Alcoholic Mom Quotes

For kids like me, the part of the brain that deals with stress and conflict is always activated...We are constantly ready to fight or flee, because there is a constant exposure to the bear, whether that bear is an alcoholic dad or an unhinged mom (p228)....I see conflict and I run away or prepare for battle. (p246)

Recovery so far is, in some ways, as difficult as the bulimic/alcohol-ridden years, but difficult in a different way because I'm facing my issues for the first time instead of burying them with eating disorders and substances. I'm processing not only the grief of my mom's death, but the grief of a childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood that I feel I had never truly been able to live for myself. It's difficult, but it's the kind of difficult I have pride in.

Mom had just gotten back from Sydney, and she had brought me an immense, surpassingly blue butterfly, Papilio ulysses, mounted in a frame filled with cotton. I would hold it close to my face, so close I couldn't see anything but that blue. It would fill me with a feeling, a feeling I later tried to duplicate with alcohol and finally found again with Clare, a feeling of unity, oblivion, mindlessness in the best sense of the word.

I became a student of my own depressed experience, trying to unthread its causes. What was the root of all this despair? Was it psychological? (Was it Mom and Dad's fault?( Was it just temporal, a 'bad time' in my life? (When the divorce ends will the depression end with it?) Was it genetic? (Melancholy, called by many names, has run through my family for generations, along with its sad bride, Alcoholism.) Was it cultural? (Is this just the fallout of postfeminist American career girl trying to find balance in an increasingly stressful alienting urban world?) Was it astrological? (Am I so sad because I'm a thin-skinned Cancer whose major signs are all ruled by unstable Gemini?) Was it artistic? (Don't creative people always suffer from depression because we're so supersensitive and special?) Was it evolutionary? (Do I carry in me the residual panic that comes after millennia of my species' attempting to survive a brutal world?) Was it karmic? (Are all these spasms of grief just the consequences of bad behavior in previous lifetimes, the last obstacles before liberation?) Was it hormonal? Dietary? Philosophical? Seasonal? Environmental? Was I tapping into a universal yearning for God? Did I have a chemical imbalance? Or did I just need to get laid?

Be nice to her,” she said, low and fast. “My mom keeps a lot of stuff inside, but her thoughts are really loud. I know she’s been scared and lonely. She has a disability, but you probably know that. It’s a barometric-pressure thing. When it rains or snows or gets really hot or really cold too fast, she hurts. But alcohol, stress, loud noises, and weird smells do it, too. You have to learn her triggers. And please, just be patient with her. Sometimes she has to lie down for a long time. You might feel bored or lonely or even rejected, but she can’t help being sick.” Audre rested her hand on Shane’s shoulder. “Mom feels guilty about who she is. Make her feel happy about herself.

Perhaps people felt there was nothing more they could do, you know? After all, how can someone be helped who doesn’t see the need? A Christian counselor I saw for a while described such situations as, “a White Elephant everyone can see but no one wants to deal with; everyone hopes the problem will just go away on its own.” Just like with my mom. Back then it seemed women were almost expected to go a little loopy sometimes. After all we’re the ones with raging hormones that get out of whack – by our periods, PMS or pregnancy and childbirth – and cause craziness and bizarre behavior. And because of those uncontrollable hormones, women are also more emotional and predisposed to depression. These are things my mom was actually told by her parents, her family, her husbands and friends... even her doctor. Eventually, she made herself believe that her erratic behavior stemmed from PMS, not mania or alcohol.

I could just hear my mom now, "You know those old candy cigarettes are bad for you. Next thing you know, you'll be drinking alcohol, and they'll find you dead in a ditch somewhere. I'll never be able to show my face in this town again.

Every addiction story wants a villain. But America has never been able to decide whether addicts are victims or criminals, whether addiction is an illness or a crime. So we relieve the pressure of cognitive dissonance with various provisions of psychic labor - some addicts got pitied, others get blamed - that keep overlapping and evolving to suit our purposes: Alcoholics are tortured geniuses. Drug addicts are deviant zombies. Male drunks are thrilling. Female drunks are bad moms. White addicts get their suffering witnessed. Addicts of color get punished. Celebrity addicts get posh rehab with equine therapy. Poor addicts get hard time. Someone carrying crack gets five years in prison, while someone driving drunk gets a night in jail, even though drunk driving kills more people every year than cocaine. In her seminal account of mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow, legal scholar Michelle Alexander points out that many of these biases tell a much larger story about 'who is viewed as disposable - someone to be purged from the body politic - and who is not.' They aren't incidental discrepancies - between black and white addicts, drinkers and drug users - but casualties of our need to vilify some people under the guise of protecting others.

