When I was growing up, I thought that the reason people died was that they got cirrhosis of the liver. I`m from a large family, and we went to a lot of funerals and wakes and the reason for death was always cirrhosis. So I just thought that was the normal course of things.
It strikes me as absurd now, but that`s how rampant alcoholism was in our family. And no one ever looked at this as something that needed correcting. It was just accepted that people drink to the point where they get so sick with this terrible liver disease and then they die. We never said that anyone died of alcoholism.
My father was born in a family of alcoholics. There was no information at the time for him to know that he was genetically predisposed to the disease. His father was an alcoholic and died when my father was a little boy.
It started with social drinking with my father, which is pretty much how it starts with most people. He was the life of the party, the best athlete.
When my mother met him she was shy and introverted, and he just swept her off her feet. She thought life with him was going to be great, and, of course, she presumed, as so many women do, that after they married he wouldn`t drink so much.
A few years after they married, good old Ducky Mahoney (my father)
started developing the ”means” when he drank. He`d switch his mood and became hateful. Everyone was a ”dumb son of a bitch.” It was like a Jekyll- and-Hyde transformation.
My older brother and sister knew some good years, but by the time I was born my father was a full-blown alcoholic. He was drunk the day I was born, and that`s all I ever knew. My brother, Dan, to make me feel good, would say things like ”Before you were born it wasn`t this bad.” So I grew up with this awful feeling that my birth had done this to the family, and no one ever told me otherwise. I tried so hard to be such a good little girl so my father would love me enough that he wouldn`t have to drink.
The hate that he directed at me was really self-loathing, but I didn`t understand that. All the things he`d say to me as I was growing up-”you`re worthless, you`re nothing, you`re a big zero”-I believed them. It never dawned on me that he thought these things about himself. So I grew up with very low self-esteem.
I was ashamed of him, and that made me ashamed of myself. Along with that, we tried to keep it a secret. But everybody in our small town knew. He stumbled down the street, used swear words at school assemblies, showed up drunk to coach our grammar-school baseball team.
On top of all this there was the violence. There was absolute craziness on a nightly basis. We never knew who would be his target. We`d all go to bed knowing it was going to be a very short sleep, he was going to wake up with the ”means” and the ”hates” and we were all going to have to protect whomever was his target.
It was crazy. A husband and wife trying to hit each other, little children trying to separate the mother and father and getting hit themselves. It would finally end when someone got badly hurt, or my father would pass out or sit in a corner and we`d all find someplace to hide. And we thought this was normal.
We`d clean up after him, too. When he woke up in the morning he never saw the mess he had made. We never made him face the consequences of his drinking. He never knew what he did, but we were all walking around hurt and wounded and confused. We`d walk on eggs, hoping not to give him a reason to drink again, which he would anyway.
When you live with an alcoholic, you learn very early that your feelings don`t count, that the alcoholic is the focus of the family. When you grow up and leave home, your feelings don`t change; you go through life concerned with everybody but yourself because you think you`re not important. My nerves were raw. I never got enough sleep; I couldn`t do my homework; I was berated by the teachers for being lazy and ridiculed by the other students for being stupid.
The code of silence was so strong that it never entered my mind to explain my problem to the teachers. When I left the house in the morning I would act as if I were the happiest child in the world. I was not only lying to the world, but lying to myself.
We never really considered running away. My mother had no way to earn money. One night we did try to get away. We tried to check in to a downtown motel. They asked my mother for her credit card, and she said she didn`t have one and they turned her away. She took us all back to the car-we were in our pajamas with our school uniforms under our arms-and she just sat at the steering wheel and cried. We all felt so helpless.
Lying becomes a way of life because that`s all you lived with as a child. Besides the lies I`d tell at boss and say he couldn`t come to work because he was sick when he was really drunk. Or if my mother had a black eye she`d say she slipped, but I knew Daddy had hit her. So I learned that it was okay to tell lies. The nuns at school would say, ”Never lie,” but no one was allowing me to tell the truth. And this behavior was not going to change when I grew up.
When I was a senior in high school I got a music scholarship to college. I don`t know how I pulled that off because the rest of my grades were so bad. But I excelled in the fine arts. That was my fantasy. I`d sing and act myself into a fantasy to escape my reality and I got very good at it.
I started school, and I certainly wanted to finish. I wasn`t looking for an out. What got me into trouble was not being able to say what I was feeling, not being able to say no. So I got into a marriage that was doomed to failure from the start. It was not only that I didn`t want to be married, but by that time I was so conditioned to insanity and crisis and violence that I got off on it. As a child, when this violence would occur, I would hyperventilate. There was a strange excitement that came out of it. I hated it, but in some sick way I liked it, too. It was the only time I felt alive, and it was the only time I reacted. If somebody got hurt I could scream and cry, I could call the doctor or the police. I could react. The rest of my life I was just walking on eggs because I didn`t want to upset anybody.
So I married this young man for all the wrong reasons. When I told my family on a Wednesday that I was pregnant, I was married on Friday, quick, quick, so that nobody in town would know.
It was the saddest day of my life. My father was so drunk that I thought he wasn`t going to pay for the dinner that we had after the wedding. It was awful; I just wanted to get out of there. But that meant I was going to be this married woman, which I didn`t want to be, and have this baby, which I didn`t want to have. I felt suicidal on my wedding night.
