Behind every alcoholic parent, there is a child of an alcoholic and, with over 7.5 million people in the UK showing signs of alcohol dependence, that’s an awful lot of children who will be affected by their parents drinking (one in five children, to be exact.)
When you grow up in the house of an addict, forced to take on the role of adult as you ‘parent the parent’, your childhood is characterised by chaos, unpredictability, and (lack of) control.
When you know that what is happening at home is wrong, that a child should not be in that environment (when your mother herself has told you so, yet continues to do it anyway), somewhere along the way you have to pretend that you don’t care, pushing the emotions away as far down as they will go. Because, as hard as home life is, you’re told that being in care will be harder, ‘and if social services get involved, that’s exactly what will happen…’, as she would remind you every time you’d shout, in between cries, that ‘it’s not fair.’
Having essentially been forced to remain silent for 18 years, left with no choice but to make numbness my default so as not to ‘slip up’, and the years after that forgetting that there was an alternative, it is only now, aged 22, that I am, slowly, opening myself up to emotion and it is interesting, in a word.
To be able to feel things that I have spent a lifetime not feeling.
To be able to feel something other than…nothing.