LAST WEEKEND WE brought you some powerful, personal stories about alcoholic parents. It prompted our readers to share their own heartbreaking stories. Here is one of those stories from an anonymous contributor. 

I’m a child of an alcoholic. When I say child – I’m 40 years old.

Adult children of alcoholics – It’s a search I’ve carried out on the internet. My story is not unique, I’ve found. It’s a story that could be told by countless men, women and children up and down the country.

My Dad is in his 70s and he is an alcoholic. Chronic/raging you choose the term, it all leads to the one thing, a truly horrifying disease that when witnessed first hand makes you think that death would be an easier horror to handle.

My Dad has been an alcoholic for all of my life and pretty much most of his own.

The strongest memory I have from childhood is not a family day in the park, a holiday in the sun, an amazing Christmas present. It’s not a memory, it’s a feeling.

A constant feeling of dread, anxiousness, fear.

Humorous, gentle drunk 

I was never afraid of my Dad, he’s not that type of drunk. He’s the humorous and gentle type. A drunk who repeated himself often and who sometimes spent all the weekly wages for the large family on Guinness and whiskey. Sometimes self-righteous and a lot of the times argumentative.

This combination doesn’t mix well with a fiery woman who expects her husband to at the very least provide for his family while she raised them.

Children of alcoholics have a heightened sense of awareness, from that very moment when I would walk in the front door, I would know instantly if he was drinking or not.

Even a silent home of an alcoholic is noisy with its palpable atmosphere.

Even when I was outside the house I was consumed by this awful feeling of shame. Shame! My adult brain tells me I’ve nothing to be ashamed of, I’ve done nothing wrong. Yet in many ways I still feel that sense of shame. Even today I would never share with work colleagues whom I know for years, that my Dad is an alcoholic.

Only a handful of my close friends know the truth about what’s happening.

Death of my mother

On and off over the years there were periods of sobriety and most recently he was sober for around 4 years. Things changed a year ago when my Mum died suddenly.

Mum’s passing has unleashed an unabashed rampage of “lets see how much alcohol one can drink before we fall over and die”.

The last year has resulted in my Dad drinking lots of Guinness, only he realised that Guinness doesn’t give you quite the same buzz, so he started on the whiskey.

He has fallen over and had to go to hospital. We’ve had to wait in local A&E for anything from 10 hours to 65 hours (because a drunk is not a priority – “sure he brought it on himself”).

The A&E doctor prescribed my father, the alcoholic, Librium or some other drug to detox him, which he did for two days. But this scenario has been repeated over and over again, with the same result.

You may think I’m being flippant, but when you have reached cycle ten of the above you are ready to give up. I mean the family member wants to give up, the alcoholic will continue like this forever.

How do you fix it? 

As a family we are at a complete loss at what to do. Your car’s broken, bring it to a mechanic. You break your leg, you go to the doctor.

What do you do with an alcoholic?

AA will take you in with open arms once you walk in the door yourself – however, when you’re in the throes of a binge that has no end in sight you’re not going to walk through that door.

The local doctor whilst helpful in some respects has done as much as he can. He recommended a psychiatrist come to visit Dad, which she did and concluded that Dad was not depressed.

The A&E doctor ticks the patient off his list and sends him on his merry way with a big bottle full of drugs to help in the detox, but no follow up, no suggestion of any other services, if they even exist.

We have organised counselling sessions with an alcohol and grief counsellors, all of which have been cancelled last minute by my Dad.

All of my siblings have sat with him and talked with him about his drinking and how it is affecting his health and our mental health. As a family we have tried group interventions.

When do you walk away?

You can’t force someone to get help when it’s apparent they don’t want help. So what do you do? When do you decide it’s time to walk away?

That childhood feeling of dread is back, every day I wait for that phone call.

The logical part of me knows that addiction is a disease, but emotionally it’s so bloody hard to understand and accept especially when it’s happening to someone you love.

I am a fixer by nature (or maybe by circumstance), if someone has a problem I always try to come up with an answer or a way to fix it. That’s why this current situation is so unbelievably frustrating and hopeless.

The author of this article wishes to remain anonymous.

Read: ‘I will never get my childhood back’: Four people talk about life with an alcoholic parent>

Read: ‘It was always my job to check if Dad was breathing after he passed out’>