How to Tell Your Kid That You're a Drunk
What do you do when your child is old enough to learn about your alcoholism?
The subhead implies that there might be a helpful answer to this question within this newsletter, but there are no correct answers. Everyone’s experience is different, and everyone’s child is different, so there are many ways this could go extremely well or traumatize everyone for life. I guess the one standard should be to avoid lying? And don’t offer anything that wasn’t asked for either.
I’m simply hoping that I have something prepared for when the inevitable question arises from one of my children, but our oldest (7) is inquisitive enough and online enough that I feel like he’ll figure out my ignominious past on his own and that I won’t have to do too much explaining. I’m hoping “Son, the online media scene in the 2010s was a non-stop carnival of sin …” will suffice.
Today, Ben Gaffaney returns to TSB with an essay about how he plans to go about discussing his alcoholism with his six-year-old son.
“When adults drink beer, wine, or booze, it can feel good. But if you’re allergic to it like me, you’ll drink and drink until you’re not yourself. You’ll do dangerous things and get very sick.”
Read the full essay below.
Kid Alcohol
By Ben Gaffaney
Earlier this year, my ex-wife and I talked in person, alone, for the first time since 2019. She asked me to research how to talk to our son about my alcoholism. He's not old enough to understand much more than "When daddy has wine or beer he acts crazy" and compare it to his classmates' peanut and strawberry allergies, but, even at six, he's not far off from experiencing alcohol as a chemical that interacts with his blood and brain, and he won't know what it means.
Six sounds alarmingly young, but in AA you hear the worst stories. My Sober Living house manager distinctly remembered his first drink at age four, and his first experience with weed, also at four, given to him by his hippie father. A surprising number of alcoholics my age felt that chemical need at young ages over the peppermint schnapps that seemed to inhabit every 1970s liquor cabinet. My brother - over 30 years sober - was around 10, that first splash of alcohol telling him "I need this." My parents offered me a sip of Bailey’s around age eight. I found it revolting, but I can still feel my throat closing at the thought of it, which means it meant something to me.
Talking about that seems simple enough. Even if my son were given a sip of booze he could talk about how it made him feel. We could read my imaginary book, AA Junior., with Bill W. as a friendly walrus who explains “Some people who drink too much think they can drink just a little and be happy. But they’re wrong, and that’s okay.”
That’s the alcoholism that’s in the public ether, and six-year-olds see more than you think. (There’s a recovery meeting in “Wreck-It Ralph,” for example.) I’ll tell him how alcohol isn’t safe for everyone, and that he’s lucky, because he has a father who will understand if someday he learns that what makes him feel great and free also makes him sick and dangerous. I’ll tell him he’s lucky to see safe alcohol consumption modeled by his mother, who is not an addict.
But my ex-wife didn’t ask me to talk about alcoholism. She asked me to explain my alcoholism.
Since I’ve spent part of my professional life preparing executives to talk to reporters, I created a question tree, building to the best outcome I can imagine.
There are infinite types of alcoholism, but also only two. In Type A, there’s that fusion of brain matter and CH3CH2OH. Type B is about fixation on the effects of alcohol. As a Type B alcoholic, I needed to obliterate myself till I felt okay in my skin, free from my life of failure. Describing my alcoholism means delving into the very adult damage you can do with fixation.
That starts with family.
I barely knew my grandparents. One died when my father was 16, the other three were alcoholics, gone by the time I was 10, dying of cirrhosis, emphysema and heart disease, all before age 60. Almost half my cousins have been to rehab.
One grandfather had shellshock from World War II and drank wine until he was numb, which was my kind of drinking. Another grew isolated and morose after his divorce. In later life (that is, 50), he had a lady friend who wanted him to straighten out and commit to her, “a real nice gal,” in North Dakota terms. He decided he’d rather be glum over the end of his marriage, drinking all night and smoking five packs a day. I think of him when I’ve gone two weeks without seeing anyone socially, or if I’m checking my texts to see how long it’s been since anyone reached out. I don’t remember my alcoholic grandmother at all, though I must have met her when I was old enough to form permanent memories.
A few months ago, one of my cousins went to alcoholic rehab in her 40s. She’s anorexic, so weak she’s barely mobile. She and her dog, a beloved 14-year-old pit bull, were living with her parents, and the dog was deteriorating with age, though not ill. As she left for rehab, the daughter said, “Don’t you dare kill my dog.” Her mom threw out much of her furniture, turned her room into a guest room and euthanized him within a week. It’s horrifying to watch someone’s traumatic events play out in real-time.
No one talked about alcoholism as a family disease when I was growing up, but I refused to drink throughout high school and college for that reason. “No Beast for me, I can’t drink, it runs in the family.” (Beast is Milwaukee’s Best.) My first drink came after college, in Boston, surrounded by my girlfriend’s new law school friends, most of whom I absolutely loathed, especially the one who considered himself a writer. I was nudged into it, since I was such a novelty, a 21-year-old who’d never drank before. The writer told the bartender I was to become a man that day, and asked for a recommendation, so my first drink was a very butch Triple Sec and orange juice. It’s when I learned how useful alcohol is to get through an evening with the worst people in the world, and that was no small factor in justifying my drinking habit.
