All in moderation…

I have been thinking about my dad a lot lately. Despite my efforts, he’s never far from my thoughts. You see, my dad is an alcoholic, he is 62 years old and I have very few memories of my dad that doesn’t involve an alcoholic drink. My children will always remember their granddad drunk, fragile and unpredictable, nothing like the man he was before the alcohol took him.

Did it take him, or did he go down this path willingly? I know he started willingly, we all have a choice to make, and it’s a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in the beginning. I say ‘yes’ along with a majority of the population but I am in control. For my Dad, it’s far more complicated than just making a choice now. I think the time has come to accept that my Dad is beyond help, he is fully alcohol dependent meaning he simply cannot function without it! That’s the crux of it, if you can identify and differentiate between casually socially drinking to needing a drink as much as you need to breath the air around you then you are in control, control is lost the moment the poison your drinking becomes as natural as the air your breathing!

It’s been nearly 200 days since I last spoke with my father, his latest stunt was changing his mobile number and not telling me… that’s kind of a big hint that he’d rather have nothing to do with me or mine. Maybe him not telling me is his way of protecting me. We do this, us humans! We make excuses for our loved one’s bad behavior, we try to reason it out with logic to take the sting out of the truth, when the truth is…. sometimes people are arseholes. They don’t mean to be arseholes but it’s a product of circumstance.

‘Arsehole-itous’ it is a common side effect of alcoholism, an addiction of which I am continually making excuses for, undecided if the excuses I am making are for my father or for my own benefit in an act of self-preservation. Everyone shames my dad. Everyone says he’s a waster, he’s changed, he’s a wanker for treating his kids like this, no wonder his wife/wives left him. The people saying these things, don’t get it, don’t get the addiction, don’t understand the illness. Like everything there are various degrees of alcoholism, there is a vast difference between ‘harmful drinking’, which is like bingeing on a bottle of Jägermeister leaving you vomiting over your best friends’ new frock to being alcohol dependent . Just be careful your bingeing doesn’t become a habit your addicted to!

My dad has had so much help offered to him over the years, I have helped him countless times. I have begged him numerously, sobbing my heart out as a young influential teenage girl when he had almost caught himself on fire in the house we lived in having fallen asleep in an intoxicated state in front of the fire with a lit cigarette in his hand that had slowly began to singe the rug he slept on.

I have begged him on my hands and knees pulling out of a ditch in the pouring rain after searching for him for hours, then finally finding him in a hole in the ground where he’d fallen through the safety barricade, inebriated and incoherent. Just two snippets of many stories I could tell – It’s a wonder the man is still alive if I am honest.

I always felt that I should have been enough.

He has rejected all the help he was ever offered from anyone. So how do we help someone who is not ready, willing or understanding of the fact that they need help?

Simple answer: You can’t! … and the reason is just as simple. You have to WANT it, you have to want to be open to accepting help, as much as you need the air to breath.

When you know and accept this knowledge, it makes it even harder to accept that when we have a loved one, like I do in my Dad. I want him to love me enough to trust me to lead him down a better path, I want him to love me and his grandchildren enough to want more for himself than the life he has chosen. I want him to understand why drinking became so important to him, that everything and everyone else he loved mattered less. I want to be enough. However, I am not and I never will be enough, but that is no reflection of me.

That’s the truly sad reality of alcoholism. I think the point many of us miss with alcohol abuse is it’s socially acceptable to drink, the process from ‘all in moderation’ to ‘full on addiction’ takes hold so gradually its often missed before you realise you have a problem with it. You can drink excessively and its accepted because its socially acceptable to ‘rack em up and neck em’, I mean the local crack head ain’t going to rock up at the local supermarket, and say ‘excuse me, in which aisle will I find the crack?’ …

You can drink in social establishments almost everywhere in the UK, I took my little girl to the soft play center the other day and on the top shelf of the chiller cabinet, there it was all lined up, from cans of lager flowing into miniature bottles of chardonnay, shiraz and bubbles!! You can even drive within a certain number of consumed units which in my opinion is a bit like turning your car into a ‘bipolar hitman’! Let’s be more Scottish on this one guys ‘ZERO TOLERANCE’. Let’s not blur the lines with our beer goggles.

I bloody love a good knees up and enjoy the social aspect of drinking with friends, so writing this may seem a little hypocritical to most given that I also have had a love hate relationship with drugs and alcohol over the years. I fell into the trap of initially abusing alcohol because it was an easy escape from the pain I was feeling, I was drinking to numb my reality, rather than face my reality. It soon became my solace, it became my friend, my medicine to help anesthetise the pain in my soul.

I kept telling myself that its OK I’ll wait until the kids are asleep, until I was cracking one open at 4pm.

Then I’d say its OK I’ll just have one with dinner, until your having one after every meal including breakfast and having another bottle as a nightcap.

It’s OK I won’t drink tomorrow … but tomorrow never comes…

So, what’s the difference between me and my Dad? I was accepting of help and I trusted the people around me to have a little more clarity than I did, I took help before I was unreachable. Combine this with the fear I had of letting my children down, the fear that this was yet another trait of my Dads I had ‘inherited’ and I also would go on to let my children down as he had me. That hurt more than any shame I felt in seeking help. Whilst I was able to identify a reason for my excessive drinking not everyone drinks for a reason other than the enjoyment factor… and that’s what makes it so dangerously addictive. I think we live in a society where we want to find reason or blame for doing something, especially when its detrimental. To admit you are addicted to something because you enjoy it, doesn’t resonate or create the same empathy as someone excusing their drinking because of painful experiences or profound life changing events. Some of us drink for no other reason than for fun and that fun evolves into a habit. Whilst others use it as a tranquillizer to tranquility.

My dad says it’s in his blood, he says it’s hereditary (a debate that will be debated forever) he says it was a huge part of his youth, years of being the youngest son of the off-license owners in 1960’s London, drinking from the age of 11! It’s what he knows best, its peer-pressure and above all else it’s excuses. I firmly believe that we are all a product of our upbringing to a degree, not all of us have flawless childhoods but it is up to you whether you use it as a reason to do better or as a justification for your actions. That is a choice you do have.

Alcoholism is a self-destructive path disguised as merriment that leads you sometimes unknowingly,   down a path of loneliness, alcohol will make you friends by night and leave you alone in the morning, it will make you funnier than Michael McIntyre and then more depressed than your overdrawn bank balance, it will give you confidence when you have none, and leave you feeling ashamed when the confidence is gone, because what once was your enjoyment, is now your biggest secret as you lie to your friends about what you drank last night.

This isn’t a pity post, nor is it a patronizing post trying to tell you how to live your life, it’s a reality post and a warning that whilst enjoying a cocktail or three is great fun, be cautious and careful always. Especially if you have one of those addictive personalities that can’t say no to just one Hob Nob!!