Growing up with divorced parents lead me to make a decision that would change my life forever. I had to decide which parent I was going to live with. Naïve and unaware of what I was getting my ten-year-old self into, I chose to live with my mother. The roles were reversed; I was taking care of her, cooking for her, cleaning up after her, just the way a parent would for its child. My mother was diagnosed with chronic depression two months after the divorce, which drove her to become a narcissistic alcoholic that put drugs and alcohol above everyone and everything else. Her dependence on alcohol started before I was born but deteriorated as soon as I came to this world. She would get drunk every night, which would lead to a mental and physical breakdown. She would then inject herself with heroin and slit her wrists – right in front of me. Her feeble attempts to conceal her disease became futile. I spent most nights of my childhood holding her hair back with one hand, two fingers down her throat with the other, and wrapping bed sheets and old t-shirts around her fragile and wounded wrists. Every night was the same; my life was like a broken record on repeat.
Since the beginning of human history, people have discovered ways to alter their bodies and their consciousness by consuming substances such as herbs, alcohol, and drugs. This has sprung diverse significant influences to science and culture, prominent among them being the development of modern medicine. There are a number of effects that drugs and alcohol can have on the human body and in this paper, I will address the disease of drug and alcohol addiction; a disease that affects the lives of millions of people worldwide – including mine. The way addiction is defined and diagnosed is an on-going issue and one that will also be discussed in this paper. While there are several categories that substances are classified in, this paper will be focusing on hard drugs and alcohol.
An estimated 126 million Americans have experienced a drug or alcohol problem. The effects that drugs and alcohol can have on the human body, as well as the addiction it produces, have been discussed in presidential debates and have been the topic of many scholarly journals, papers, and books. According to scientists, the most conclusive way to define addiction is that it prevails when the drug or alcohol use is directly affiliated with “impairment of health and social functioning.” Addiction can be described as “the lack of choice the user has over the use.” Once the individual needs the alcohol or drug to feel normal, and not as a way to feel pleasure, they are considered reliant on on that particular substance.
Drug and alcohol addiction not only destroys those that consume, but also the lives of the people close to the addict. Thousands of jobs, homes, and families are lost annually due to infatuations of drugs and alcohol. Children grow up without parents, spouses are left with no choice but to raise their children alone, and grandparents become legal guardians for a second time. This is a disease, which is obliterating many people and families, and is a constant burden on our society.
The term alcoholism has been used over the years as an indefinite, poorly understood, and sometimes morally flavored term. Alcoholism is described as a principal, chronic disease with genetic, psychosocial, and environmental factors including its development and manifestations. For many years alcohol has been the most extensively abused substance in America. The causes of alcoholism are highly controversial, but include both genetic and environmental factors. The main factor is genetics; the idea that addiction is passed on to children through inherited genes. In comparisons of genetic and environmental factors, the genetic factor seems to be more closely associated with the development of alcohol as a disease. I believe that there is a misconception that men are generally the alcoholics in the family but when it’s the mother, the nucleus of the family is destroyed and everything falling apart becomes an inventible fate.
My childhood was chaotic, with routines constantly disrupted and promises to stop drinking broken. As I got older I tried to talk to my mother about her alcoholism and drug addiction, but she never wanted to hear it; she was in complete and utter denial. It forced me to come to terms with the fact I couldn’t change her. She refused to recognize she had a problem and actively contradicted it whenever I brought it up.
I cannot begin to express the discomfort and despair in knowing that my mother was incapable of living a normal life and had to resort to oblivion from a bottle instead. It felt impossible to feel loved, or believe the sentence “I love you” when it was being said by someone who wasn’t lucid. The reason, as I felt it, was because proclaiming love from another’s demands was a level of selflessness, and drinking is purely selfish and venal behavior. I never meant to condone or criticize my mother, and I know that she had her reasons for wanting to burry her emotions into a bottle; I knew that this was her coping mechanism nonetheless I can’t begin to reiterate how important it is for anyone – especially a parent to learn to deal with their emotions appropriately and stop damaging their families with this habit.
I began to base my self-esteem on people’s judgments of me. The neglect, lack of love and attention made me feel inadequate. This resulted into having a compulsive urge to please others. I regularly interpreted assertiveness for anger; I had a fear of criticism and conflict. The childhood fear left me in a hyper-vigilante state; I overthought and sensed problems that weren’t even there. This stems from experiencing interpersonal conflict. I was living a fake life – an unsatisfactory life. I avoided emotional connections and I found it difficult to put my feelings into words and share them. I had a limited empathetic response, and I was overly critical, excessively rigid and perfectionistic. I had chronic anxiety and an overwhelming sense of insecurity, I felt erratic, impulsive and unpredictable all at the same time. I learned to fake a smile and get the instantaneous reaction of replying, “I’m fine” to the question “how are you?” and I lost my identity in the process of seeking acceptance – the acceptance I never received as a child. My mother’s addiction forced me to be more cautious and restrained. I reasoned that if I drank anything, I would turn into her: a gloomy, egocentric, inconsiderate cold-hearted monster. When she would drink, she would transform – it petrified me. Her eyes would turn blood red, her face would turn anemically pale and the sound of her voice changed – almost as if she carried an accent of some sort.
The persistent feeling of responsibility and concern for her life kept me up at night; I became a light-sleeper and always stayed by her side, I was apprehensive every time I had to leave the house to go to school, buy the groceries, or get some fresh air outside when situations got out of hand. I will never forget the sense of invisibility to her, or the way her face would decipher her mood, her verbal assaults and threats, the sense of being so small to such an enormous world, the deep shame, the smell of alcohol, the scene of running blood, and the fear of falling asleep at night.
The more she denied she had a problem, the more it dawned on me that I wasn’t her. I had developed more self-awareness and control than she had ever shown me, however, the realization didn’t happen overnight. There was never any therapy sessions or group programs, there was only time. Maybe I didn’t need a fresh start after all; I just needed to realize that I wasn’t her. I never trusted her to show up for me as a parent. I never felt she cared about me and maybe she didn’t or maybe she couldn’t because she was rarely sober, but it forced me to see how important is it to be their for people in my life and I know that in the future, I will be the mother I never had – the mother I always wanted.