Throughout his alcoholism, the alcoholic is surrounded by family, friends, and coworkers who tolerate his insecure personality and his drinking behavior. They become "co-alcoholics," and they are also affected by the disease. To the degree of their closeness, they develop a manner of thinking, a way of reacting, and emotional scars which they will carry for life. They have a problem, which they believe is the alcoholic and the alcoholic's drinking. They are wrong to place the blame where they do.
The first thing they must learn is that there is absolutely nothing they can do about the alcoholic and his drinking. Arguments, control, threats, bribes, favors—all that appears to be well-motivated and helpful—will fail. They must seek help for themselves. They must wait for the alcoholic to hit bottom or force it to happen.
The lives of those close to a drinking alcoholic are lives of anger, frustration, self-pity, and depression. The co-alcoholics—whether the alcoholic in their lives is drinking or not—must get down to the business of living their own lives. In seeking help for themselves and not the alcoholic, toward whom they previously directed their energy, they will begin to discover a new sense of peace and happiness. When they focus on their own needs and wants, their lives are transformed.
When those around the alcoholic seek help for themselves, they quickly learn how they are helping the alcoholic to continue his drinking. By helping themselves, they change their own behavior. This ultimately will affect the alcoholic, who in turn may seek help for himself.
If there are 20 million alcoholics in America, minimally 80 million Americans are directly affected by alcoholic behavior. This figure—which represents more than one third of the entire population—includes the alcoholics themselves, and the husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, children and parents of alcoholics.
Society has a long way to go in truly accepting alcoholism as a disease, and that is doubly true of accepting alcoholism as a family disease.
However, Dr. Conway Hunter, Jr., is hopeful when he says that enlightened people nowadays recognize the impact of one family member on another. Dr. Hunter does not mince words when he says, "You show me the child of an alcoholic and I'll show you a sick child."
Conway Hunter, Jr., M.D., is an alcoholic. He serves on the board of directors of the International Council of Alcohol and Addiction, an organization that advises the World Health Organization and the United Nations. He is a physician in private practice in Atlanta, Georgia.
When an alcoholic drinks, he or she changes into a different personality, a different being. The whole family is involved in the process.
Enlightened people know that in families each individual's life is involved with the others'. This is not just true with alcoholism. It's true with any major illness in any family. For example, when somebody is dying of cancer or having a serious surgical operation, the entire family is affected by it. But these things have an end point. Alcoholism or drug addiction goes on and on and on and on. It waxes and it wanes, and it gets better and it gets worse. It's the complete instability of the disease process, with apparently no known causes, that becomes so undermining to the entire family. It's very difficult for the family members to regard themselves as having part of this illness, to think that there is anything wrong with them. More often than not they develop a martyr role that is supported by their friends. Rather than thinking of the family members of the alcoholic as sick people, we think of them as deprived, depressed, poor, suffering individuals.
Alcoholism becomes a way of life, for the family members as well as the alcoholic. They live a life of total deceit. They deceive themselves by trying to rationalize that they are in a normal situation. There isn't anything normal about it. They develop all kinds of schemes to cope. They start game-playing and role-changing. They become protectors. As the alcoholic slowly descends into a childlike personality, the other family members assume parental and protective roles. They protect many different things: themselves, the integrity of the family, the economic structure of the family, and, of course, family pride. As they enter into this alliance of deceit, they become very untrustworthy. They become unreliable and physically and emotionally sick themselves. They become enablers. They make up stories to explain abnormal behavior in the alcoholic. They make up excuses for an absence. They hide. They cover up. They rationalize. They justify. They forgive over and over and over again and assume that it's not going to happen the next time.
In our society today, the pillar of strength in the home is the mother. When she becomes a victim of alcoholism or drug addiction, it is devastating to the entire family, especially the children. They are horribly embarrassed by her. They are mortified. They are ashamed. They blame themselves. This is a very significant event. Almost 100 percent of children of alcoholic mothers blame themselves for their mother's illness.
