Lessons in a Bottle: What I Learned as the Child of an Addict.
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“I’m not an alcoholic, I just like to drink,” my mother would say as she poured the last drop of wine from the bottle into her glass.
She was a waitress and a single mother, doing her best to raise me in spite of her demons. I never knew my father. I was told at a young age that my father had died — hit by a train, the story went. When I was 16, I was nonchalantly told that he was very much alive and living in downstate Indiana with his wife and children.
Unlike most children with estranged parents, I had no desire to ever meet him, and feel the same to this very day. I felt empty for many reasons growing up, none of which were because I was without a father. I had the experience of being raised in a home consumed by alcoholism. While growing up in a home with addiction was not without consequence, there were valuable lessons to be learned.
I’ve spent decades trying to piece together potential reasons why my mother seemingly chose liquor above all — even her only daughter — and nothing quite makes sense. Addiction is funny that way — filling our voids with the very thing that leaves us feeling most empty. Maybe she does not feel that the life she leads is one worth living, or maybe I look too much like my father — I can only speculate, at best.
In truth, I do not really need to know why, I just need to take the lessons I have learned and move toward forgiveness.
Having an alcoholic parent taught me that I do not need my pain to be validated. I always felt the need for others to understand why they hurt me, as if their epiphany would make my pain all the more justified.
I would always try to make my mother understand all the ways in which she harmed me because I needed to know that she understood the severity and the consequence; I wanted her to feel remorseful so that I could move forward knowing that what happened would not happen again the very next day, as it had so many times before.
Although it has taken nearly three decades, I now realize that I do not need her validation or apology in order to heal. Moving forward is my decision and mine alone, I cannot hold my breath waiting for repentance. We can cling to our pain for as long as we wish, but misery will surely follow. At some point, we have to choose peace.
A difficult lesson that I learned watching my mother struggle in her addiction is this: we are far more motivated by fear than the prospect of growth. Substance abuse is often a symptom of something greater than just a disease in itself. As is the case with so many others, my mother’s greatest addiction was fear.
I learned at an early age to be fearful of everything that could go wrong. As a result, I stayed small so that I would not be disappointed when life went disastrously. I lived within the lines, and lacked the confidence needed to overcome self-doubt. I failed to try new things because of what could potentially go wrong. Over the years, I have learned that fear directly compromised my ability to truly live.
For so long, fear convinced me that I would be unable to cope with disappointment or loss — that I could not handle rejection or failure — but now I thrive in situations that force me to endure. We must think so little of ourselves to assume that we cannot rise from the ashes. I have learned that there are few situations that I am unable to navigate and I welcome the challenges that each brings.
I learned to replace fear with a healthy sense of adventure and begin truly living.
Having felt shame throughout most of my childhood, I learned to be more discriminant with regard to how I am treated. I felt shame for so long because I permitted it. I allowed others to make me feel embarrassed for what my mother had done because I felt that she was a reflection of me, an extension of what I did not want to be known as.
I consented to feeling ashamed because I did not know that I had a choice. I believed that I had to accept how society wanted me to feel. I have learned to be particular about how I am treated by both myself and others. I now know that I do not have to accept negativity from others, and I am more aware of how I speak to myself. I have learned to be kind to myself.
The hardest lesson of all is that love must be conditional. I allowed my mother to hurt me because, after all, she is my mother, right? “You only have one mother,” I am often told. I am warned against distancing myself from my pain because I will have regret when she is gone. But when am I allowed to be happy? When am I allowed to walk away and say “this hurts me and I can no longer stay”?
I learned that there comes a time when being kind to another is being unkind to myself. When the hurt becomes overwhelming, we must leave. Despite the obligations and the guilt, we cannot continue to place another’s well-being before our own and not deem it abuse.
I will likely regret ending the relationship that I had with my mother and wish that things had been different, but I cannot be Virgil, leading her through her own hell. However, I will be there when she chooses serenity.
Lastly, I learned that I am responsible for my unhappiness. People struggling with addiction have a tendency to ignore the role that they play in their own misfortune, and thus continue repeating the same behaviors.
The ones close to me who were at the mercy of drugs or alcohol erroneously believed that they needed their poison in order to feel okay when they already possessed the ability to heal. My mother, like so many other women, believed that she needed a man. She would tell me that she both needed them and hated their existence in the same breath, but she would stay.
I’ve watched so many of us medicate our loneliness and our fears with drugs and people when all we truly needed was to love ourselves. I have learned that no one can cure my unhappiness but myself. I have to take accountability for what is not going well in my life, and have the courage to make the necessary changes, no matter how uncomfortable.
Not all of us have lived lives full of sunshine and family sitcom moments, some of us got dealt a bad hand. We cannot choose every situation that we find ourselves in, but we can choose how we respond. We can find purpose in the unhappiest of moments, we can learn to thrive in chaos.
My upbringing taught me what kind of a woman I wanted to become by showing me the real life consequences of poor decisions. I was able to witness what crippling fear can do to one’s will to live, and I clearly saw that playing the victim can become a lifetime role if we allow it. Most important of all, I found that we have the ability to learn from our trauma without being defined by it.
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Monica Torres is a recovering cynic and world traveler, scouring the earth for meaning, purpose, and fine wines. You could contact her via her website, Facebook or Instagram.
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