When your parents can’t stay off booze

By Bunmi Sofola

If your partner is a chronic alcoholic, most experts advise you to show him the door.  That only when he has reached rock bottom will he be ready to overcome his addiction to alcohol.  But what happens if that alcoholic is your father – or your mum as it was the case with me?”  Susan, now in her thirties, is a medical doctor.  When she got married eight years ago, she made sure her mother wasn’t one of the guests.

“It was the most heart-wrenching decision of my life,” she confessed sadly.  For as long as I could remember, my mum had always loved her bottles of stout.  She was not that bad at first, but when her well-stocked shop was bulldozed by the state government, she lost almost everything and was too beaten to start all over again.  She’d lost a lot of her spark and turned more to the bottle to bring it back.

“She did some petty trading from home but most of the profits went to her booze.  At first, she did her drinking in the evenings, but before long, it began in the afternoons – and there were times she sneaked in the bottles before noon!  By this time, us kids, three in number, had learnt to fend for ourselves as she was almost invariably slumped in the chair by the time we got home.  Dad was a fairly successful estate agent but had no control of her drinking.  She’d been most reluctant to get married in her jet-setting young years.  But he was in love with her.  She told him she hated children but he assured her he would help.  ‘I’d thought that one look at her kids would make her fall in love with them, but nothing like that happened,’ dad had told us sadly.

“We were all close to our father who loved us dearly, but that didn’t seem to bother mum.  On my traditional engagement party, my mum’s face was already puffy from drinking  By the time the social leg started, she was so smashed she got on the dance floor with her irresponsible friends, singing away to the band’s music.  I was so pissed off that I begged my brothers to take her home.

“My in-laws were a bit bemused.  They were all respectable people with comfortable well-ordered lives.  To them, a wild night would have consisted of a couple of beers at a social outing.  Rampant alcoholism belonged to a different world.  After the engagement ceremony, my mother started planning the wedding.  But I imagined her at the do, breathing alcoholic fumes into guests’ faces and making a fool of herself on the high table.  That was when I made my decision.  I couldn’t bear her to spoil the most important day of my life.  Since the bride’s family was supposed to foot most of the wedding reception’s bill, I had a talk with my dad.  Whatever money he had saved for the wedding should be given to me – I was going away to get married.

“Dad understood, of course, but my in-laws nearly hit the roof.  But my fiancé pacified them and I had a most memorable wedding with friends abroad pulling together, and with no mum singing and falling on her face.  An uncle on my mother’s side gave me away, that should make mum happy.”

For years, visitors to Alan and Mide’s house became used to finding Alan with a bottle of his favourite scotch and his long-suffering wife beside him.  Whenever he lifted the glass to his lips, Mide would shove in a spoonful of food – the only way she could get him to eat anything.  “When Alan and I got married over 20 years ago, he was a chemical analyst in the manufacturing company he worked for and the best trouble-shooter the company boasted of,” said Mide.  He’d loved his drink even then, but never touched the stuff until late in the evening.  Sometimes, he would stay late boozing and go to the office a bit bleary-eyed, but once he was on the job, he was fine.

“I made sure there was enough to drink in the house – that way, I could monitor his drinking.  He later went into partnership with a good friend of his and they actually made good profits.  As more hands were employed, Alan drank more, now money was no problem.  Most times, I got apprehensive of what I would find when I let myself in from work – would he be there or would he be at his favourite beer parlour?”

“In spite of the frightening number of alcoholics in this country, there are no places they could go to get dried up like the Alcoholics Anonymous abroad.  It is only when alcoholics are ill, probably from their liver virtually collapsing, that you find succour in the hospitals.  But there is no counselling or follow-up treatment that discourages alcoholics from going back to their booze as soon as they’re discharged.  Most of my friends are fed up with Alan and have suggested that the best thing is to leave him.  Yet, if it’s other illness he’s suffering from, no one would have advised me to leave him.

“He’s tried several times to give up and we would both work together to cut down on the amount he was drinking, but he always went back to heavy drinking.  Then there were his women who were also alcoholics.  He actually disappeared for a few days to be with a particular mistress he said he was fond of.  Then one day, the woman brought him back to the house herself – he was roaring drunk and she said he was owing her the rent money she lent him.  I had to give her the money and Alan was really apologetic when he became sober.  Out of desperation, I started watering down the hard liquor in the house.

“By this time, he didn’t care much for food and the day he vomited blood was the day he started going down hill.  Then he suffered a stroke and couldn’t move about as he would love to.    The problem is that I’m so used to his disease, and because I love him, I would try to make life easier for him until he drinks himself to death.  He’s been a good father and provider and deserves his family’s support for his illness.”

“Making life easier for an alcoholic enables him to continue on the path to destruction,” says an expert who specializes in treating drug and alcoholic addiction.  “It is a matter of fact that men are more likely to leave alcoholic partners while women are more likely to stay.  It may seem cruel to leave someone, but it is more likely to bring the condition to a satisfactory end.  A partner needs to spell out what will happen if the alcoholic doesn’t stop drinking – he will ruin his health and probably die.  Alcoholics change their behaviour only when they believe they have no choice.”

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