Paternal alcoholism is more socially acceptable. The whole family unites. The father is usually removed from the house and does much of his drinking away from home. The impact, though not as great as with the mother, is still devastating to the children and the family. They become victims of living in a very abnormal situation. They make excuses. They become deceitful. They all accept the blame for their father's illness. They suffer greatly from lack of their own identity and self-expression because so much of their lives are involved in their father's illness. How are they going to explain it? What are they going to do with it?
I often hear stories about children hiding under the bed or in the closet. The children gather together and go up into the attic and sit, waiting for Father to come home, not knowing how he's going to be. Is he going to love them or is he going to beat them? There is no in-between. It is one way or the other, and it produces such an unstable situation that these kids never get on an even keel.
You find that they become, more often than not, overachievers rather than underachievers. They need to excel. They need to find a source for their own re-enforcement. And often their energy is devoted to making top grades in school. They're in the glee club, the band, they work on the school paper, and things like that. They're overachievers, involved in many activities. They are often isolationists and do not mix well with the other kids. They become leaders, but they become loners.
Children of alcoholics quickly learn not to bring friends home. Because of the instability of the situation, they don't know what it's going to be like when they get there. The fear is there all the time, plus the shame, so they do everything they can to avoid embarrassing episodes.
The long-term effect will probably be the same, whether for boys or girls. Most of these children will live abnormal lives. Many of them will become alcoholics themselves. A large number of them will marry alcoholics. Almost all of them will experience very difficult living situations. They just do not turn out to be really rounded individuals. Adult children of alcoholics will have to deal with low self-esteem, difficulty in trusting other people, hostility, anger, fear, shame, guilt. Guilt for everything, completely unfounded guilt. They often assume responsibility for everything negative, including their parents' alcoholism. They will experience a distorted view of marriage, difficulty in achieving satisfying relationships, and all manner of sexual deviation problems, real and imagined.
Children of alcoholics grow up with not only a negative role model, but an incredible amount of verbal abuse, physical abuse, and often sexual abuse. They're all people-pleasers. Their abnormal growing up is an abnormal way of life. Not until they get beyond that, get out and away from home, do they find that other people don't live that way.
Husbands or wives of alcoholics are prisoners of the alcoholic. They come under the spell of the disease of alcoholism. The spouses don't know whether to be loving or to have defenses up and be ready to go to war. They have to stay that way all the time because they never know in what state the alcoholic is going to be. They are prisoners of this imbalance that keeps them teetering and tottering. There's no one more loving, more generous, more kind, more empathetic, and more passionate than a sober alcoholic. On the other hand, no one can be as bitter and cruel and selfish as the drinking alcoholic. So the spouses who live with it are caught in that turmoil. Is it going to be up or down? They don't know. They keep coming back. It seems that there's a greater power pulling them to the alcoholic than the one that's pulling the alcoholic to drink.
The most mysterious thing to me, which I have never been able to solve, is this: We take the worst possible situation, which is the daughter of an alcoholic father, and nine times out of ten she will marry an alcoholic, even if she doesn't know her own father, her blood father. If she divorces an alcoholic, nine times out of ten she will find herself another alcoholic, who may not even be drinking at the time she gets involved in marriage. This happens over and over and over, about 90 percent of the time. It seems that this negative re-enforcement, this slap in the face, may be part of the answer. She seems to thrive on it.
Every form of sexual dysfunction, from bestiality to incest to adultery, can surface in alcoholic marriages. Seeking companionship with members of the opposite sex outside of marriage is probably one of the most commonplace events that occurs in an alcoholic's life—predominantly with males, but with females, too, especially now, with the so-called liberation of women. More women work; more women are outside the home. Infidelity is also prevalent among the spouses of alcoholics. The alcoholic becomes isolated and, to a degree, unlovable and unreceptive. Often the alcoholic is demanding and really obnoxious in the bedroom. The spouse then begins to seek understanding and compassion and romance wherever it can be found.