My first incident drinking alcohol occurred after a 2-month period in which I stole wine coolers and beers from my parents and hid them in different places around my room. I was 14 years old, in eighth grade. I invited a friend over one night after I had stolen enough. After 2 wine coolers the friend interrupted me, saying, "Hold on," and vomited into a trash can. I vomited a lot into the toilet. The next day, like a dumbass, I put the empty wine cooler and beer bottles in our outside garbage bin without trying to cover them. My dad caught me as a result, but hid it from my mom for unknown reasons.

For kids like me, the part of the brain that deals with stress and conflict is always activated - the switch flipped indefinitely. We are constantly ready to fight or flee, because there is constant exposure to the bear, whether that bear is an alcoholic dad or an unhinged mom. We become hard-wired for conflict. And that wiring remains, even when there's no more conflict to be had.

editor in New York and my mom and dad on the phone. My body is weak and bloated. I’m slowly poisoning myself to death. And it’s not like I haven’t seen what this shit does to people. The most fucked-up detoxes I’ve ever seen are the people coming off alcohol. It’s worse than heroin, worse than benzos, worse than anything. Alcohol can pickle your brain—leaving you helpless, like a child—infantilized—shitting in your pants—ranting madness—disoriented—angry—terrified. But that’s not gonna be me, I mean, it can’t be. I may hate myself. I may fantasize about suicide. But I’m way too vain to let myself die an alcoholic death. There’s nothing glamorous about alcoholism. You don’t go out like Nic Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, with a gorgeous woman riding you till your heart stops. Alcoholism takes you down slow, robbing you of every last bit of dignity on your way

How, I asked, could I have gone my whole life not knowing about my mother? How could I have not known what Keith knew when he saw our house? “It’s your mom,” Helder said. “Because it’s Mom.” He sounded firm and knowing and clear. “When a child has an alcoholic father, he sees him drink all day long but he doesn’t have a label, a concept. You just know that at night, when the tires make a certain sound in the driveway and the doors slam a certain way, with a certain sound, you just know you need to hide.

Kids from dysfunctional families cannot possibly seal their identity, because they have no sense of I AMness when they begin adolescence. My family was severely enmeshed as a result of my dad’s alcoholism and his physically abandoning us. Our enmeshment looked like this. As you can see, none of us had a whole distinct self. Most of each of us was part of the others. When one of us felt something, the others felt it too. If mom was sad, we all felt sad. If she was angry, we all felt it and tried to stop her from being angry. There was very little foundation for me to create my identity.

Why are you so mad at me?" Norris shouted back. The neighbors could definitely hear them now. His throat dry, but he didn't care. "I'm sorry if I interrupted one of your dates, or whatever, but I DID NOT DO ANYTHING! Ground me for leaving prom, ground me for drinking, but I didn't drive, I didn't have unprotected sex, I didn't even get high! You know that! You're supposed to be on my side here, Mom!" "NO!" she hurled back. "Not on this, Norris" I can't be!" "Why the hell not?!" "You know damn well! Trayvon Martin," she began. "Tamir Rice, Cameron Tillman, so many others that I can't remember all their names anymore!" Norris knew too well. It was almost a ritual, even back in Canada. They would sit as a family and watch quietly. "Be smart out there," Felix used to say. "You're not a handsome blue-eyed little Ken doll who's going to get a slap on the wrist every time he messes up. That, tonight?" she said, pointing to the door. "Do you know what that was? Do you?!" "I-" "That was a fucking coin flip, Norris. That was the coin landing heads." Her finger dug into his chest, punctuating every other word she was saying, spittle flying at his face. "Heads. A good one. Officer Miller, who has four sons, and luckily, mercifully, thank Jesus saw someone else's kid back-talking him tonight." She exhaled, her breath Thai-food hot against his face. "Tails." Her voice broke. "Tails, and I would be at the morgue right now identifying you! With some man lecturing me about our blood alcohol level and belligerent language and how you had it coming.

I’m already fantasizing about how I’m going to wind up with Steven. The self-help books said to be flexible when goal setting, to be willing to adjust and tweak accordingly, and my God am I willing to adjust and tweak. I am ready to abandon my goal of focusing on myself. I don’t want to work on my shame and humiliation and grief and bulimia and alcohol issues.

We are supposed to consume alcohol and enjoy it, but we're not supposed to become alcoholics. Imagine if this were the same with cocaine. Imagine we grew up watching our parents snort lines at dinner, celebrations, sporting events, brunches, and funerals. We'd sometimes (or often) see our parents coked out of our minds the way we sometimes (or often) see them drunk. We'd witness them coming down after a cocaine binge the way we see them recovering from a hangover. Kiosks at Disneyland would see it so our parents could make it through a day of fun, our mom's book club would be one big blow-fest and instead of "mommy juice" it would be called "mommy powder" There'd be coke-tasting parties in Napa and cocaine cellars in fancy people's homes, and everyone we know (including our pastors, nurses, teachers, coaches, bosses) would snort it. The message we'd pick up as kids could be Cocaine is great, and one day you'll get to try it, too! Just don't become addicted to it or take it too far. Try it; use it responsibly. Don't become a cocaine-oholic though. Now, I'm sure you're thinking. That's insane, everyone knows cocaine is far more addicting than alcohol and far more dangerous. Except, it's not...The point is not that alcohol is worse than cocaine. The point is that we have a really clear understanding that cocaine is toxic and addictive. We know there's no safe amount of it, no such thing as "moderate" cocaine use; we know it can hook us and rob us of everything we care about...We know we are better off not tangling with it at all.

