OKaysez

 

Made a Decision

(65)

    Alcoholic Parents and Children; Both Sides of that Fence.

Fairly early in my sobriety my Home Group brought in a Big Guns AA Speaker to share with us. We usually met in the church hall, but for this event we packed the main church itself. 

It was a gala occasion.

Big Guns got up and his opening line was: "I have yet to meet an alcoholic who didn't grow up in a dysfunctional family." 

And I remember that so well because my immediate thought was, "Well, here's one."

It took me a long old time in recovery to come to grips with the illusions I held about my childhood versus the actual reality of it. 

 SLOW-briety, remember?

To any child, their surroundings and the people around them are their normal. Some of us become aware when very young that other families operate in a different and perhaps even better way; some of us never question our "normal."

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The children in my home were taught that "Yes, we're different in our family, but that's because we are superior ... Well, maybe YOU aren't, kid, but all the rest of us in this family are."

That probably wasn't the message my parents intended to send, but it's the one I received. And I don't think my two older brothers got a different one. And they, in fact, in many ways had a much tougher childhood than mine. 

It is to my brothers' credit they didn't grow up resenting their pampered baby sister, so that in later years we could come to understand our different levels of difficulty adapting in life, following the lessons we learned in our family home.

While my parents gave me an appreciation of those things I still most enjoy, like reading, poetry, writing, art, gardening, adventure, people, cooking, baking, the maritime industry (odd, but true), nature, pets, and much more. 

They also instilled in me a deep sense of guilt, insecurity and anxiety, along with teaching me to lie, fear intimacy, and become a first class people-pleaser. 

My dad also taught me, since my mother had cornered the market for perfection in women, I should concentrate on things where I might actually be able to succeed. From that I gained a workaholic career drive and a lifelong insecurity about my own femininity.

In other words, while my parents were wonderful, intelligent, interesting and loving people, they were not necessarily the best parents for three sensitive children. 

And nor was I to my own four children. 

We all just did the best we could with what we had to offer. And the same is true I suspect - to a greater or lesser degree - for each and every one of us.

Some of us in recovery had truly dreadful parents, but they often had truly dreadful parents, too. No one had ever installed good parenting skills in them, so the beat - literally and figuratively - went on. 

Parenting is hard work. This is especially so for those given a faulty blueprint for parenting. Throw addiction into that mix and the recipe is guaranteed to cause harm. I'd love a do-over for my children, with me as a better parent. So would most alcoholic parents I know, but the best we can do is to stay sober and be supportive of our now older children - if they want that from us.

Neither one of my parents had much of a childhood and in both cases it had ended early. My Dad was working in a coal mine by the age of 13. My mother at that same young age was working as a nanny 150 miles away from her own family. 

So when I was born they gave me the childhoods they'd missed out on, and I'm sure never once considered if the perfect childhood they envisioned was a good fit for a timid little girl.

I was given ballet lessons, made to act professionally on stage before large audiences, give radio and newspaper interviews, study piano, and perform in music recitals. My Dad, an avid home movie buff, filmed me scaling tall (scary) ladders, riding big (scary) horses, and otherwise behaving like the Shirley Temple I wasn't. They regularly turned me loose in strange cities while they visited art museums and similar places. When they went out of town, my brothers and I were left for weeks at a time (separately) with people our parents knew. Sometimes we knew those people, sometimes not.

There's no doubt that the above made me into a stronger person as an adult, but it all scared the hell out of me as a kid. 

And, even though both my parents died in the 1990s, I still feel a twinge of guilt at writing everything you've just read. Family loyalty gets hardwired into us long before we ever step inside a school room. It's still there in me, but at least today I understand it.

As recovering adults we need to examine all aspects of our life, including what we learned in our families of origin, so that we can keep the good stuff and work on eliminating the not-so-good. Learning to separate out the many real gifts our parents gave us from some of the "issues" we learned, is an important part of our recovery. Especially when we can do so while remaining (mostly) guilt free.

Most children of recovering alcoholics - once they realize a parent is well and truly into recovery - can reestablish a good relationship with them. That's true in more cases than not. They come to realize their mother or father was both physically and mentally ill while drinking and has become a new person in recovery. The frightening parent they knew has become the person they were meant to be before alcoholism took over. 

Others, and sadly for all concerned, never recover from the trauma of their drunk-drama childhoods, especially if their parents divorced and they grew up with an embittered ex-spouse. Young minds are, after all, impressionable. These kids grow up hating the alcoholic for what he/she did to their family home. They remain hard and cynical, unable to forgive.

Learning and healing take time. Forgiveness takes both desire and effort. Estrangement usually ends, but not always. Acceptance of whatever develops remains the key. 

Hanging onto our own parenting guilt isn't helpful either. I had a lot of guilt over the fact that, of my four children, my eldest was wanted at birth in every sense of that word and my youngest, born less than five years later, arrived into the turmoil of a fracturing marriage and my escalating alcoholism. In other words, my baby got the short shrift. 

It took a very wise woman in AA to point out to me that each of us has our own lessons to learn in life and that the conditions for our growth have to exist from the beginning. 

"Call it Karma if you prefer," she said, "But each child gets the design they most need for their own soul's development and eventual fulfillment."

I took some real comfort from that. I hope you can, too.