Close friends, employers, and coworkers also become victimized by the alcoholic to a degree, depending on their closeness to the alcoholic and to the unnatural environment. This is very important. The brother who lives thousands of miles away is not going to be as affected by his sister's alcoholism as her sister, who lives in the house next door. The brother is somewhat protected by the distance. Yet he's still affected because the family network holds together. "What are we going to do about Joan?" It is an embarrassment for the entire family that they can't get away from. But the closer they are to the alcoholic, the more severe is the impact of the disease process.
Some of the sickest people and the most enabling people are the parents of alcoholics. Their son, their daughter, can do no wrong, and they will love them to their graves. They will enable them to their grave's edge and then push them in. Parents are very difficult people to deal with because it's hard to break down their denial.
You show me the child of an alcoholic and I'll show you a sick child. You show me the wife of an alcoholic and I'll show you a sick wife. You show me the mother of an alcoholic and I'll show you a sick mother.
Family members of an alcoholic need to get treatment for themselves. They may or may not survive without it. In order for them to become totally complete, self-sufficient individuals, they need treatment for themselves, not to help the alcoholic. If they get better, the alcoholic will get better, too. It is from their own wellness that the alcoholic reaps the benefit.
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Lee Bonnell, the husband of Gale Storm, is specifically included in this section because he so clearly recognizes what he did right and wrong in dealing with Gale's alcoholism. Looking back on those years of Gale's drinking, Lee realizes how he enabled her to hide from her own responsibilities and continue drinking. At home and on the road, when Gale was appearing in theaters, Lee often bought alcohol for her, even though he says, "I knew that it was not the smart thing to be doing, but I did it." At times he felt like a failure, even though he realized that he was not to blame.
The best thing Lee did, he says, was to attend Al-Anon meetings. It was there he realized, "There just wasn't anything I could do about it." He let go.
Lee's story is a powerful message to the spouses and family members of alcoholics to seek help for themselves.
Lee Bonnell is a former top insurance executive. Lee and Gale Storm have been married forty-three years and are the parents of four children.
There was a conspiracy of silence. No one wanted to talk about it. We all knew that Gale was an alcoholic, but we just didn't like to think about it. Maybe that was the whole thing. Our son Peter said he just thought that she'd drink until she killed herself, and I got to a place where I was of the same mind. I didn't want that to happen, but I realized that there wasn't anything I could do. I would turn it over to God, and it was up to him to work it out. But I had to get out of the picture in the sense of trying to run her life.
The thing I think I did wrong, and in a sense it enabled her to go on drinking, was not really facing up to the fact that she was an alcoholic. I knew she was an alcoholic three years before she did, but I didn't do anything about it except needle her and cause friction in our relationship. Our daughter, Susie, got me to go to Al-Anon, which began to help me realize what I was doing. What I did right was to go to Al-Anon, and when I went there I realized that I had been helping her to drink instead of helping her to stop.
I enabled her by catering to her, by doing things for her, by not being up-front with her with my feelings about her drinking, by not explaining to her that I thought her self-worth was going down because of how she deprecated herself and let me make all the decisions. I thought I was doing right, but, in retrospect, I know I was an enabler. I did all the wrong things. She should have been standing on her own feet. She should have been making decisions. She should have been aware that she was drinking too much. But I protected her. I knew she was drinking at home. I'd come home and know that she'd drunk an awful lot of liquor. I could tell that she had been drinking because her personality would change. She would become very antagonistic and very angry very quickly. We could no longer talk. We could no longer communicate.
She never really went on a bender per se. I begged off from social situations many times because I knew that she wasn't up to going. She was sick, so we couldn't go out. I would become very angry. I knew that our life could have been a lot more rewarding socially for both of us if she hadn't been drinking. So I resented that.
But I never was embarrassed about the fact that she was an alcoholic. A lot of people are, I think. But I never felt that way. I guess I loved her so much it didn't make any difference to me what other people thought.
Sometime after Gale quit drinking, she said she wanted to go public and tell other people about her alcoholism, to help them, and that was the most exciting thing that I think could have happened. I think God has used her in a marvelous way to help a lot of alcoholics get sober who wouldn't have gotten sober otherwise. I have heard people come to her and say, "You saved my life." That's a thrill for her, and it's a thrill for me too.