The joy of being a REAL alcoholic, is that you just want booze, and nothing else. You've lost faith in God, and people (except Mom maybe), and government, and you know deep in your heart that all you really want to do is drink on the beach somewhere, all day long, forever. even after all the stupid steps. All 12 of them, thoroughly, you know you just want a goddamn beer. Maybe they'll put THAT in the next edition big book.

Sweetheart, I’ve been there with you through all of it. I was the one who camped out with you in that old tree house for days on end and held you after your mom died. It was me who sat with you while we waited for your sister to come out of the surgery that cut out her cancer. I was the one holding your hand while we waited for those test results to come back, and I was the one who supplied the alcohol to get you drunk, and the shoulder to cry on while you processed it. I understand. You don’t have to do this alone.

To the night version of her (mother) I owe free-floating anxiety. I am no longer a child in an unsafe home, but anxiety became habit. My brain is conditioned. I worry. I recheck everything obsessively. Is the seat belt fastened, are the reservations correct, is my passport in my purse? Have I done something wrong? Have I said something wrong? I'm sorry - whatever happened must be my fault. Is everyone all right, and if they aren't, how can I step in? That brilliant serenity prayer: God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. To all the children of alcoholics I want to say, Good luck with that. If I don't do it myself, it won't get done (this belief is often rewarded in this increasingly incompetent world). Also, I panic easily. I am not the person you want sitting in the exit row of an airplane. And distrust. Just in general, distrust. Irony. Irony, according to the dictionary, is the use of comedy to distance oneself from emotion. I developed it as a child lickety-split. Irony was armor, a way to stick it to Mom. You think you can get me? Come on, shoot me, aim that arrow straight at my heart. It can't make a dent because I'm wearing irony.

For the rest of Kat’s childhood, she moved from one relative’s house to another’s, up and down the East Coast, living in four homes before entering high school. Finally, in high school, she lived for a few years with her grandmother, her mom’s mom, whom she called “G-Ma.” No one ever talked about her mom’s murder. “In my family, my past was ‘The Big Unmentionable’—including my role in putting my own father in jail,” she says. In high school, Kat appeared to be doing well. She was an honor student who played four varsity sports. Beneath the surface, however, “I was secretly self-medicating with alcohol because otherwise, by the time everything stopped and it got quiet at night, I could not sleep, I would just lie there and a terrible panic would overtake me.” She went to college, failed out, went back, and graduated. She went to work in advertising, and one day, dissatisfied, quit. She went back to grad school, piling up debt. She became a teacher. Kat quit that job too, when a relationship she had formed with another teacher imploded. At the age of thirty-four, Kat went to stay with her brother and his family in Hawaii. She got a job as a valet, parking cars. “I’d come home from parking cars all day and curl up on my bed in the back bedroom of my brother’s house, and lie there feeling desperate and alone, my heart beating with anxiety.

You’re really nice,” I slur. We’re waiting for the valet to bring Gavin’s truck around, and it feels like the fresh Colorado air has increased my alcohol level from drunk to trashed . . . and I still haven’t cracked open my wine.   “You’re pretty nice too.” He’s watching me closely, and I’m trying to watch him closely. His eyes are crinkled with amusement; mine are struggling to focus.   “I really wish you were an investment banker.”   Oh no. The loose lips part of the night has arrived.   “Besides my mom, you’re probably the only person in the world who does.”   “Because everyone else would miss their superstar quarterback in his super-hot pants throwing the ball every Sunday?” Sober me hates drunk me so hard right now.   “Because I’m terrible with numbers. I had three different tutors trying to get me to pass my math courses in college. And I’m not sure most of the fans focus on my pants, but I’m glad you do.” His body is shaking with laughter as he nudges me with his shoulder.

What better way to lose that hangover headache than get drunk again? Oh, the joys of being Canadian with socialized health care and legal drinking age of nineteen. After a year (officially) honing that skill, I imbibed at an Olympic level. The red wine on the modular coffee table gleamed in a shaft of sunlight like its position had been ordained by the gods. I snatched up the crystal decanter, sloshing the liquid into the glass conveniently placed next to it. Once in a while, a girl could actually catch a break. I fanned myself with one hand. The myriad of lit candles seemed a bit much for Ari’s romantic encounter, but wine drinking trumped curiosity so I chugged the booze back. My entire body cheered as the cloyingly-sweet alcohol hit my system, though I hoped it wasn’t Manischewitz because hangovers on that were a bitch. I’d slugged back half the contents when I saw my mom on the far side of the room clutch her throat, eyes wide with horror. Not her usual, “you need an intervention” horror. No, her expression indicated I’d reached a whole new level of fuck-up. “Nava Liron Katz,” she gasped in full name outrage.

