Please Spare My Grandson – Part 1
Alcohol and/or drug addiction has done a lot of damage in and to my family. My father was an alcoholic and my mother was an alcoholic and addicted to codeine. Life was a little (to say the least) chaotic at our home even though my parents tried as best they could to raise us and give us what we needed. There was an obvious struggle emotionally for them between the good values they had instilled in them and the outbursts that came as a result of the alcohol and drugs. Although 2 of my sisters became alcoholics (and are now recovering) and I abused drugs for a couple of years in my youth, I never became addicted to drugs or alcohol.
As an adult I was so thankful that I never became addicted and since my sisters had never relapsed, I thought the ordeal was over. Never in a million years did I expect my own daughter to become an alcoholic. The thought just never occurred to me. I just wasn’t looking for the signs, and therefore, I didn’t see them until it was almost too late. I knew that before she had her children, she would go to the club and occasionally have parties at her home. Typical youth behavior, I thought. She had her first baby in 2006 and shortly after that, she moved back in with me. Everything went fine, she drank occasionally but when I found out she was pregnant with her second child (only several months later) I didn’t see her drink. After the second child was born, the drinking increased, but I put it down to depression over having lost her car and her job (which she had worked very diligently at).
Then I noticed her waist getting thick again.
I repeatedly asked, “Are you pregnant again?” and she always said no.
I noticed her drinking more often and keeping a bottle of vodka in her room but up until then, she had taken exceptional care of her two children. Then things began to change. She began yelling at the kids more often and over time she spent more and more time in bed. The older child would come out for me to fix her something to eat and then I’d get the little one and feed him. Then, quite by accident, I found out the shocking truth (or one of them anyway), she was pregnant yet again.
