So I asked my mom to read some ACoA lit, so that we could begin to talk about the elephant in the room - our alcoholic family. My mom left my dad when I was around 13, and she did a lot of work on herself to the point where we have had a fairly good relationship, but we haven't discussed or healed from our painful past. I decided to give it a go by asking her to read some books to inform herself. I felt that was the best way to broach the subject and I was so angry at her that I didn't trust myself to give her the information in an impartial way. I wanted her to learn about alcoholic families first and make her own connections.
So, she called me Sunday and said she read the first book I suggested, Adult Children of Alcoholics Syndrome by Kritsberg, in one sitting. She said she went through a whole tissue box too. All those years she thought she was protecting us, she realized she wasn't. She said she saw me and my two brothers throughout the book. She apologized for getting help for herself, but for not getting us help and for not seeing how much pain I was in. When she asked how I was doing, I shrugged and said I was fine, and she regretted not probing more and taking my responses at face value. She hopes I can forgive her. I told her that I do too, but I have to feel the anger that's been coming up before I can forgive her. I said I wanted to continue talking about it because it's not the type of thing that's resolved in one conversation. She was open to that and even got online to look up Al-Anon meetings. All in all, she responded better than I could have hoped to all this. I've been trying to turn it over, but must admit I've been feeling a lot of anxiety about how our relationship will play out now that I'm in recovery. With one brother not speaking to me, I feared losing another relationship in my family. I know people have survived and recovered without the support of their loved ones, but I also knew it would be very painful for me to experience that lack of support from my mom.
She also shared with me some fascinating details about her past that I never knew. She said reading the book made her realize and remember a lot about her own childhood. She said her dad wasn't an alcoholic, but he had a very volatile temper. She remembered him throwing her and her sisters on the bed and beating them. She relayed a painful memory of her older sister going out with a boy she wasn't supposed to in high school and when she got home, her dad was waiting for her on the front porch. He beat her with a belt on the front lawn and then dragged her inside and continued to beat her. My mom said the next day at breakfast, nobody said anything or talked about what had happened. She didn't want to tell me those stories about her dad because she wanted me to love my grandpa, who died 10 years ago. She shared that two of her sisters were molested by her younger brother. Her family was totally dysfunctional. She said that she was always walking on eggshells and reading the book made her remember the constant fear she grew up in.
This conversation with my mom definitely filled in a missing piece in my story. I was wondering why my mom would have been attracted to my dad, and why she put up with him for 25 years. She grew up with the same rules Kristberg identifies in alcoholic families - denial, isolation, silence and rigidity. I wondered if my mom had become a co-de through living with my dad, or if she found my dad because of her co-dependency. It was a chicken or egg conundrum that I wanted resolved - and now it is. My mom wants to talk to some family members to find out if her paternal grandpa was an alcoholic, which would mean that my grandpa was like me, and my paternal grandpa, the adult child of an alcoholic. She also shared that one of her uncles was an alcoholic who died of liver complications. I think knowing that my mom was also once a little girl living in fear will help me to get over the anger I have towards her. My mom has an inner child too and it seems that she's never done the work that I'm doing now to heal her, so maybe this is something we can experience and share together.
I really recommend Adult Children of Alcoholics Syndrome. It's a great, easy read that really breaks down the dynamics of alcoholic families. I think it's a good read for adult children, co-des raising children, and recovering addicts alike since all of us probably have similar upbringings and without recovery, we re-create the rules and roles we learned as children when we start our own families. See
review of the book on
Guess What Normal Is.
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