After forty-three years together, you begin to read each other's minds. And that happens a lot with us. I'll be thinking of something and she'll say, "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" I'll say, "What are you thinking?...Yup, that's it." We do have a great relationship now. We've had a marvelous marriage. We've had a lot of ups and downs, lots of screaming and yelling over the years, but, believe me, I really love her, and she really loves me. We have a warm relationship. I don't know what I would do without her, and I'm sure she feels the same about me.
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Children of alcoholics experience feast or famine, all or nothing, protection or neglect.
The Reverend Jerry Falwell's father was an alcoholic who died from cirrhosis of the liver when Jerry was fifteen years old.
Jerry says, "I never recall a time when my father was not drinking—not a single day." Reflecting back on his own lack of knowledge about alcoholism, he says, "We had no perception of the problem he was facing, and we had no concept of how to help him."
Like so many children of alcoholics, he wished that his father would stop drinking, and shame and embarrassment about his father's unpredictable behavior prevented him from bringing friends and dates home or talking with them about his father's alcoholism.
Reverend Falwell believes that his father's guilt feelings played a large role in why he was given so much at such a young age.
Reverend Jerry Falwell is the pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, and president of the Moral Majority. His father, Cary Falwell, was an alcoholic. In his father's memory, Falwell started the Elim Home for Alcoholics in Lynchburg.
My father was a successful businessman. He was about five ten, 210 to 215 pounds, a big, rotund fellow with a bay-window stomach, and very aggressive and volatile. He was very kind to us children and gave us everything. I have a twin brother, Gene, an older brother, Lewis, and an older sister, Virginia. Gene and I are both fifty now. We had an older brother who died last year who was eight years older than Lewis. My father was very considerate to us all, probably gave us too much, lavished things on us—automobiles, money, whatever—without our having to work or assume responsibility to obtain them.
In my first memories of my father, when I was a little boy, he was already drinking quite heavily. He was running the Power Oil Company, the Mary Garden nightclub, and a large motel/ restaurant. During Prohibition, he ran a liquor business, illegal moonshine, and sold it to distributors. Though he was well known as a lawbreaker, he never had any trouble over it. Dad made a lot of money selling liquor. Everybody in our town, of course, knew that. We lived in a big house up on a hill, and you could either get your oil or whiskey there or someone would deliver it to you. The nightclub was a very rough place. My father also, back in those days, would stage dog fights and chicken fights. They were all illegal, but they were on our farm and everybody came. They would gather in a big circle, betting. My father never had any problems at all with the law because he was so powerful in the county. It was just part of life. I grew up that way.
In 1931, two years before I was born, my father and his younger brother, Garland, who was quite a wild fellow, quite a reckless guy, had gotten into an extremely violent argument. There was a shoot-out, and my father killed him. There was never any trial over it. It was all in self-defense.
I guess that Garland was in his early twenties. My father would have been thirty-eight. There was quite a range between them. Garland had been in a lot of trouble and actually gone to jail. He had been unmanageable by any member of the family. They couldn't handle him. I don't know all the circumstances of that day, only hearsay. Garland was on drugs. He was wild. Completely out of it. Someone had called the police about his throwing firecrackers next door to our restaurant, right there in the city. It was a neighbor who'd called, but since Father owned the restaurant, Garland thought it was my father who had called. When Dad drove up, I am told, Garland came out of the restaurant with a pistol in each hand, cursing and screaming and yelling at my dad. Dad was very hot-tempered, so he drove to our house immediately, a mile away from there. Mother said she knew he was very upset when he came in. He got the shotgun, .12-gauge double-barreled shotgun, and told my mother he was going back up there to see what Garland was doing. She pleaded with him not to go, but he went anyway. He parked and walked in the door, and Garland came out with his two guns again; Dad shot from the hip. I think Garland was hit in the chest or the neck and was killed instantly. My mother said it was the key incident in my father's life, with which he could not cope.
Nobody was bitter with Dad about it. But that incident precipitated his excessive drinking, and he never stopped. Seventeen years later he was dead from cirrhosis.
