Alcoholism and family history January 2022

Alcoholism runs in my family. It is probably safe to say that suicide also runs in my family that is, if a suicide in each of three previous generations counts. Mostly, my family alcoholics were functional alcoholics; that means, they worked, married, had children, bought homes (some of them) and didn't die early from liver disease.

My father was a high functioning 'binge drinker' which means he kept his drinking to lunch during the week and drank a case of beer over the weekend. It was, in a way, part of his job. He was a cost estimator for a big company and one of his strategies was to befriend and go to lunch with other cost estimators (they were in on the strategy too) and they would all drink and try to trick information out of each other on what jobs were being bid on and what the bids were. If estimator A could get estimator B to divulge the bid, he could, of course, underbid within the profit margin and win the job!

The smell of alcohol and industry is fixed forever in my memory of my father coming in from the cold after work. He worked outdoors for the early years of his career, as an ironworker. He came home ruddy faced and wreathed with cold winter air exhaling whiskey, and his clothes permeated by various motor oil and metal odors. I loved my father, but he wasn't ever, and easy man. He had spent his entire adult life in the traditionally male sphere, the Conservation Corps, the Merchant Marines (like his father) and the navy, followed by Ironwork and Structural Steel. He built damms, skyscrapers, bridges, and moved impossibly heavy and large items from place to place - the kind of things that require roads to be built to accommodate them, and bridges over wet terrain. He had an interesting job and he loved it! Even when it almost killed him. In my memory, two ironworkers suffered the same industrial accident, my father and my brother's best friend. An unsecured crame (a crane not bolted to a stable base) carrying a heavy load of lumber, tipped over and hit my father on the side on the way down, shattering most of his bones and causing him to be laid up for nearly a year. He had, among the broken pones, pierced lung from a rib being shoved into it. He was a brave, stoic and resilient man, because he recovered and never complained about aches and pains. He was like a new man. And the company showed its appreciation by promoting him and promoting him. It goes without saying, he wouldn't have been promoted had he not also been highly intelligent, immensely knowledgeable in his field, and a man's man capable of holding his own with other men in his field.

my father grew up poor in the city. His father, the merchant marine, had been killed under mysterious circumstances in a hit and run incident after arriving in port. My grandmother was left to face the depression with no education and four children, her three sons, and a niece she had taken in and was raising. Shrtly after her mother suffered a catastrophic stroke, my grandmother moved to Ocean City to take care of her and my father, at 16, was left to fend for himself. I don't know all the details about that, why he didn't go with her for example. No one in my family EVER talked about anything related to family history and in contrast I would say they were all remarkably tight lipped and secretive about most things.

For example, it tookk me decades to get even a clue about what happened to my own mother's biological mther, after I found out that the woman I always thought was her mother was actually her aunt. No one ever talked about that. And I was told, when I asked, one lie after another. Like a detective, I had to piece it together through ancestry.com research and the few breadcrumb clues I could pick up here and there, vague memories, hints, possible names and so on.

Among the aforementioned ancestral alcoholics, however, to get back to topic, was my father's maternal grandfather. He had been a well educated man with gambling and alcohol addictions who left the family penniless. I believe he may also have been one of the suicides as was my mother's maternal grandfather, also an alcoholic and suicide. He shot himself. My mother remembered him coming to visit her when she was in the "Friendless Childrens' Home" in Camden, NJ, after her mother died leaving three little girls and their father put them into the orphanage. I don't know much about him except that he was from a Quaker farm family, and he was a ne'er-do-well. My mother's aunt, the one who raised her, hated him, presumably one of the reasons she refused to tell me anything about him, including his name, when I plied her with questions so many times over the years. Before she died, my mother's estranged sister told me about knowing him before he died and that he was not a good man; he was a 'drinker.'

From growing up with my father's functional alcohoism, I became familiar with what I called the three phases: sociability, followed by contrary argumentativeness, capped off by aggression and belligerance. I believe this pattern can be observed pretty readily in any bar and often concludes with the infamous bar fights.

How did I elude the family curse? For one thing, I was a born reader, and I read the classics filled with terrifying adversaries such as pirates and kidnappers, and diseases like the Black Plague. For another thing, I didn't inherit alcoholism, but I did inherit intelligence and the cost estimator's tendency to size people up and observe. My father was an ever present danger due to his drinking. He was an ofte violent man, not so much to my mother who early on established that she would brook no such assaults, but to us children. When he got incensed, he beat us, with his hand as in what is too generously described as spankings, which is more open hand beatings on legs and buttocks, and at times with the belt. When we moved from our city home, finding that the big china cabinet in the dining room wasn't coming with us, my brother and I scraped a hole through the plaster and dropped 'the belt' into the wall.

To me alcohold was never something you looked at as a reward or a treat, as my father did. To me it was a brown bottle with a large poison label across it. It still is! Two of my siblings are functioning alcoholics, both of them graduated to three DUI status. My brother eluded jail time only because his lawner convinced the judge he needed to have home arrest so he could take care of his elderly father who lived in a remote and rural place. My father actually took care of my brother in real life. My brother had been a homeless drug addict and my father and mother gave him shelter until he became clean and sober. My mother died and my brother stayed on and looked after my father until he died. My brother who had been in Vietnam, had a lot of trauma in his life so it isn't surprising that he drinks, and also that he smokes pot to help him sleep, since he has had recurring nightmares since Vietnam. After his 3rd DUI, however, he stopped drinking at the VFW or the American Legion or the local bars and only drinks at home and doesn't EVER drive after drinking. My sister is now learning that lesson. Because of her, I am reading "NO MORE LETTING GO; The spirituality of taking action against Alcoholism and Drug Addiction by Debra Jay. I read through a LOT of book reviews before I bought the three books I have purchased to help me navigate thie latest stormy sea, and this is the one I am starting with because I am not able to go the old route of shunning the miscreant, cutting them off, distancing myself and letting them "hit bottom."

There is a saying I like "Revise your Priors!" And it means don't get stuck in old ideas that don't work any more. Newer approaches to coping with family members with addictions is to find ways to intervene and possible spare them and yourself the decades of despair and destruction before they reach "the bottom." So that is what I am going to try. I will keep you informed about my progress in the book and in the strategies in case you have someone you love who has a problem.

I have never believed that secrecy is particularly helpful to anyone. I was a teacher, and I am a scholar, an intellectual, and a communicator, a writer and an artist. I am committed to sharing our stories and from them, deriving wisdom or at least comfort!

Happy Trails!

Jo Ann