Member-only story
The Realizations I’ve Had With My Father’s Alcoholism
The hard truths I’ve come to terms with.
It probably wouldn’t surprise you that if I’m dealing with an alcohol addiction, I more than likely grew up with a parent who had also one. There seems to be two paths a child of a parent’s addiction will take later on in life- they either swear off alcohol and never try it, or they become the thing they feared. We know that there’s a significant increase in alcoholism if you have a family history of it, and most studies have shown that children are four times as likely to become alcoholics if their parents were.
When I went sober, I thought a lot about my relationship to alcohol. The surprising part of my reflection was that I started remembering more of my childhood. A steady image that stayed in my mind was a Lone Star Light, a lighter beer made in Texas. That pale blue font on a white can was a pillar of my growth as a child. My father always had one in his hands, even when driving, and it seemed normal to me; I didn’t know life without it.
Understanding that it wasn’t normal for a parent to drink all day and was detrimental to my childhood hit me hard when I was doing that introspection regarding my own addiction. It made me incredibly sad that I hadn’t known my father, truly, even if I had been a total daddy’s girl who followed him around all of the time…
