Co-parenting with an alcoholic

[LittleGwyneth]

I'm hoping someone might have some wisdom about how best to co-parent with an alcoholic. Some backstory:

• He was an alcoholic when we met (he is ten years older than me) but I was 23, fairly naive and didn't realise. We were together for seven years, and we share one child who is now three.
• The alcoholism was severe to the extent that he overslept and forgot to come to the hospital the morning after I gave birth, he fell asleep while drunk and holding our newborn, and he drove us off the road into a ditch (admittedly very slowly and no-one was hurt). He was never aggressive to me but by the time my daughter was a month old he was sleeping 18-20 hours a day and only waking up to get drunk again.
• We split up just over two years ago, in a protracted split entirely based on his drinking.
• I promised I would stand by him, and then when he relapsed the day he came out of rehab asked him to move out of the family home, and a few months later told him I wanted a divorce.
• I live in the family home in London which I bought with inherited money, he lives in Scotland with his parents.
• He is still actively in addiction, in and out of rehab, intermittently trying but relapsing and not trying to stop.
• He can't work because of the alcoholism so doesn't pay any child support.

Currently he visits for one weekend a month during which I supervise three or four 2-ish hour visits, during which he is mostly sober but often either in withdrawal or clearly jonesing for a drink. He loves our daughter but has no idea how to interact with her and reports feeling unhappy about not knowing what to do with her.

In the other weeks I facilitate a FaceTime four times a week, which my daughter absolutely hates (not because it's her dad, she just inexplicably hates FaceTime).

I find supervising this much access hard and stressful. I also, if I'm totally honest, feel privately sad about how much my daughter loves seeing him, given how little he has been involved and how he treated me. Obviously I can't let her be aware of this, but privately it's bloody horrible.

I'm wondering what other people have done in terms of contact and visitation. I'm in a new relationship, and while we're taking things extremely slowly and carefully, I do hope to have more children one day and I can't see how I could do that and facilitate all of this. But I also don't know if it's right or fair to cut off contact until he gets sober. I get intermittent messages from him and his family saying that she's all he has to live for etc, which is agonising. I feel painfully guilty about leaving him and taking our daughter away from him, but I also feel like it was the only safe step, and honestly I want to rebuild my life and be happy.

I would be so grateful for any insight, especially if you've been through something similar.

Alcoholics ruin lives.

Your child did not choose to be the child of an alcoholic. You made that choice for her.

You can choose not to subject her to her alcoholic parent. No good will come of her being exposed to him. Adult children of alcoholics rarely have anything good to say about their parenting. It can cause a lifetime of issues for them.

The messages from his family members (please look up the term "flying monkeys") are akin to emotional blackmail: if you don't do what we want, then it's your fault when he fucks up again or harms himself.

You have got yourself into a very bad situation here. Your emotional enmeshment with the alcoholic father of your child is a complex web that you need to unstick yourself from. You might need professional help in the form of counselling to help you work on your boundaries and to recognise what a healthy relationship looks like.

I would keep your child as far away from him as I can. Your feelings of guilt are entirely misplaced. Your first priority must be to your child's welfare and raising her in a safe, secure, happy environment. An alcoholic has nothing to bring to this. They are bad news.

@Sicario I appreciate the advice, and I agree that alcoholics are extremely bad news. However, I did not 'get myself' into this situation, and I did not make the decision for her to have an alcoholic parent, I didn't know that he was an alcoholic when I had a baby with him. If I had known that he had addiction issues, I would not have had a child with him.

Don't get me wrong. I did exactly the same. This is why I am so hard-arsed about it. I was a complete mug and had absolutely no idea about the man I married.

So I have walked in your shoes.

You cannot co-parent with an alcoholic. They are nightmare people, no matter how they present. There are of course people who will tell you otherwise, who claim that the alcoholic can reform, or that it's not their fault.

None of this matters. The only thing that matters is you and your daughter, and that you get to raise her in the most stable, loving environment you possibly can.

It is not your job to facilitate his role in this. It will bring you and your daughter nothing but chaos and heartache.

@Sicario Thank you for the tough love - it's really helpful, genuinely, especially the part about being blamed if he hurts himself. I'm so sorry you've been through the same thing.

Me too, he is no longer your responsibility. It is his responsibility (if he loves her so much) to be sober when he has contact with her.
That's the decision YOU make.

Unfortunately @Sicario speaks the truth. You cannot co-parent effectively while he is in the grip of alcoholism. It may be different if he was sober but he isn't.
It also isn't your responsibility to enable him to be in your child's life.

I have been there and seen the outcome.

There are some things that you can work on to help yourself navigate this.

Firstly, spend some time reading up about toxic dynamics, particularly "triangulation" (where you get put into their drama, sometimes via their family members acting as "flying monkeys").

Also read up about FOG (fear, obligation and guilt), which is very hard to handle as you feel bad about how others are affected by your decisions not to engage.

It's essential that you start to practice emotional detachment. Check yourself if you start feeling guilty. You mustn't.

He is NOT your responsibility.

There is nothing you can do to change who he is and how he chooses to behave.

This is NOT your fault. None of it.

Remove yourself from all the people who are trying to insert themselves into the chaos. Block numbers, block emails, refuse to engage with any of them.

Report any abuse immediately to the police. This includes any threats to self-harm. Get a non-molestation order if he turns up uninvited.