I was fifteen when my father died. He didn't believe in hospitals or churches, and he never set foot inside either one. He died at home. Doctors treated him there. Cirrhosis causes your liver to stop working. You swell up and then they tap you, draw off the fluid so many times until you are out. You turn very yellow. Jaundice. I remember, as a boy, watching that.
Three weeks before Dad died a man named Josh Alvis, now long since dead, had come by the house. I remember his coming in to see Dad a lot toward the end. He spent some time reading the Scriptures to Dad, giving him the biblical plan of salvation, the story of the gospel of Christ. Dad accepted Christ. It was not until years later that I was able to put all the pieces together and connect his conversion experience and his last days on earth with what happened and the way he reacted. The last several weeks of his life, probably three, his language and his attitude were greatly changed. Very little hostility there, I recall. I detected that he was ready to die.
Dad used to come home after a long day, really loaded, yelling and screaming, and upset everything. Mother was never disturbed by it, and because she wasn't, we never paid any attention to it. He never struck any of us. He never hurt his family. He was never violent to us. But very noisy. He'd go to bed early every night and get up at four o'clock every morning. By the time everyone else was up and around, he had long since been at the office. I do remember, about the last five years of his life, that he would sleep a lot because the drinking was beginning to take a real toll on him, to debilitate him and deteriorate his faculties. By that time, my older brother, Lewis, was involved in the business, and things were going on without Dad's personal involvement.
Dad never drank to the point where he couldn't run his business, but several fifths of whiskey a day were not unusual for him. He got to where it didn't intoxicate him, where you couldn't notice it, except for the smell on his breath.
Dad had made enough money in his life, even while he was drinking heavily, that we never had to do without anything. It was nothing, back in those days, for me, a twelve- to fifteen year-old kid, to walk around with a hundred dollars in my pocket. To the kids I ran with then, that was a mammoth amount of money. It was nothing unusual for money to be piled up on the table. I'd say, "Dad, you got any money?" And he'd say, "Get your hand full." He didn't know what I took. He didn't care. I had an automobile by the time I was twelve. My father gave me one. He signed a driver's application saying I was fifteen.
With the license, I didn't have to stay at home. But I didn't dare bring a girlfriend or anybody refined to the house because Dad was totally unpredictable. I brought a friend into the house one day. Dad was sitting at the table. A fifth of whiskey and a .38 Smith and Wesson were lying on the table. He carried a .38 with him all the time. My dad picked up the gun and said, "Don't move, boy." And he put the gun down to his feet. "I've been trying to kill that fly all day." He shot a hole in the kitchen floor, right between his feet. That was the last time I ever got my friend onto the property. Mother just couldn't believe it.
When Mother saw a storm arising, she would just get us out of the house, just tell us to go. Whenever it was just Dad and Mom, he got quiet, because he knew he would never get a rise out of her. There was no point in starting an argument if it was going to be a one-way street. The only time he would put on a show was when he was really upset and a crowd was there. Mother very wisely would say, "Why don't you find something to do? Go somewhere, play with somebody." We always had something going. I was very active, into everything, and all that fit into Mom's way of handling the problem. She made the situation as harmonious as it could be under the circumstances, but rather than bringing a crowd of buddies to our house, I would hang out in the town where the gang was.
The refrigerator was filled with liquor all the time. Dad usually kept a fifty-five-gallon keg of wine in the basement. Good wine, usually several cases of beer, and always cases of whiskey. The refrigerator would be full of it. He wouldn't have cared if we drank it. We never did. I suppose seeing what it was doing to him, instead of tempting us to drink, caused us to hate it. I have drunk some whiskey and beer in my life, wine as a youngster, just piddling with the guys, just to act big. But I never enjoyed it. Never wanted to do it. I think it was because I saw the bad side of it.
Dad would go to bed very early and, of course, young people don't go to bed at eight o'clock, so we would have to get out of the house and do things, which we did a lot.
We couldn't say anything. Couldn't knock on doors. Couldn't let the phone ring. That type of thing. He was shielded, protected all the time, and he had enough money that he was never deprived.
