Member-only story
Did Mom Have a Drinking Problem?
I am ashamed of us now: my father, and we three oldest children in the family. (The two younger ones weren’t yet responsible for anything except trying to protect their lives.) Our mother — Dad’s wife — kept getting tipsy, sometimes all the way to drunk, and weepy on the phone with us. We told Dad he had to make her stop.
Not one of us asked her why she was drinking. (Dad might have feared the answer.) Come to think of it, the drinking wasn’t a problem for Mom. It was her solution to the pain we can now recognize.
Back then, it was our problem, we three grown kids and Dad. As far as we were concerned, Mom was acting immature, rude, inconvenient, and most of all, embarrassing.
Today I see what I couldn’t see back then: We victimized the victim. And there is no way to make amends directly. Our mother (Dad’s wife) died suddenly at age 53, of an entirely curable condition that cut the blood flow to her kidneys and sent her spiraling into heart failure. If she hadn’t used drinking to cope with her stresses, and if we’d had more skills in supporting her, she might have seen a doctor who took her symptoms seriously — the one she did visit told her she was experiencing “the changes” in a messy way, clearly implying she was making a female fuss about nothing much.
