Parenting

Moving back home during the pandemic forced me to confront my dad's alcoholism | Anonymous


It’s a global pandemic and I’m late for a Zoom quiz because I’m wiping up my dad’s urine from the kitchen floor. As I mop and clean, my dad teeters over me, earnestly maintaining that he hasn’t pissed himself, but instead simply spilled a very large glass of water. But he’s very, very drunk, and the crotch of his jeans is dripping. After 10 minutes of back and forth on this, his drunken logic kicks in, and he motions to sample the liquid as proof. “It’s OK dad,” I say. “I believe you.”

My dad is an alcoholic. I’d like to write about how he’s other things, like a capricorn, or a northerner, or a surprisingly decent goalkeeper, despite sustaining a hip injury in his youth. But his disease obscured all that for me a long time ago. I am 23 now, and he’s been drunk as long as I’ve been alive. As a child, I was aware of his drinking, but in the vague blurry way children understand things that make no sense. I was 11 by the time his alcoholism spilled over and became impossible to ignore: he lost his driving licence after causing a motorway collision through drink driving.

Despite periodically attending both rehab and therapy, his drinking spiralled. In public, he presented as a high-functioning and successful businessman, saving the reality of his alcoholism for his family. My teenage years were punctuated by his erratic, unpredictable, and angry behaviour. He’d do terrible things, like give me and a boyfriend a lift to the train station, only to veer drunkenly on to the wrong side of the road. When friends were old enough to get jobs in the bars he secretly visited, he’d threateningly tell them not to let me know they’d seen him. He left my younger sister unattended in a park to go to the pub. Most nights, he’d drive home from work, park his car around the corner, drink half a bottle of whiskey, then come through the front door.

Aged 18, I moved 400 miles away to attend university. Besides the few times when I called home to talk to my mum and my dad picked up, I was able to largely stop speaking to him. Away from his chaos, I found it easier to develop my own relationship with alcohol (throwing up semi-digested pesto-pasta at a Metronomy gig, after discovering the existence of pints).

This fledgling attempt at personal growth was interrupted by a combination of job scarcity, low wages and the high cost of renting. Like many other young people, I wound up moving back in with my parents during the Covid-19 pandemic. Caught between the stability of not paying rent or cooking my own meals and the instability of my father’s drinking, I found myself reflecting on my dad’s addiction.

I’ve spent many days during lockdown returning to scenes from my childhood, in an attempt to understand their impact on my adult self. Unpicking what is direct causation and inherited genes from how I’d have turned out anyway is hard. When I told a friend at university about my dad, and she replied “But you’re so normal!” I remember feeling proud, as though this indicated I’d conquered his illness. But over the endless stasis of lockdown, I’m increasingly questioning whether large parts of my personality are actually just habits I developed in response to his.

My friends often joke that I conduct conversations like a talk-show host, asking endless and rapid questions with an intensity that borders on inappropriate. “I just like getting the gossip,” I’ve said. In reality, it’s more likely my desire to manage conversations arises from learned behaviour to do with preserving harmony. As a child, if I asked my mum enough questions about her day, I thought she wouldn’t notice that my dad had come home from work drunk again. Likewise, if I asked my dad enough questions, his mood wouldn’t sour and he wouldn’t shout at my mum. As time went on, this laboured performance of distraction became indistinguishable from normal conversation.

Given the cyclical nature of addiction, perhaps it’s no surprise that scenes from my childhood have repeated themselves during lockdown. The last birthday I’d had at home was my 18th, which my dad missed by faking a rehab session to go drinking alone in London. When my 23rd birthday fell, in the first week of lockdown, my dad missed it by drinking alone in his bedroom. Eating a birthday cake that my mum and sister had baked, I found the repetition of the events helped me to accept that while I couldn’t change my dad’s behaviour, I could change how I responded to it.

It’s been strange, living side by side with my dad as an adult. I’m now the same age he was when he met my mum. Like many children of alcoholics, I grew up worrying I’d end up like my dad. It wasn’t so much that I worried I’d develop a drink problem. Rather, I was convinced that if we had similar interests, it would indicate something bad and broken within me.

As a child, this manifested in an outright rejection of his hobbies and interests – I pledged allegiance to Fulham FC simply because of their 3-2 victory over my dad’s beloved Manchester City. Now I’m older, I still struggle to allow shared interests between us, fearing the tenderness that comes with those rare moments of connection. I find them harder to tolerate than his bad behaviour, because they challenge the detachment I’ve cultivated to protect myself.

Over lockdown, I discovered my dad and I shared a love of Nick Cave. The day after he pissed himself, he played Cave’s 1994 album, Let Love In. When Cave sang the words “Now the storm has passed over me, I’m left to drift on a dead calm sea,” I felt, in his own pitiful fumbling way, my dad reach out for me. I’m out of reach now dad, I thought. But I can still feel you trying.



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