Alcoholism taught me not to trust.

The Ethical Society is devoting each month to a different emotion and September’s emotion is trust.  In considering this theme and in response to a recent visit to my hometown, I determined a fundamental truth about myself.  Alcoholism taught me not to trust.

My dad is an alcoholic and has been for as long as I’ve known him.  He was a risky alcoholic too – he frequently drank and drove, even with children in the car.  He crashed multiple vehicles, earned many DUIs, spent nights in jail, and lost his license for a year.  My dad also has a fuzzy relationship with the truth; he frequently exaggerated and lied to make himself look better.  I never understood it and I raged at my dad about his drinking, his lies, his exceptionally risky behaviors. I cannot count the number of fights we had about it, which generally resulted in my yelling furiously and disappointedly at him and his slamming the front door as he stormed out.  We kept up that relationship for a solid 7 years, from about age 8 to 15.  I purposefully did not invite friends over to my house because I was embarrassed by my dad’s drinking.  I stopped talking to him except to judge him.  I refused to go home with him if he had been drinking and I was irate at him and my extended family members for loading kids in the car with a clearly intoxicated driver.  How do you trust the adults around you when they clearly don’t have your best interest and safety at heart?

His alcoholism and my unwillingness to accept it did break our family; my damned persistence and righteous fury never ceased and my dad kept getting drunk.  My sophomore year of high school I told him that our relationship was over because he had chosen alcohol over his family.  That statement was the catalyst: he decided to quit drinking and he went sober cold turkey.  I was ecstatically happy he stopped.  In my remaining 2.5 years of high school, my family did events together, took trips together, spent time together.  I remember the last few years of high school as being really positive – probably because I wasn’t spending all my free time yelling at my father and being worried that he was going to kill himself or someone else – and I did normal things like hang out with friends, join clubs and teams, focus on academics, etc. I began to trust him.

At age 18, I went away to college and, almost instantly, my dad began drinking again.  I returned at Thanksgiving break to discover my father had returned to alcohol.  My mom, brother, and sister watched this happen and did not stop it AND DID NOT TELL ME that it was happening either.  (They had many opportunities; I regularly called every Sunday morning.)  I felt so betrayed by everyone and I desperately wanted to leave Owensboro – the focal point of all this pain – and never come back.  I raged and cried and vowed that we were done.  I was emotionally cutting off from him.

I returned home that summer and made it deliberately clear that it was a short-term stay.  I did not move back into my bedroom but instead slept on the living room couch.  I continued to bunk on the couch during other college returns to Owensboro (Thanksgiving, winter break, spring break) and then I would cut the trip shorter and shorter.  Even though the vacation was two weeks long, I’d be back in Saint Louis after 4 days because that time was all I could emotionally stand.  As a 20-something adult, I shrunk those 4 day trips down to 4 hours or less.  Christmas gathering scheduled for 1 PM?  No problem.  I’d drive the 4 hours to Owensboro, arrive by noon, stay for the meal, exchange gifts, and leave by 4 PM to drive back to STL.  Yes, I drove 8 hours to only spend 4 hours at my destination.  Then I stopped coming for those trips too.  At this point, at age 39, I go to Owensboro for funerals and that is all.

When I was pregnant (and more of an adult), I wrote my dad a letter and tried to express all of this to him.  I also stated that he would not have a meaningful relationship with my children because I didn’t trust him to do right by them.  My daughters spend substantially less time in Owensboro than I do because I fundamentally refuse for them to be exposed to his alcoholic and lying behaviors, I refuse for them to lose trust in a loved one in that way. 

As an adult, I can rationalize and be empathetic toward him.  His parents divorced when he was young.  His sister died from cancer as a teenager.  He fought in the Vietnam War.  He has witnessed and experienced absolutely horrendous things.  I understand that my dad self-medicates with alcohol and I understand that alcoholism is a mental illness.  Even so, those rationalizations don’t repair our relationship.  I clearly haven’t learned to let this go, and I don’t know that I will.  I don’t want to give him a way to hurt me anymore.  I don’t know how to have a meaningful relationship with someone I don’t trust and I don’t know how he can ever fully earn my trust again.