I knew a lot of kids at school who probably didn't have the money we had, but they had very happy family relationships. Their parents, family, were all close together. We were always careful to cover up, to pretend we had the same thing, talk about it as if we did. I doubt if any of our friends knew that Dad had a serious drinking problem until he was dead.
We had lots of buddies and friends. We just busied ourselves, staying out of the house, staying away from Dad because the situation was definitely uncontrollable. Very few people in our school knew that he had a problem. We never talked about it, and it was really a well-kept secret inside the family and the business that he was deteriorating and diminishing on a regular basis.
Because of Mother, we always had big Christmases, and Dad would unload any amount of money she wanted to buy things. We got big gifts. Big everything. It was all a part of the guilt complex, I'm sure. Thanksgiving, no matter what, we'd always have a big Thanksgiving dinner. To his credit he would really try, until the last year or two, to be straight for the holidays because people would be coming in. It would usually be late in the evenings before he got a little bit difficult. On holidays he might have a little bit. He drank enough that when he drank a little, you wouldn't know it. As a matter of fact, he had to drink a little to stay steady. He'd sip all day. The big citizens around the area would be in during the day. Everybody who was anybody. Dad would take a little drink here and there throughout the evening until he got ready for bed.
Every morning he'd get up, break two raw eggs, sometimes three, into a glass and swallow them. Very often I would see him mix raw oysters with vinegar, salt, and pepper, and then take the bowl and swallow them. I couldn't imagine anybody drinking raw eggs and oysters. But that was his Maalox, the way he kept his stomach livable. He couldn't eat anything until he had those eggs or oysters, and a little drink after that.
I know that I wished that he would stop, that he would not drink. I saw it getting worse. Yes, sir, I saw him physically going downhill. There was obviously a medical problem. And I saw his personality, his will, weakening. I saw him sleeping more. I saw him coming home during the day. I even saw him a few times at his place of business, when he would have his office locked. When I would go look in the window of the office, he would be asleep on the floor, just taking a nap there.
I think we had more pity than contempt. Because it would be nothing for him, sitting in a chair, to fall asleep in the middle of the day, just fall out of it. Toward the last, he really lost control.
I was so much into life, having the money and not having to work, that I didn't have time to feel neglected or sit down and analyze how bad things were. I have a feeling that if Dad had lived until I was seventeen, eighteen, or twenty, I would have begun to build up those resentments. I think maybe I would have come to the place where I really would have resented what he was doing to Mother. I think my biggest concern, the only thing that gave me any bad feelings toward Dad at all, was his making life so miserable for Mom. She would never leave home. She was very much a homebody. I do recall feeling very strongly about the uncomfortable, miserable conditions Mom was in.
She never took on a martyr's complex. She never retaliated against him, and she worked very hard to prevent our ever resenting him. She never allowed an altercation. She took all the burden on herself. It must have been a tremendous burden, but, as a result of it, we don't have any bad memories of being unkind to Dad. She would always tell us, "He just can't keep drinking, he'll stop." She would try to give us a ray of hope. I don't think I ever had any hope that he would stop. I don't think I ever believed what she was saying. He died at the age of fifty-five of cirrhosis of the liver, right in the spring of his life. He was victimized by alcohol.
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"There were unlit Christmas trees and cold houses and no dinners." This simple statement says so much about the alcoholic home. Rod Steiger's mother was an alcoholic, and his early years profoundly influenced his life. The beauty of Rod Steiger's story is its positiveness and his joy for his mother, who found sobriety through Alcoholics Anonymous. Rod Steiger's love for his mother and his understanding of alcoholism are inspiring.
Rod Steiger, one of America's most distinguished actors, received an Academy Award for his performance in In the Heat of the Night. Some of his other films include On the Waterfront, The Harder They Fall, and The Pawnbroker.
I'm an only child, and I was born in West Hampton, Long Island. I think my mother's basic problem was the fact that she was a very attractive woman physically; she also had great mental spirit.