And we’re going out. Kill me. ‘Got everything?’ Mom asks, her voice all sing-songy. We’re acting normal. A short-lived facade when I open my bag and Operation Check Contents begins. 1. Phone to call for help if we have a car crash/get mugged/drive into the path of a tornado 2. Headphones to drown out the sound of people if we get caught in a crowd 3. Bottle of water for if we break down and get stranded in the middle of nowhere 4. Another bottle of water in case that other bottle leaks or evaporates 5. Tissues for nosebleeds, sneezing, crying, and/or drooling 6. Sanitizer to kill the germs you can catch from touching anything 7. Paper bag to breathe into or throw up in 8. Band-Aids and alcohol wipes in case open wounds should occur 9. Inhaler (I grew out of asthma when I was twelve, but you can’t be too careful when it comes to breathing) 10. A piece of string that serves no purpose but it’s been here since for ever and I’m afraid the world will implode if I don’t have it 11. A pair of nail scissors for any one of a trillion reasons, most of which conclude with me being kidnapped 12. And, finally, chewing gum to take away the sour taste I always get when the panic hits Normal takes a nosedive into my bag, sinks beneath the copious amount of clutter, and dies a slow, painful death.

People talk about Divine Order. The people who are really pumped up about Divine Order are the people who have had a sweet Divine Order in their lives. I know that my life is what I have made it. But my mom? Divine Order is the concept that every single thing in your day and your life is exactly how it is supposed to be. Divine Order for some people is, “Went to college, got married, had three children who are now senators and oncologists, had seven grandchildren, then I died peacefully sitting on a blanket in the middle of my flower garden.” That is a really nice Divine Order. Then there are people with a different Divine Order. “Went to college, married an alcoholic, had six kids, twenty-four grandchildren, lived in my car, and died choking on a pretzel in the parking lot of a dollar store.” The Divine Order people are the same as the “money doesn’t matter” people. The people who say “money doesn’t matter” are the people with shitloads of money. If you ask an old lady who lives in the middle of a drug-infested, violent, poor community that she can’t leave because she can’t even afford bread, she might say that money matters. She might say that she had five children, but two of them were killed on the streets, and if she had money, she could have relocated herself and her children when they were small and maybe her life would look different today. So does money matter? Yes. It matters a lot.

I grabbed my favorite exfoliating facial scrub, the same one I’d used all the way through college. Not quite as abrasive as drugstore-brand apricot scrubs, but grainy enough to get serious and do the trick. It had to be the magic bullet. It had to work. I started by washing my unfortunate face with a mild cleanser, then I squirted a small amount of the scrub on my fingers…and began facilitating the peeling process. I held my breath. It hurt. My face was in a world of pain. I scrubbed and scrubbed, wondering why facials even existed in the first place if they involved such torture. I’m a nice person, I thought. I go to church. Why is my skin staging a revolt? The week of a girl’s wedding was supposed to be a happy time. I should have been leaping gleefully around my parents’ house, using a glitter-infused feather duster to sparkle up my wedding gifts, which adorned every flat surface in the house. I should have been eating melon balls and laughing in the kitchen with my mom and sister about how it’s almost here! Don’t you love this Waterford vase? Oooh, the cake is going to be soooooo pretty. Instead, I was in my bathroom holding my face at gunpoint, forcing it to exfoliate on command. I rinsed my face and looked in the mirror. The results were encouraging. The pruniness appeared to have subsided; my skin was a little rosy from the robust scrubbing, but at least flakes of dead epidermis weren’t falling from my face like tragic confetti. To ward off any drying, I slathered my face with moisturizing cream. It stung--the effect of the isopropyl alcohol in the cream--but after the agony of the day before, I could take it. When it came to my facial nerve endings, I’d been toughened to a whole new level of pain.

The banishing of a leper seems harsh, unnecessary. The Ancient East hasn’t been the only culture to isolate their wounded, however. We may not build colonies or cover our mouths in their presence, but we certainly build walls and duck our eyes. And a person needn’t have leprosy to feel quarantined. One of my sadder memories involves my fourth-grade friend Jerry.1He and a half-dozen of us were an ever-present, inseparable fixture on the playground. One day I called his house to see if we could play. The phone was answered by a cursing, drunken voice telling me Jerry could not come over that day or any day. I told my friends what had happened. One of them explained that Jerry’s father was an alcoholic. I don’t know if I knew what the word meant, but I learned quickly. Jerry, the second baseman; Jerry, the kid with the red bike; Jerry, my friend on the corner was now “Jerry, the son of a drunk.” Kids can be hard, and for some reason we were hard on Jerry. He was infected. Like the leper, he suffered from a condition he didn’t create. Like the leper, he was put outside the village. The divorced know this feeling. So do the handicapped. The unemployed have felt it, as have the less educated. Some shun unmarried moms. We keep our distance from the depressed and avoid the terminally ill. We have neighborhoods for immigrants, convalescent homes for the elderly, schools for the simple, centers for the addicted, and prisons for the criminals. The rest simply try to get away from it all. Only God knows how many Jerrys are in voluntary exile—individuals living quiet, lonely lives infected by their fear of rejection and their memories of the last time they tried. They choose not to be touched at all rather than risk being hurt again.

