Children of Alcoholic Parents

My father had always been someone who suffered from mental illness. He had struggled with depression, anxiety and was potentially undiagnosed with bipolar disorder. My father was also battling a bad addiction with alcohol and pills. It has been something he has been struggling with for twenty years.

My father had been drinking for almost a month straight at this point now. He would wake up at 9am and drive to the liquor store, buy enough to hold him through the whole day, and would come home and start his ritual. He would fill an empty glass with ice and pour Tito’s vodka to the rim of the glass. Within minutes, that glass would be empty and he would be ready to fill it up again.

My dad slept downstairs on a pullout couch. Him and my mom didn’t sleep together. They both had different sleep schedules, different interests in TV shows. You know, the normal things parents say in this situation to evade their kids from thinking there may be problems between them. On a normal (sober) day, my father would wake up around 6AM with a cup of coffee, watching the news. He would comfortably sit in front of the TV on the couch and get some work done. When my father decided to drink his days away instead, he would drink whatever was leftover from the night before, go out as soon as the liquor store opened to buy more booze, then come home and pass out for hours at a time.

The issues started when my father would wake up from his drunken state and realize he slept off some of his buzz and needs to buy more. The liquor store was down the street, but I never wanted my father going out and drunk driving, but how do I do that without being an enabler? Sometimes I did go out and buy him alcohol, because he couldn’t even get out of bed to get it, but knowing him, he would push himself to go.

My father started to consume those little one shot bottles of Tito’s vodka. I’m not sure why he wouldn’t just buy a pint, but I like to think he thought it would be easier to hide the smaller bottles. There were days where he would go through 2-3 pints of vodka in a 18 hour period. He couldn’t walk. He couldn’t stand. We would have to physically carry him up the stairs to the bathroom and help him pee. Once he was awake and in his extremely drunken stupor, he would start yelling at the TV. Loudly. Enough for our neighbors to hear. I would ask him to stop, but that would only make him yell louder and more frequently.

He would leave, and for 10 minutes there would be peace. Peace from his random outbursts, peace from his loud snoring, peace from living in a world that I would never wish my worst enemy to live in. But also in that 10 minutes my mind would race with thoughts. Did he make it there okay? Will they call the cops on him when he gets there because he’s too drunk? Will he run into someone he knows? Will he cause a scene? With all of the different type of scenarios running through my mind, I couldn’t sit still. I would sit in the living room for however long it took in order to make sure he made it home okay. On almost all occasions he did (thankfully). But the fun always began when he was all stocked up on alcohol and ready to drink the rest of the day away.

I was stuck. I didn’t know what to do. How do you help someone who doesn’t want to help themselves? I always felt like it was my responsibility to help my father in any way that I could. I would talk to him about his issues, troubles, concerns. He would tell me them (or so I thought) and we would talk them out. I would encourage him to seek out for help and he would agree every time, but I knew once my dad sobered up a little he would tell me rehab isn’t for him and that he forbids to go. I would spend hours with him at a time just trying to understand what’s going through his mind. From conversations about work, relationships, mental health to happy memories in the past, it never worked. But in my mind, I was always that much closer to making him crack.

For two weeks straight, my father lied in his pullout bed downstairs in our living room, drunker than I have ever seen him in my life, almost like he was waiting to die. To see someone you love and look up to suffer like that is unbearable to watch. I’d catch myself crying because I finally came to the conclusion that I can’t do anything to help him. He needed to make the decision himself that he wanted to get better, but I was just slowly watching him hit his rock bottom. I always told him he just needed to hit his rock bottom before he realizes he needs to straighten himself out, but I wasn’t expecting my father to do what he did.