Realising my mother may have had an alcohol problem for years

[Lemonthyme]

My Mum the alcoholic?

About 2 years ago, my Dad got rushed into hospital. He's got cancer and we thought it was something serious. Long story but it wasn't. But at one point he whispered to me about my Mum having a problem with alcohol. I think she'd made a comment.

My parents have both been quite unpleasant to me over the years so please don't comment on the appropriateness of what he said. He is who he is.

While I initially dismissed it (he's a former heavy drinker himself who gave up since the diagnosis) but since he said it, I've thought back to when I was young and how she behaves now and I can't unsee it.

I'm one of three siblings but I was very much the child who got roped into helping with food shopping for decades.

Every week my Mum would buy several bottles of wine. 10 maybe? And a bottle of sherry, and a bottle of gin. She'd also buy small cans of wine which she'd say were "for cooking". You know the kind of thing. Also a four pack of lager for her. Then bottles of beer / ale for my Dad.

I remember walking in on her with a glass of wine when cooking quite often. "Oh there was a little left in the can". She'd be drinking sherry through cooking Sunday lunch and pass out after drinking wine with the meal. It was only after one of my Dad's many affairs that I saw her drinking the gin, she'd get me to make her a G&T most evenings. But even before that, the bottle would be gone every week and my Dad never had one (he'd only drink beer perhaps pop out to the pub Friday and perhaps some wine on Saturday night and the wine on Sunday.)

So I start to re-evaluate it all. Think back and realise she probably was drunk quite a lot. At 16, 17 she started buying specific alcohol for me every week (those four pack small bottles of white cider, don't judge it was the 90s). And while I'd been drinking for a while, she actively encouraged it to keep her company. It's only been recently I have really recognised I was heading down a route that would end in dependency and got sober instead.

Fast forward to Christmas this year. Not my cup of tea having those big events but I do it for everyone else. I revert back to "Mrs do it all" mode so it's exhausting, especially being sober. But everyone else seems to have fun. A few days later, the recriminations start. One sibling starts bitching about people but one of the complaints I start to hear from them and my father is "there was gin and nobody offered your mother any". We were hiring a house. It wasn't anybody's job to "offer" and I'd bought the fucking gin even though I don't drink.

So I've reduced contact a bit. Seen them once since. For a meal. Where my Dad ordered my Mum two lagers at once as soon as we sat down (not even joking) because "they're a bit small" so I guess he's given up thinking it's a problem. But I just feel so tired that part of the reason people have fallen out was because she needed alcohol and didn't get it. And didn't get off her arse either.

I completely understand living with my philandering Dad for as long as she has would be a nightmare but also I just don't see it as a mess I want to try and clean up anymore. I had too much of that as a teenager and too much of normalising that's how adults behave.

I'm so sorry to read your post. I have also realized in later life how much my mother must have been drinking throughout my childhood and I can't believe I didn't realize it at the time. She used to tell me my father was an alcoholic all the time which was a brilliant deflection tactic.

Taking bitter offence over very insignificant things is definitely a behaviour I now associate with my mother's problem drinking.

You have done very well to escape the cycle and get sober. Well done. I was also given alcohol by my parents from a young age but fortunately it doesn't seem to have caused any dependency issues for me. Probably because the stuff they gave me was such disgusting cheap wine I absolutely hated it. And it wasn't given to me to enjoy. It was my job to drink the other half of the bottle of wine to stop my father from getting too drunk (as he's such an alcoholic of course). I feel so stupid not to realize my mother was probably necking down the vodka while all this was going on

Thanks for replying @deplorabelle and don't feel stupid. We were kids! That's not how adults should behave.

I think at times my Mum liked me drinking because it normalised her drinking. My Dad was a heavy drinker too but has recently almost given up (the odd glass of wine about once a month being his only alcohol nowadays) but on Sundays he used to take me down the pub at the age of about 16. Two pints later for me, two and a half for him, he'd drive us home 😫.

It's only just occurred to me that in that time when my Mum was cooking she was getting hammered. They both used to fall asleep on the sofa in the afternoon. I just assumed that's what middle aged people did. Now I'm a similar age to what she would have been then and I run half marathons and never need a daytime nap!

I think I've been fighting for years not to judge both my Mum and Dad but to be honest, why? Their examples in life were appalling. They both abused alcohol to overcome their own traumas but became really crappy parents as a result. Well that's part of the reason why they were shitty parents.

I remember when I was a teen going for evenings out with friends and sharing lifts with their parents. When it was my parents "turn" they wanted to pay for a taxi instead. We lived near a major city and the other parents weren't happy about this. When I asked my parents if they'd give us a lift instead they refused saying "they like a drink on an evening". When I told another parent this when she pushed again the response was "well can they not just avoid drinking for one night?" Which when you think about it, to someone not dependent on alcohol, is a completely fair question. You can imagine their response. And I stopped going out.

To be honest, I do a certain amount of middle-aged falling asleep on the sofa myself and never made it to half marathon running, but yes I now realize it's not normal to spend every evening lying face first on the sofa.

The business of not giving lifts is ringing very true for me too, now you come to mention it.

There's a lot of trauma in my parents' background too so I can see how the drinking came about. They probably did what they could to insulate me from it and I had a very middle class respectable life on the face of it. So I suppose I should feel grateful for that and understanding of the trauma that led to their problems, but it's hard. I feel like they were probably more unkind and more neglectful than they should have been (standards were different in those days though so rather hard to know)

My mum has stopped drinking* after some serious episodes and it's honestly even more difficult now she is being nice to me. I'm completely weirded out by it. I hate having to act like well everything is okay now. And well done you for defeating alcohol. The last forty years are all forgiven because you couldn't help it.

*Suspect she may have started again - behaviour at Christmas was odd