Wouldn’t hurt if you used your connections to grease the wheels.” “I can do that. But damn, Cole how hard is it to just ask?” “Hard,” Cole said, pushing his hand through his hair. “Especially when you’re afraid asking is going to blow up the family.” Cade nodded. “So we both know.” “Yeah.” “And Lark doesn’t.” “Nope.” “Keep it that way?” Cole tapped the side of his beer bottle. “I don’t know. I don’t like being a part of the deception.” “We didn’t lie, Cole; he did.” “But we know the truth. Do we keep covering for him?” “He never covered for us. He’d tell Mom on us, and then she’d whup our asses.” Cole laughed. Sometimes the memories were still good. They still seemed intact and not just like a facade that hadn’t meant a damn thing. “Yeah, he did. But he’s not alive to answer for it, or learn from it.” “How about we drink alcohol and make no decisions?” “I’m cool with that.” Cade took the bottle opener off the fridge and popped the top off his beer, taking a long drink

Researchers began finding that habit replacement worked pretty well for many people until the stresses of life—such as finding out your mom has cancer, or your marriage is coming apart—got too high, at which point alcoholics often fell off the wagon. Academics asked why, if habit replacement is so effective, it seemed to fail at such critical moments. And as they dug into alcoholics’ stories to answer that question, they learned that replacement habits only become durable new behaviors when they are accompanied by something else. One group of researchers at the Alcohol Research Group in California, for instance, noticed a pattern in interviews. Over and over again, alcoholics said the same thing: Identifying cues and choosing new routines is important, but without another ingredient, the new habits never fully took hold. The secret, the alcoholics said, was God.

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — The harrowing drama “I Smile Back,” making its debut on Sunday at the Sundance Film Festival, opens with a drawn-out shot of a naked, forlorn woman. She is an alcoholic suburban mom having a cocaine-fueled affair and wrestling with mental illness. At one point she gets beaten bloody in an alley.

I was hungry and you gave me food….” —Matthew 25:35 (RSV) I sat through lunch at the usual eatery, hoping the woman would be gone when I walked back to the office. The sight of her was just too upsetting: a disheveled-looking mom at the top of the subway steps, begging with her two young children in tow. “If she’s gone when I go back, I won’t have to do anything,” I told myself. I’d be off the hook. But just the image of her had kept me on the hook. Why weren’t her children in school? Where did they live? “I shouldn’t give her anything because she’s probably an addict,” I rationalized. People who know more about these things than I do tell me beggars will take whatever money you give them and use it for drugs or alcohol. But what about her kids? They weren’t addicts. They were wearing clean T-shirts, jeans, their hair braided with beads. “I’ll pray for them,” I told myself. But to leave it at that seemed like a cop-out. Maybe they’re there because God wants you do something, Rick. Not just for them but also for you. The poor and hungry should not just be ignored. I swallowed the rest of my sandwich and went to the counter to buy some more food. Not for myself this time. I carried my bag and rounded the corner. She was still there. “What’s your name?” I asked the woman. “Dolores,” she said. “Dolores, this is for you.” I gave her the food and promised to pray for her. Back at the office I put her name on a note with the names of the other people I pray for. I’ve never been good about praying for big concepts like hunger or the poor, but now I had these three faces and one name. Harden not my heart, Lord, from the pain in the world. Let me know how I can relieve it. —Rick Hamlin Digging Deeper: Mt 25:31–46; 2 Cor 1:3–4

Another reason Intervention makes me think about my mother is that she was an alcoholic. It’s a hard word to use for someone you love, and so my family avoided it. Rather, we’d whisper, among ourselves, that mom “had a problem,” that she “could stand to cut back.

With my wonder child as a guide, I can now see that my whole life is perfect. My dysfunctional family, my alcoholic dad and co-dependent mom, my poverty—all were perfect. They were exactly what I needed to experience in order to do the work I am now doing. Without my childhood I would never have done a TV series on dysfunctional families or written books on shame and shame-based families. And certainly I wouldn’t be writing this book on homecoming, which calls you and me to reclaim and champion our wounded inner kids.

I've been working with alcoholics since I was 10 minutes old. Nurse says Here's your Mom, kid. Good luck.

