened their doors to me, let me stay in their home to do homework, rely on their electricity/internet to submit uni applications.
Each time teachers pushed me on, let me know I could be someone. In all of those micro-moments it started to stop just a little bit. I didn’t realise it at the time, but the ball had started to roll even then.
Advice to anyone going through this
It’s that advice I would give to anyone living in it now. As hard as it is to accept help, to loosen control, to take a leap away from home, to let it/them go even for a few hours: say ‘yes’.
Yes to any support.
Yes to any brief moments of respite, of normality.
Yes to any opportunity, big or small, earned or pure luck.
Yes to the paths towards a different future.
They seem few and far between, but when you collect them over a lifetime, all those moments add up. They were invaluable for me forging a new future, even comprehending that a different future existed.
As an adult, a mother, I now see that my self-esteem, values and perceptions of success were based on those small windows into the lives of others who let me in.
To those who did, I thank them so deeply for their kindness… and for those who are in a position to help a kid living through it – please, please offer them something to say yes to. It really can change a life.
Sophie
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