My mental alarm bells went off when I first heard that sentence on the radio news, “The child was wearing a diaper and T-shirt.” What had simply been a tragic story of lost children in a bitter Saskatchewan winter night was suddenly tinged with that unbalanced, and yet too familiar feeling of something being terribly wrong. Where was the little girl’s snowsuit? What kind of parent would... shit. I caught a whiff of that old familiar sulfur. Of course. An unbalanced parent, likely with a substance addiction. Most commonly, a child is put in harm’s way by a drunk or otherwise addicted parent, which is how the sad saga on the Yellow Quill First Nation Reserve seems to be playing out. It’s a scenario that I, as the child of an alcoholic, am more familiar with than I would prefer.
I’m also a recovering alcoholic myself. It’s not something that I tell people outside my closest circle of friends, and truthfully, I was a fairly “high bottom” drunk: I stopped when I realized there were clear signals I was turning into my father. I haven't had a drink in almost three years. Unlike my father, I never drove drunk. I’ve been to enough AA and Al-Anon meetings to hear the stories of the other children whose parents regularly put their lives in physical and emotional jeopardy while in the throes of their addictions.
Thanks to the efforts of organizations such as MADD, we know the stories of people whose lives have been destroyed by intoxicated strangers. But it’s only been in the twelve step meetings where I’ve heard the tales of the kids who were regularly terrorized by their drunk parents, often by being helpless passengers in a car driven by that parent. Children of alcoholics often survive by being overly precocious, as will attest those who were forced to drive while still kids for a drunk parent.
Only a small percentage of alcoholics fit the stereotype of the street wino. My Dad was only typical in that he was the typical closet alcoholic: On the surface, one of the pillars of his company, his church, member of the hospital board, a hometown boy who made good. But by the time I turned twelve, my dad turned into a closet binge drinker, a kind of jekyl & hyde drunk: He’d seem fine and then when you would least expect it, he’d turn up so inebriated he could hardly stand up.
One crisp winter’s night when I was sixteen just won’t leave my brain: I had been at a high school hockey game with a girlfriend when my father showed up to drive us home. It wasn’t until we had gotten into the car and were leaving the arena parking lot that we realized that something was wrong. My father was so drunk he couldn’t put a coherent sentence together.
Luckily, he had been late picking us up, so the road wasn’t busy and he was driving slowly toward my friend’s house. Neither my friend or I knew how to drive, and we didn’t know what to do. I can still remember holding my breath as we drove across the bridge over the highway, praying that my father could hold the large 1976 Buick between the railings. After what seemed like a very long time, but wasn’t much more than a mile, we made it to my friend’s house where we coaxed my father in “for a cup of coffee.”
I was panicked, yet my first reaction was to shield my father from the fury of my mother when I phoned her to tell her what was happening. I think I was simply overloaded by the situation, and if my mother was angry, it felt like it would tip my world over the edge into the abyss. My friend’s parents ended up driving us the seven miles home. That was the only time I can recall that my father drove drunk while I was in the car, but it wasn’t the last time he would drive drunk. Years after I left home, he was mostly on the wagon, but had at least one brush with the law when he took out a stop sign. The code of silence was still in effect in those days in small town New Brunswick, so the story didn’t make it into the local paper, likely because it was his “first” offense... but really it was only the first time they had actually caught him.
The only other scary tale I experienced with my father, the booze, and the car was the day we were to deliver me and all my possessions to Ontario for my first year of university. My father announced he couldn’t drive because he was too nervous. What he really was, was very hung over, with a bad case of the shakes. Since my mother didn’t drive, I would have to do it if we were to arrive on campus in time for freshman orientation. I had had my license for all of one day, and the next day I was white knuckling us down a six lane highway for the first time, through Montreal en route to the 401.
The crazies that day just kept coming: On my way through the lobby of my residence, burdened down with luggage, I dropped a plastic shopping bag, breaking my father’s bottle of vodka. The smell of the alcohol seemed to completely fill the hall as the elderly ladies at the desk rushed to get the mop. I was humiliated and running on my last nerve when I finally met up with my boyfriend. Once I could ditch my parents, we had one hell of a freshman week. Likely I was in shock, but after the frenzy of the trip, I felt bulletproof and ready to have a rockin’ time to blot out the drive from hell. The first time I ever passed out was a Saturday night that month.
You’d think I would know better, wouldn’t you? Sadly, logic has nothing to do with it. If the craziness of an alcoholic family isn’t genetic, the loopy logic of surviving the latest bomb blast in an addicted household seems to make us vulnerable to those same demons that haunt our parents and bedeviled our childhoods. Dumb luck was the only reason I saw the signs before I drove through them.
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