I didn’t understand about alcoholism yet, how booze and drugs fed the wounded animal in Walter, I just thought that’s how life was. Unpredictable and insane. I’d show up to school the day after one of his episodes feeling shell-shocked and spaced out. I don’t know how I manifested this stuff outwardly, but I never talked to anyone about it. I just wandered around in a daze, stuck in a severe hangover. I had no idea how to deal with it. I was very conscious of the things I loved about my family—the freedom of all of us walking around the house naked, Walter being a musician, the amazing jazz I heard, the well-stocked book and record shelves, the bohemian aspects of our life. But I’d lie in bed at night and wish that I had a boring, normal, dumb family. One with no creativity. I wished my dad worked in a factory, and my mom was a conservative housewife who wore ugly pantsuits. I wished they’d have petty arguments and watch TV; the way Archie Bunker and Edith behaved on the TV show All in the Family, or like the Battaglias back in Larchmont. I equated creativity with insanity.

In landmark experiments that began in the late 1980s, Michael Meaney, a neuroscientist at McGill University, in Montreal, studied how the interactions between rat moms and pups played out in the lives of the pups. His research team took genetically identical rat mothers and videotaped and analyzed their behaviors while the pups were infants. Then they let the pups grow up, and checked how the pups of nurturing rat moms fared compared with the offspring of stressed-out moms. The pampered pups grew into adults that were more laid-back, less reactive to stress, and less prone to addictive behaviors, such as overdoing it when given a free supply of alcohol or cocaine. They were also more social with other rats, more daring, and more willing to explore new places. Pups of stressed, negligent moms grew into loners prone to the rat equivalents of anxiety, depression, and addictive behaviors. Studies of monkey moms and their infants turned up similar results. Stressed macaque infants whose moms are inconsistent, erratic, and sometimes dismissive grow up timid, submissive, fearful, less gregarious, and more prone to depression than their better-nurtured peers. These early findings were the beginning of a paradigm shift in our understanding of how experiences in childhood can affect our health and the dialogue between the gut and the brain.

All of us experienced similar difficult moments when we were young. So what is different now? It is the absence of parents, who have nothing left to give. Some of us as kids came home to intact and caring families that were able to “talk us down” from the precipice, to assure us of their love, and to help put things in perspective. Someone was there who clearly cared and who told us that the harsh judgment of our peers was not the end of the world. In the absence of that kind of wise counsel in times of crisis, such as my dad provided for me when I came home battered from school, today’s kids have nowhere to go with their rage. Some resort to drugs or alcohol, some withdraw into isolation, and some, sadly, vent their anger in murderous assault. If only Mom and Dad had been there when the passions peaked. So many of the difficulties that confront our kids come down to that single characteristic of today’s families: There is nobody home.

Eyes shrivelled by cigarettes and alcohol. Potbellies full to bursting with roundworms, amoebas, earthworms, and assorted mollusks. Heads shaved with knives. Arms and legs stiff with digging graves from morning till morning. They were close to ten, maybe twelve years old. They toted the same justifications: “We’re doing this to pay for our studies. Dad’s already gone with the locomotives. He doesn’t write no more. Mom’s sick. The uncles and aunts and grandmothers say we’re sorcerers and it’s because of that dad got married a third time and that our sorcery comes from our mom and that we should go to see the preachers who will cut the ,inks by getting us to swallow palm oil to make us vomit up our sorcery and prevent us flying round at night.” They lived off a multitude of rackets, like all the kids in town. They worked as porters at the Northern Station, and on the Congo River and at the Central Market, as slim-jims in the mines, errand boys at Tram 83, undertakers, and gravediggers. The more sensitive ones stood guard at the greasy spoons abutting the station, whose metal structure recalled the 1885s, in exchange for a bowl of badly boiled beans.

Well, you were a difficult child - that’s all there is to it,” Mom said. I remembered all the times my mother ignored me when I needed to talk. “And you were a difficult mother.” With that, I hung up the phone. Again, it was weeks before we spoke.

Following dinner, we tidied up and Mom and Dad went straight to bed at about eight o’clock. The house was dark and spooky on Sunday nights. Dad said he had to go to bed early on Sundays because he had “the yips.” Eventually I took that to mean he was hungover and had to get his sleep to be ready for another week of work.

Once you uncover your storyline, I encourage you to take these two steps: First, walk through the original drama, but give it a new ending. Change the story, and you change your energetic system—and your neurology. Second, rewrite the characters. In your life play, replace the needy mom with a giving, kind one. Instead of an alcoholic, absent dad, give yourself a super-supportive one. Your workplace dramas will shift as your internal script does. Having rewritten your story, you can formulate an intention for attracting and maintaining supportive work relationships. After all, success really does depend on being open to serving others and receiving help in return. Design an intention with your long-term heart’s desires, not just the next step, in mind.