What was bizarre about being married to someone who wasn`t a drunk, who wasn`t dysfunctional, who wasn`t sick, was that living in a situation that was right felt wrong. I felt dead and bored, and I had to do something to create a crisis. This is a classic symptom of children of alcoholics; what is right feels wrong because it`s not what you`re used to. So I created a crisis to ruin that marriage (by having an affair). I ruined the marriage in disgrace and became the scandal of my small town. Not only was I the unwed mother and the mother of the illegitimate child, but now I was a divorcee and had this other adulterous scandal circling around me.
I didn`t know anyone else who had ever been divorced. I was the first one in my family, the first one in my town. I had been 17 when I married, 18 when I had a baby and got divorced. By this time I really thought I was nothing. It never dawned on me to look at my good points: that I had talent, that I had received a scholarship, that I had survived the insanity of my childhood.
My child kept me alive. I believe my child was sent to me to keep me from ending my life. I couldn`t do that to him. I made a promise to my baby when he was born that I would make a good life for him, and I always remembered that promise. But I didn`t have any idea how to make it better. So I divorced my husband and began raising my child alone and living a life that was completely unrealistic. I tried to get a job at the phone company and couldn`t; I tried to get a job as a waitress, and they asked me if I knew how to stack and I didn`t. I found myself unhirable.
When I look back now, I can think of 150 ways to make money, but at the time my lack of self-esteem held me back. So I started eking out a living doing commercials. I was making about $3,500 to $5,000 a year; it was a real poverty existence.
More Top Picks Best Magnesium Glycinate Supplements For Sleep And Anxiety
But I did crazy things. When things would be going well and it looked like we might make it through the month, I would suddenly do something crazy, like spend the money I might have been able to put away for rent.
And I always wondered why I did that, why I always put myself on the edge. Now I know that this, too, was a result of the insanity I grew up with. When we`d had a real bad week my mother would take me shopping, and I know that she would spend money that she couldn`t afford; but for that moment, when we found something we liked and we would say, ”I`ll take it,” for that moment we felt happy. And usually it was the only time we felt happy the entire week.
My life was a lie. When my family asked how my career was going, I`d say, ”Great.” The worst part was that when I met my present husband, Alan Hamel, I began our relationship with lies because I didn`t know how to do anything else. Here was a man who was everything to me. I fell in love with him the moment I saw him. Here was the man who was going to save me because I was raised in an era when you were taught to look to a man to protect you, to breathe life into you. I was 19 when I met him.
I thought he could never like someone like me, the daughter of the town drunk, completely incapable. So I made up somebody I thought he could love. I told him my father was dead and had been a brain surgeon. Then I had to get rid of my mother because I didn`t want him to meet her and have her spoil my story. Then I didn`t want him to think I was poor so I told him I was living on an inheritance from my father. I told terrible lies for two years. It was an awful way to live, but it provided great crises and fit into this sick pattern of my life. I needed help so badly and didn`t even know it.
When I finally told Alan the truth he said, ”It`s you that I love, not the story you made up of your life. Let`s just start over.” And that was the first, most important lesson I ever learned in my life. I learned that I was lovable.
I had always felt that if my father couldn`t love me, who could? Years later, I realized that my father did love me very much and that it was his disease that made him act the way he acted.
The worst thing and the best thing that ever happened to my son and me was when he was run over by a car at age 4. His spleen and kidneys were crushed, and they gave him a 50-50 chance to live. He was in the hospital for months, and he suffered severe psychological trauma.
I finally took him to the community mental health center, which was all I could think of to do. The therapist said I had to be treated also, to help my son, and that was fine with me. After a year Bruce no longer needed treatment, but the therapist asked me to continue. She said I had the lowest self-esteem of anyone she had ever seen. I was so surprised to hear that because it never entered my mind if I liked myself or not.
So I began a journey with her that completely changed my life. She made me see my value as a human being and what I had to offer, rather than concentrating on the negative. She retrained me and nurtured me. When you grow up in an alcoholic home you don`t get the proper nurturing because the focus is on the alcoholic.
She helped me see what I had to offer and to be realistic about money. She pulled out of me that I loved to sing and act and I thought I had talent. I had never even told Alan that. She`s the one who said to me, ”You can make a living doing that.” So I went from having the lowest self-esteem to believing I could make it in show business, which is a miracle.
That`s why I believe my son was sent to me to keep me alive. He did keep me alive, and I did make a better life for him. And his therapy helped him undo at an early age all the bad things I was teaching him: keep your feelings inside, put on a happy face.
To anyone who sees herself in my story, I`d say, ”Don`t try to get your alcoholic better. There`s nothing you can do until the person is ready. The only thing you can do is get help for yourself.” If my mother had gotten help for herself, she could have changed the pattern of our life as a family 30 years earlier. My sister and brothers might not have become alcoholic.
Another thing is, once you get on a path of recovery, talk about it. Or write it down. There is a cleansing in this. Sharing your story helps you understand yourself better and helps others to open their wounds and heal. By writing my story I was able to break a code of silence and a system of denial in my family that was so firmly in place that long after everyone was in recovery and sober we were unable to face the reality of the horror we had lived.
At this point I`m a grateful child of an alcoholic because I learned all my greatest lessons from it and I got strong from that part of my life. I survived and know what it is to feel happy and know my true feelings. And I now have the life I dreamed of. As a child I`d sit in that closet when I was hiding and dream of being a star and having a wonderful family and home and husband and that I`d be happy, and now that`s my life.
Not that I expect my life to be perfect until the day I die. But now when the bumps come I`m not defeated. I look at how I can change things because I`m in control. It`s up to me to make my life what I want it to be.