Growing up with an alcoholic mother can put an undue responsibility on children.
The legacy of a mentally ill parent can last a lifetime – but my mother’s drinking problem made me determined to be everything she wasn’t.
My mother had been an alcoholic for many years before we could bring ourselves, as a family, to openly acknowledge that she had a serious drinking problem.
I still vividly remember the moment we broke our conspiracy of silence when I was about 13. We were on holiday in South Africa, staying at this wonderful hotel in Plettenberg Bay, but Mum had refused to leave the room, seemingly preferring the minibar for company over her own husband and three children.
In a characteristic attempt to keep the show on the road, my dad suggested we play some board games downstairs in the hope that Mum might eventually surface.
I think it was during Monopoly when I blurted out: “Mum’s an alcoholic, isn’t she, Dad?” Until that point, a combination of loyalty and shame had prevented us from confronting the devastating effect her uncontrollable addiction was having on our lives.
My parents finally agreed to divorce soon after, but despite being a “daddy’s girl” and extremely close to my two older brothers, I moved in with Mum for fear she might drink herself to death if left to her own devices. Dad and the boys strongly objected but also respected my sense of daughterly duty.
Having taken responsibility for household chores from a very young age – regularly rescuing dinners from being burned to a crisp and having to deal with the last-minute discovery of unwashed school uniforms – I could cope with the practical challenges of living alone with Mum. But emotionally, it took an enormous toll.
When you live with an alcoholic, you never know who you are going to come home to – the sober parent you know and love, or the drunken stranger who takes their place. Mum would remind me of the There Was a Little Girl nursery rhyme: “When she was good, she was very good indeed; but when she was bad, she was horrid.”
Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, recently wrote of his own childhood, which was plagued by parental alcoholism: “Children vary in how they deal with such things, as do adolescents and adults. But those raised in families that are broken apart by mental ill-health or substance abuse often do themselves huge harm later in life, too. Guilt imperils joy and cripples relationships. For many years, I coped by shutting myself off from the world around me. I retreated into an inner life of fantasy.”
As Hilary Henriques, founder and chief executive of the National Association for Children of Alcoholics (Nacoa), of which I am a patron, explains: “There is a magical thinking around children of alcoholics that when you hit 18, the world opens in front of you and legal independence sets you free. The reality is often anything but.”
“The grip of responsibility can just intensify, especially when a parent’s health begins to fail. The shame stops you speaking out, even to those closest to you. The legacy of insecurity, neglect and abuse lasts a lifetime in the form of poor mental health, relationship issues and addictions of your own.”
Growing up with an alcoholic mother, I didn’t shut myself off, exactly, but I did actively choose to suffer in silence by not telling my friends or teachers what was really going on because school was my only escape. Unlike home, life in school wasn’t defined by whether she had been drinking or not. And unlike Mum, school was reliable; it was consistent; there was routine and order. (This is why schools being closed during lockdown had such a devastating impact on the children of alcoholics and neglectful parents.)
So I coped by conforming where she had rebelled. I studied hard, played sports and performed in school plays almost in defiance of Mum. A little fire grew in my teenage belly: I would do everything in my power to avoid turning into her. I became self-reliant, resilient and adaptable (useful skills for my later life as a journalist). I was a coper and a doer – still am. But as a child, it was pretty lonely having to be the grown-up all the time. I had become the mother and she was the child. It was like living in a real life episode of Absolutely Fabulous, except the joke was on me.
Being too embarrassed to invite friends over resulted in me feeling quite isolated. Mum would occasionally ask people ‘round, pre-load on drink and pass out, leaving me to make excuses at the front door. The visits soon dried up. I missed my brothers so badly, I regularly cried myself to sleep at night. I constantly lived in fear of something going horribly wrong, which was obviously unsettling. I’d have to endure white-knuckle school runs, knowing she was driving while heavily under the influence.
Holidays were similarly challenging because I’d find myself in unfamiliar territory with an irresponsible adult. I remember naively trying to restrict her alcohol intake during a trip to Dublin by watering down her duty-free gin, only for her to end up collapsing in the street from alcohol withdrawal. As ever, I covered for her, telling lies to avoid us getting into any trouble. That’s what you do as a child in these situations – you protect the person who is supposed to be protecting you in order to protect yourself. Mum was a supposedly respectable middle-class woman, a doctor’s ex-wife, for heaven’s sake. The last thing I wanted was social services knocking at the door.
When I turned 17, I resolved to pass my driving test as quickly as possible in the interest of self-preservation. I was in the middle of my homework one evening when she came in and drunkenly clouted me over the head for no reason. Enraged, I punched her squarely in the face (it is the one and only time I have ever hit anyone), and at that moment I realised I couldn’t stay any longer because I was in real danger of hurting her. She was desperately ill and extremely vulnerable and I felt incredibly guilty for leaving her.
I moved in with my father, who had remarried a woman who would go on to become a second mother to me. Then I passed my A-levels with flying colours and went off to study law at Leeds University, by which time Mum had become so completely ravaged by alcoholism that she kept on having major internal bleeds and ended up in intensive care. She died in 2001, a year after I graduated and had just started as a cub reporter at a local newspaper. She was only 54.
It might sound odd for me to say this after everything I have written, but I wouldn’t have changed anything about Mum or my childhood because both were full of love. Of course I wish I could travel back in time to when she first started hiding whisky bottles in wardrobes and drinking before noon to stage some sort of intervention. But deep down, I know it wouldn’t have worked. Dad had spent their entire marriage taking her to a succession of psychiatrists who all confirmed that she was in complete denial. She even had a spell in rehab, but emerged after a month believing she could still drink spritzers. She wasn’t ever going to stop.
The thing you have to remember is that she was the only mother I knew and I loved her with all my heart. When sober, she was a truly captivating woman. Not only was she stunningly beautiful, but she had an enormous amount of charm and such a great sense of humour. She was well-read, cultured and had impeccable taste. In many ways, she was the woman who had everything, which is what makes it even sadder that she threw it all away.
The truth is, I will forever remain eternally grateful to her for making me the woman I am today.
Some of it was intentional. She would constantly bang on about the importance of me having my own career – and my own money – even though she took the phrase “lady of leisure” to new heights.
But her alcoholism also had the unintended consequence of making me determined to be everything she wasn’t. According to Nacoa, the three million children in the UK affected by a parent’s drinking are six times as likely to witness domestic violence, five times as likely to develop an eating problem, three times as likely to consider suicide, twice as likely to experience difficulties at school, twice as likely to be in trouble with the police and twice as likely to develop alcoholism or addictions themselves.
I did have a period in my 20s when I drank too much – largely to numb the pain of losing Mum – and got into all kinds of scrapes. Having spent my childhood always having to be in control, I craved a loss of control after she died. But I stopped drinking after I had my first of three children in 2008 because I genuinely couldn’t bear the idea of history repeating itself.
I count myself lucky in that I have always had a loving husband, father, stepmother, brothers and friends to support me. Some people don’t have that, which is why charities like Nacoa are so important. They offer children and adults the understanding that despite a tough start, you can make healthy choices and lead a happy and fulfilling life. Philip Larkin was right – they can f*** you up, your mum and dad, but only if you let them. There were times when Mum was a fantastic mother – and times she really wasn’t. I’m by no means perfect, no parent is, but I’m a very stable, dependable presence in my children’s lives. That’s not just a result of what my mum got wrong, but the golden moments I will forever cherish are when she got it right.
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