Priscilla has made it a mission to disabuse the students who still come to L’Abri of the Schaeffer mythology. She makes no secret of her nervous breakdowns, her dependence on Prozac, her depression and anxiety attacks, her alcohol-related struggles. She will tell anyone who asks that being a Schaeffer child—and the pressure from Mom to be part of the ministry and, above all, from strangers to live up to their “Schaeffer expectations”—didn’t help. When I called her to ask if she would allow me to write about her problems, and she gave me the okay, she also said “Mom drove me crazy, but in fairness I would have suffered from stress and depression anywhere. I would push too hard in L’Abri, then crash. If I had been doing something else just as intense, it would have happened, too.” Susan

My parents weren’t given to calling their friends liars. So when our friends who were homosexual—Mom was always open, as was Dad, about which students were or weren’t gay—told my parents that they had been born that way, not only did they believe them, but Dad defended them against people who would judge or exclude them. Dad thought it cruel and stupid to believe that a homosexual could change by “accepting Christ”—or, for that matter, that an alcoholic could be healed by the same magic. Dad often said “Salvation is not magic. We’re still in the fallen world.” Dad

My father was a nuclear physicist. My mother was a mom. Alcohol was what I was supposed to be.

Mom spoke so self-righteously about going to rehab and cleaning up her act when I was a toddler, and considered her struggle with alcoholism to be such ancient history that she would drink casually with Danko as if it wasn’t a big deal…

Still, in the many topics that suggest a realistic world, there are some that are winners and others that are losers. Among the good, the popular, and (for writers) the go-for-its: marriage, death, taxes (yes, really). Also technologies—preferably modern and vaguely threatening technologies—funerals, guns, doctors, work, schools, presidents, newspapers, kids, moms, and the media. By contrast, among the bad and unpopular, we already have sex, drugs, and rock and roll. To that add seduction, making love, the body described in any terms other than in pain or at a crime scene. (These latter two bodily experiences, readers seem to quite enjoy.) No also to cigarettes and alcohol, the gods, big emotions like passionate love and desperate grief, revolutions, wheeling and dealing, existential or philosophical sojourns, dinner parties, playing cards, very dressed up women, and dancing. (Sorry.)5 Firearms and the FBI beat fun and frivolity by a considerable percentage. The reading public prefers to see the stock market described more so than the human face. It likes a laboratory over a church, spirituality over religion, and college more than partying. And, when it comes to that one, big, perennially important question, the readers are clear in their preference for dogs and not cats.

. . . just as alcohol is not the cause of capitalism's problems, it is also not the cure. Wine does not alleviate wage inequality or the lack of affordable childcare. If people mocking wine moms on Instagram were truly concerned about their health and welfare, they might instead try working toward getting women the support they desperately need.

Some alcoholics refer to events like this as “reservations.” If my mom dies, then I’ll drink.

That year, my mom descended into an alcoholic stupor. My dad became a gaunt phantasm haunting the rooms of our dusty house.

Don't get rekt, don't trade, call your mom, work out, eat healthy, don't drink alcohol, don't gamble, don't play grinding video games.

With all that taken care of, she was officially off duty for the day. And out of excuses to not call her mother back. Was she being a healthy adult by avoiding unnecessary stress? Or was this an immature defense mechanism left over from a tumultuous childhood? She picked up the phone and scrolled to her mother’s contact. Andrea. Not Mom. Andrea hadn’t earned the title. “Mackenzie!” her mother trilled when she answered, and Mack automatically shifted into carefully listening mode for any signs of alcohol, her mother’s favorite hobby. “Hi, Mom.

remember developing a fear of neighbors because I heard the term in school, and since we didn’t have any neighbors I didn’t realize what they were. In fact neighbors sounded quite terrifying, and I went home and asked my mom, “Do neighbors bite?

These were the days of the big smokey rooms overflowing with recovering drunks of every race, creed, and color. I relished the opportunity to accompany Mom to her meetings. You could sit in the back of those rooms and hear the sort of Frankenstein tales even Mary Shelley couldn’t have written.

...the fight or flight response is a destructive constant companion. As Dr. Nadine Burke Harris put it, the response is great "If you're in a forest and there is a bear... When that happens, the Harvard researchers found, the sector of the brain that deals with highly stressful situations takes over. "Significant stress in early childhood, ' they write, "... result[s] in a hyperresponsive or chronically activated physiological stress response, along with increased potential for fear and anxiety" For kids like me, the part of the brain that deals with stress and conflict always activted- the switch flipped indefinitely. We are constantly ready to fight or flee, because there is constant exposure to the bear, whether that bear is an alcoholic dad or an unhinged mom. We become hard-wired for conflict. And that wiring remains, even when there's no more conflict to be had.