We took a trip to California when I was a child. I don't remember this incident, but the story is in the family. My mother was on the beach in a bathing suit, and she was offered a contract by a movie company. That's how attractive she was. Soon after that, she got an infection or a disease in, I believe, her right leg and they did an operation. In those days they were not technically where they are today, and the operation backfired. The leg became stiff for the rest of her life. At one time she wanted to be a singer. She had a very good voice, which is passed on to my daughter, who is now an opera singer in Britain. I think out of that incident she began to fortify her courage, to lose her disappointment, through the use of alcohol. It got to a point where alcohol finally took her over instead of her having any control of it.
When I was a young boy, before my family broke up when I was twelve or fourteen years of age, she was to the point where she was hiding bottles around the house and under mattresses. It was like The Lost Weekend. I didn't understand at the time that alcoholism was a disease that could take over a person's nervous system or central operating mechanisms. We had quite a few fights, some of them physical.
One day my stepfather left a note saying, "I'm going down to the corner." He left a little money on the table—and he didn't come back. He was a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful man; I could not have had a better father had he been my real one. I never knew my real father.
My mother used to disappear for days at a time, and things were pretty rough. We had verbal shouting matches and fights and arguments and struggles over bottles of liquor. There were unlit Christmas trees and cold houses and no dinners. My most embarrassing memories are of being called up by people in local saloons and told to come and get my mother when she was making a nuisance of herself. I didn't bring many friends home after a while because I didn't know if anybody was going to be home or who was going to be home. When she went through her worst periods there would be all sorts of strange people in the house and they'd be drinking.
When I was a child I didn't know that an alcoholic needs guidance and professional help. A child can't understand why a parent doesn't stop something that's hurting the child, and hurting herself. You become confused and angry; you don't understand at all.
When I was sixteen and a half years old, I went looking for my mother and, in a sense, physically forced her to sign a paper saying I was seventeen, so I could go into the navy. While I was in the navy, my mother tried to pull herself together and had a little flat for me to come home to. She begged me to come back after the navy. I came back, and I was old enough and I had seen enough in the navy and had learned enough of life and death to be grown up. I began to look at her differently. Very quietly, without even telling me, she joined Alcoholics Anonymous, and through AA she pulled herself out for the last eleven years of her life. She became a sponsor of other people, and she worked very hard. She never had another drop of drink for the rest of her life and became a wonderful person again. I loved her again, instead of thinking I hated her, which had been because I hadn't been an old enough or wise enough or mature enough person to understand her problem. It was through her own efforts—that's what makes me proud of her and her ability to face her problems—that she finally conquered it.
I loved my mother very much when she died, but it was only because of my own problems and what I had seen in the navy that I began to realize that alcoholism is a disease and can be treated, and a person can pull out. My mother certainly did, and she was splendid and well loved at the time of her unfortunate death, of a coronary.
I understand my mother better now because I've had major surgery, which put me into depression. I didn't go into alcohol, I went into a depression, which is another form of chemical imbalance. When you have a major operation, your hormone balance is knocked off, and I could easily have gone into drinking to ease the pain of depression. Having seen what it did to my mother, I didn't. I went for therapeutic help, but I can see how quickly one could go to alcohol.
I think that for a great deal of time my mother's drinking made me distrust any intimate relationship with anybody; it made me into too much of a loner. It may also have affected my relationships in marriage; I've been married three times, and I'm not very good at it. That was the unconscious effect it might have had on me psychologically.
I learned that my mother had a disease that could be handled, and I learned to have compassion for her rather than anger. I realized that she was fighting a very bitter and desperate battle and, happily, she won. I can't say words enough about such organizations as Alcoholics Anonymous. No organization is 100 percent, but whatever they do, it's wonderful. I've seen in action what happens when human beings are given reaffirmation in their self-respect and a little love. Nothing bathes you more in happiness than to see those you love regain their self-respect. The glow of their pride coats you like a new God-given sunshine. If you love them, nothing makes you feel better than when you see them hurdle a fence that they swore before they could never get over. They become Olympic champions in your eyes and in their eyes. I saw that change in my mother and I remembered it. Because my mother gained her self-respect, I found the ability to love her again. An ability to create love is one of the greatest treasures on the face of the earth.