Your post touched me as I've been thinking alot about my mom who passed 3 years ago.
I remember being a child (6-8 years old). My mother was divorced from my biological father (he was not an alcoholic) and there were 5 of us kids.
She never drank and really struggled to raise us on her own; I remember having tomato soup and crackers for dinner almost every night of the week; she never ate with us claiming she 'had eaten ealier' - I realized later that she went without because there wasn't enough food.
Anyway, fast forward...she re-married when I was 10. This man was a full-blown alcoholic. A couple of years passed and she began drinking with him. Very uncharateristic for her. She claims to have 'joined him' to 'tolerate him.'
She was a slight woman so a couple of drinks would knock her on her butt easily, and she was a fiesty drunk too.
My point is, is that no matter how much I disliked her drinking, that's not what I remember and cherish about her.
Even though I turned out to be an alcoholic myself (another topic I suppose - genetic vs. learned behavior), I have far many more good memories of her as a mother who would put her life on the line for her children and a wise woman beyond her years.
I choose to hold onto the good lessons my mother taught me and the strong characteristics that she had as a woman.
I can only speak for myself. I know there are other people who had real trauma in their childhood. I did not.
I choose to not identify her as an alcoholic only since that's not how I choose to only define myself.
Thanks for your thought-provoking post. It's brought back some really good memories that I needed this morning.