If you have any concerns about escalating behaviours, don't hesitate to call Women's Aid or any of the other women's charities who can signpost you to further help.

None of these things existed when I went through similar. It was pre-internet so I had to learn the hard way. I wish I had known then what I know now.

You will have to channel your inner lioness to raise your daughter away from the influence of an alcoholic father.

Excellent advice from
@Sicario

I get intermittent messages from him and his family saying that she's all he has to live for etc, which is agonising.

He was an actively-drinking alcoholic before your daughter was born. He was an actively-drinking alcoholic while your daughter was being born. And he's still an actively-drinking alcoholic today.

That, to me and my experience of having an alcoholic ex, sounds much more like "Boo hoo hoo, I've got a child I don't see very often. Woe is me, my life is terrible. In fact, my life is so awful that I might as well open the next bottle of booze. Cheers!" Or, as alcoholics anonymous puts it, "Poor me, poor me, pour me another."

You are currently doing most, if not all the running in trying to facilitate contact between him and your daughter. If you stopped doing that, what do you think he'd do?

Sicaro has it spot on.

With regard to the intermittent messages saying his daughter is the only reason he keeps going, that's emotional blackmail and isn't on. I would personally tell them that you don't want to hear that from them because until he sorts himself out, which doesn't sound likely given what you've said, they're nothing but guilt trips. His mental wellbeing isn't your responsibility, and it's not your child's.

If he hasn't sorted himself out by now, the reality is that he probably won't. Neither you or your child deserve that nonsense in your lives.

Thanks all. I've been very nervous about even considering removing all contact, honestly mostly hoping he'd drop it himself so I wouldn't have to, but I'm hearing that I probably can't just wait until that happens and need to allow myself to be the bad guy for my daughter's sake.

I blocked all contact. There had been a period of no contact (his choice), then some very sporadic contact (his choice) and like a fool I ran around facilitating all this. When I saw the effect it was having on the DC I tried to stop it but was dragged through the family courts who refused to hear the wishes of the children or my pleas and made a contact order.

I defied the court order. What were they going to do? Put me in prison?

Best decision I made and wish I had done it earlier, realising that the court order has no teeth and me knowing full well what was best for the DC. In adult years, they thanked me for it and said they hated seeing him.

Don't be nervous. Be a full-on badass. Don't let anyone intimidate you or scare you. They can fuck right off. You are mother warrior and nobody comes between you and your daughter.

Me and the thousands of other women like me will be standing right beside you.

Another tip: you might want to get a cheap burner phone with a separate number and use this as the only point of contact for anything to do with him. Then you can control if, as and when you check it. Block all unwanted numbers and contacts on your regular phone number.

Right there sister 😊

Thank you all for your help here - it's enormously valuable.

There is quite simply nothing an alcoholic has to offer as a parent that will ever outweigh the horror that comes with them being your parent. I'm 38, still scarred by an alcoholic parent. What I am also still angry about is my dm forxing contact on me. Because he's 'my dad' so what? She chose to have a baby with an alcoholic, I didn't and neither did your child. My advice, cut all contact. Let her thank you when she is an adult. Sorry if this sounds harsh, but life with them is horrific.

I am a grandmother, my son has his 3 daughters, their mum is an alcoholic.. they came home 2 yrs ago .. the girls aged 11,9,2 yrs .. mum lives alone, always suicidal, we are finding it incredibly hard to find the right path to go down regarding access.. my son gets incredibly angry and bitter with mum , when she has girls for a day and then drinks.. he himself finds it incredibly hard to bring up the 3 girls alone ... Hence he came home so I can support them all (fortunately my house is big enough) .. the 2 yrs old doesn't miss mum , as it's really only ever been dad bringing her up , but the 11 yr old misses mum immensely.. I'm desperately searching for a path to go down where access is concerned, as I hate to think they will grow up without a mums love..

My DC's dad is an alcoholic. We left when DS was two.

Since then he sees DS for 6 hrs on a Sunday, mostly at my house. I get the chance to assess whether he is under the influence before allowing him to drive DS to lunch. Ex knows if he arrives drunk, I won't let him in. Generally he is sober on Sunday mornings as a result.

I raise DS alone in all other aspects - health, care, schools, social life, diet. DS goes on a week's holiday with his df once a year and spends five days at his house between Xmas and New year - comes home before New year's Eve. So DS does see his dad and they are at least familiar and at ease with each other. It's the best I can do for DS given ex's addiction. I've managed it for 14 years and have a happy, well balanced teen.

In your case I'd scrap face time since she hates it, and set up a family face book page. Encourage your dd to draw pictures for daddy, take photos for daddy etc. He could send her funny memes and pictures of places they will go on their weekend together etc. As she gets older they can chat that way.

A regular relationship, if carefully managed by you, will at least assure your dd that her dad loves her. It allows her to know her df but removes most of his negative influence, while allowing you to provide her with the secure stable home she needs.

It's a balancing act, what you are prepared to facilitate while meeting the needs of and protecting your child. Every addiction is different. Only you can judge what might work.

Keep doing the visits once a month. Could someone else eg a babysitter help facilitate these? Or could he go to a children's centre session with her? Or even a contact centre?

Reduce the FaceTime - have a special - dad call - box of toys or paints that she gets out on the table and only plays with while he's calling so he can watch her colpur or play and chat at the table. Perhaps once a week. Agree to send pics or videos the rest of the time.