See if you can recognize any of these patterns from your own life or from the lives of your friends and family members: Only being able to earn a certain amount of money each month, no matter how hard or how much you work Only being attracted to partners who turn out to bear an uncanny resemblance to your asshole dad (or to your asshole mom, or to the first person who broke your heart, or whatever) Hearing the mean voice of your third-grade teacher in your head whenever you sit down to create, so you avoid creating Overeating (or overindulging in drugs, alcohol, etc.) to cover up feelings of guilt, shame, loneliness, frustration that seem endless Disliking yourself/your body no matter what your shape Perpetually feeling victimized and like your life would be good if only rude other people (your family, your boss, your spouse, your employees, the government, the blacks, the gays, the straights, the whites, the Jews, the Christians, the capitalists, the hippies, etc., etc.) would stop messing with you

I don't believe in urban legends. I've been an adult since I was a child. My parents are interesting in the sense they never truly grew up. I was managing Dad's alcohol addiction and Mom's cryptic affairs with her personal trainer before I could multiply.

VR addictions take it to a new level. People are found dead everyday in their beds or couches, with their VR helmets still on, their games still running. They die of starvation, thirst, heart attacks. It's a big problem, and zombies—people with severe addictions—are as common as alcoholics or drug addicts these days. Many of them can't function in the real world anymore. They don't go to school or work or go outside. They couldn't even if they wanted to. The way Hakeem's mom explained it to us—in an effort to scare us from ever letting ourselves go that route, I guess—people with severe VR addictions have flipped the real and virtual worlds in their minds. To them, reality is the simulation, and VR is reality.

Once in a while I hear a POP in my head. Possibly from the Disulfiram that Mom puts in my food... without telling me. My heart beats real fast and I cannot consume all of the booze that I intend to for a couple of days. If I die from an Aneurysm or something... This is probably why. It's not the alcohol. Tell the truth, for fuck's sake. Don't fuck with my booze, Please.

The Bible takes a stand on every major issue we deal with today from abortion, gay marriage, self-defense, alcohol, sex, private property to pretty much any other concern of our time. When talking with my mom the other day, our conversation veered into how wicked the world has become since the time she was young. I told her that we can basically look at any position the Bible takes on a particular topic, and the world will say that the opposite position is okay. It really got her thinking. That is the culture we live in today. But it implores us to know our Bibles so that we can stand against the untruths found in media, classrooms, politics, and false religions, which cause people to stumble and trip today. The ways of the world or the ways of the King—which one will you choose? “It is impossible to mentally or socially enslave a Bible-reading people.” —Horace Greeley23 “I have known 95 of the world’s great men in my time, and of these, 87 were followers of the Bible.” —William Gladstone24 “The Bible is the rock on which our republic rests.” —Andrew Jackson25

I could always tell when my mom drank because the corners of her mouth fell down. Alcohol took her smile. Strange, because I never drank, but it took mine too.

Alcoholics are the worst of the weak. They hang on like leeches, all suction, no spine.

I could feel him looking at me, wanting me to turn toward him and say something, anything. He needed me to constantly assuage his guilt, every moment of every day. Sometimes I could do it; other times it made me resent him almost as much as Mom did. Because he gets to have his basement purgatory where he can be both victim and villain, and get away with feeling shitty all the time. And Mom gets her women’s group and her alcohol and self-righteous indignation, and she’s also allowed to feel shitty all the time. Me, I get to supervise them both, sitting here in the kitchen so they can talk to me and not each other, so their cold war can continue into eternity. Didn’t they think I’d like to have permission to feel shitty all the time too? Couldn’t they give me a day where I could sulk around and behave like a child and let go in front of them, and they would both be stuck mediating my mess? (Something Like Gravity, 75)

I'm not even drinking Duat wine.” I lifted my glass. “Rum isn't going to do anything to me. I've become such a mom.” “What's wrong with being a mom?” Trevor asked. “Moms kick ass and they can hang harder than people who have never pushed babies out of their bodies. Mothers are survivors.” I chuckled and sat up. “Yeah, you're right.” I lifted my drink and looked at it. “And if I want to drink with more juice than alcohol in it, I will!” “There's my wife.” Trevor kissed my cheek.

Even though my mom and dad didn’t go to college—didn’t finish high school—Dianne had driven it into us that We. Were. Going. To. College. She instilled in us that if we did not have a college degree, if we did not find something to do, if we did not focus, if we did not have drive, we were going to be like our parents. I felt if I did not go to college, if I did not get a degree, if I was not excellent, then my parents’ reality would become my own. There was no gray area. Either you achieved or you failed. I love them dearly, but I didn’t want to live a life of poverty, alcoholism, and abuse. I thought I had only two choices: either succeed or absolutely sink. No in-between. I had no understanding that I possessed the tools to dig my way out if I somehow made a mistake. I had no understanding that there would be hard times and then joy would come, or sometimes the shoe would fall, but failing wasn’t permanent.

The findings demonstrate that teens who drink in high school have a significantly higher risk of binging in college. The study also confirms how much influence parental behavior has on teenagers and children. And it’s not just boys modeling their dads or girls modeling their moms. If either parent drinks at home,