Articles That Didn't Make It

The Scars of Living with a Drunk

It's not easy living with an alcoholic. I was never raised in a drinking family and I never had to deal with alcoholism until I married in 1968. My husband's drinking turned into an addiction. It wouldn't have been so bad if he could have been a happy drunk, but he wasn't most of the time. His drinking got worse after the birth of our daughter. He stopped even trying to keep a job. It was up to me to keep the family together and pay the bills and put food on the table. Sometimes I didn't have money to pay the rent because he used the money for whiskey without my knowledge. We would get evicted from one apartment, and we'd start up with another one. It was a cycle and I couldn't seem to keep the family together in one spot because my husband was drunk and being destructive with our money.

I stayed married to my husband for 10 years, before I finally cut him loose. There was nothing I could do really, because he didn't want to help himself. He denied he even had a problem. I was the problem, he said. It was hard for me to decide to leave him, but I knew I didn't want to raise my daughter in an unstable environment. One night it all came to a head when my husband yelled at my daughter and called her a wicked name. She retaliated, called him a drunk and said she hated him. He got up from his chair and charged after her like a bull. I went after him trying to stop him.

My daughter had locked herself in her room, but that lock didn't hold for a second after he kicked the door in. He knocked the door right off its hinges. He picked up my 8 year old daughter and flung her against the wall and she slid to the floor with the wind knocked out of her. Seeing my daughter lifeless on the floor of her room, I picked up the only thing I could see at that moment, which was her baseball bat. I was poised ready to take his head off, I told him to back up and get out of her room and leave. I then called the Sheriff. He went to jail for domestic violence.

I never looked back. I picked up my daughter and went to my parents' home and we lived with them. I divorced my husband. He never tried to see or talk to his daughter again. Alcoholism is a disease that affects the whole family. Even when my husband tried not to drink, he still had the mentality of a drunk. He was behaving like a dry drunk when he wasn't drinking. He was just as mean.

I could tell you that everything worked out well after that, but it didn't. The rift between my daughter and her father never mended. He cleaned up, I heard, years later, but he still never tried to contact her, and that is perfectly acceptable to my daughter. I see every day that the scars from a drunken father left their mark.