Drug Addiction Stories

Little girls only understand the black and white.  Things like alcoholism and disease are foreign concepts to little children and I was no different.  On alternating weekends, my parents and their friends used to go over to each other’s homes.  One Saturday they would come to our house and the next, we would go to theirs.  My sister and I were the same ages as their two girls.  Oh, we had great fun almost every time.  We kids would play.  The women would talk (and drink) and the men would play cards and drink.

He was a good man, a family man…but he was an alcoholic.

My favorite times were when we were allowed to spend the night over there because the alternative was riding home with Dad driving.  It terrified me.  I would crouch down in the back seat and try not to look at the way he was driving.  Back in the 60’s, there was an advertisement billboard, which had what appeared to be the back end of a car sticking out of the sign.  We called it the “Car in the sign”.  My father, in jest, said “Oh, someone had too much to drink and missed that turn!”  That was all it took.  I was a child, of course I believed him.

Those memories are still so very vivid to me even years after my Father is gone.  He was a good man, a family man…but he was an alcoholic.  Even as a young girl, getting into a car when he had been drinking literally terrified me.  I’m sure that affected who I was and who I became in many ways.  The blessing was we never did get into an accident.  I can’t account for that because there was so many times that my Dad was blind drunk and could barely walk.

I can remember being all of 7 or 8 years old and having the courage to tell my Father; “Daddy, when you drive and have been drinking, I’m scared.”  My Father held me tight and said something I’ll never forget.  He said “I’m sorry, kiddo.  I’m being the only kind of Father I know how to be.”  The alcohol was so much a part of him, he could not distinguish the fact that his drinking scared me, he didn’t.  And so, it continued and I knew that on alternating weekends, my friends had to deal with their Dad driving drunk.  Then there were the camping trips…