Last weekend with my son, my starter went out on my car and I had an intense flash of panic that surprised me. We were at home, not in any danger, we were just going to miss his swim lesson while I waited for a jump, then, it turned out, a tow. We took a Lyft to Enterprise, then continued our weekend. But the panic kept circling: I am alone. I have no one to help me. I am alone. I have no one to help me. I felt uneasy all morning.
My panic wasn’t based in reality. I have a few local friends I could have called if my car had conked out on a highway. Believing I had no one to support me is part of the family tree. It’s part of why I never reached out for help when I was drinking.
My son was upset by the disruption, but maybe he picked up on my vibe.
***
I’ve had supportive AA friends question my wife’s decision to divorce me after I got sober. Would she have left me if I had cancer? How is this different?
That never sat well with me. My obsessive self-reliance has a flipside: it makes me responsible. It makes me culpable. Perhaps a better metaphor would be a spouse facing illness and refusing treatment, the anger that could bring. Even so, I want to believe I did alcoholism to myself. It flatters my independence, no matter how much damage I did.
Five years ago, I had a DWI that sent me to jail, then decided that was the end of my drinking career, that the risk to my personal freedom was enough of a wake-up call. I believed that was my rock bottom.
When I got out of the downtown jail, I walked to the office to plug in my phone enough to call my wife. This was a dangerous decision, since my job involves a lot of entertaining, so it’s full of liquor. Somehow I didn’t drink. I called my wife and she picked me up, told me I was going to rehab, that I wasn’t going to be left alone until I went. Her mother flew down while I was in jail, and my parents came shortly after. Along with friends, they took shifts to make sure it was impossible for me to drink, then drove me to rehab, several hours away.
The first couple weeks in treatment, my wife left supportive messages, and I was sincerely committed to never drinking again. Prior to the DWI, I’d pretended to go to meetings, making up shares and inventing a sponsor, because I wanted to keep drinking. In rehab, I was learning the rules of AA, how to attend a meeting and share without looking like what my son would call a noob. Of course, I also had no access to alcohol.
After a couple weeks, my wife chose to read a decade of my journals, where she learned how many lies I was telling to keep drinking. She also learned that I was filled with resentment, towards her, towards everyone, but mostly towards her. She learned who I was obsessing over and that years prior I had a fling I never told her about. I was untreated, in need of therapy, meds and sobriety, and my unhinged journal was a result.
Her lawyer collected all the worst bits for the divorce proceeding, and I’m confident I would have been forced to read them aloud in a deposition if I hadn’t accepted the terms of the divorce as she presented them. After the divorce was final, she returned my journals, I read them one last time and threw them away. While reading, I simply felt tired, since resentful, circular thoughts were part of my daily existence. I’d write my thoughts, they’d disappear, then they’d come back.
Alcoholism may be a disease, but the journals were written in my handwriting. I believed everyone journaled that way, but instead, I was unmasked as the awful person I always knew I was.
Turns out that was my rock bottom.
***
Adult Children of Alcoholics follows the twelve steps of AA pretty closely, though I’ve never done the steps in that program. Early on in treatment, I zeroed in on the ACoA “laundry list,” which straightforwardly describes 14 traits that cover the reasons you’d attend a meeting. Adult Children tend to be people-pleasers and love bombers who avoid conflict to an obsessive degree, fearing abandonment. We also seek relationships with self-absorbed people who value our “overdeveloped sense of responsibility” without noticing or caring what it does to us. As the list dryly notes, “this enables us not to look too closely at our own faults, etc.”
That “etc.” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
When my counselor at rehab asked me why I never reached out for help, I said, “I didn’t want to be a bother.” I had told her much about my parents, focusing on their taciturn Midwestern qualities since they’re not alcoholics. The counselor cried out, “Oh no, and they passed it along to you!”
That’s what they passed along to me. It’s what I don’t want to pass on to my son.
Young kids are obsessive by nature. Right this moment, a boy, about five, keeps running to a support pole at this outdoor coffee place, jumping and grabbing it to feel the flash of dizziness he gets from centripetal force. He’s done it at least 20 times, trying to recreate the surprise of that first jump-and-spin. He’s chasing a high. I know my son will chase highs.
***
Whichever way my son asks about it, I’ll be answering a two-part question: “What is alcoholism, and why does it matter to me?”
Here goes:
“When adults drink beer, wine, or booze, it can feel good. But if you’re allergic to it like me, you’ll drink and drink until you’re not yourself. You’ll do dangerous things and get very sick.
“You have to know this now, because alcoholism runs in your dad’s family, so you might be allergic to it too. Alcohol is for adults, but if someone gives you alcohol and you try it, please tell me and your mother immediately. Tells us how it feels. We love you and we’re here for you.
“And no matter what happens, I will never kill your dog.”
*****
Ben Gaffaney lives and writes in Texas. More of his work can be found at “Hopping Off the Bus to Abilene.”
ALSO BY BEN GAFFANEY:
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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:
Pity Ascending With The Fog
by James Tate
************************
He had no past and he certainly
had no future. All the important
events were ending shortly before
they began. He says he told mama
earth what he would not accept: and I
keep thinking it had something to do
with her world. Nights expanding into
enormous parachutes of fire, his
eyes were little more than mercury.
Or sky-diving in the rain when there
was obviously no land beneath,
half-dead fish surfacing aoo over
his body. He knew all this too well.
And she who might at any time be
saying the word that would embrace all
he had let go, he let go of course.
I think the pain for him will end in
May or January, though the weather
is far too clear for me to think of
anything but august comedy.
ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN