New member seeking advice.
Hello, all.
I have no idea if this is a place for questions like this, and if not, I apologize.
As a brief introduction, I am 24 years old, I live in Indiana. I am engaged to my best friend, getting married in less than three months. I love photography, I love our three dogs. I love to read. I love country music. I love family. I come from a family of alcoholics.
I don't know if there are degrees of alcoholism, I guess there must be. Some people drink away everything they own, other people pass in society without it being obvious. The problem that I am dealing with seems so huge and destructive and devastating to me, but doing a brief scan here, it seems trivial compared to some who have lost more, suffered more, dealt with more. But today something in me kind of snapped and needed input from someone wiser. I don't know what, if anything, to do.
My grandmother is an alcoholic. We have plenty of other family, but she is the relative that I am the closest to, and vice versa.
When she is sober, she is someone that anyone would want to know. She's intelligent and witty and sarcastic and loving and wise. I always feel a need to explain to anyone who hasn't met her sober that she is so, so, so different, a completely and utterly different person. About 15 years ago she started drinking in the evenings, but secretly. It was never a "couple glasses of wine too many with dinner" kind of situation. My mother and I actually took several years to even figure out what in the world was going on, as ridiculous as that seems in retrospect. She started acting extremely strangely in the evenings, and gradually we put it together: the alcohol smell on her breath, the fact that she would go into her bedroom at unusual times during the evening and come out even more off than before, the fact that if she was out somewhere away from access to her bedroom, she was extremely irritable, but lucid. She lived in Michigan during my whole childhood, but we lived with her there for a few months and that was when we figured it out, and found a regularly replaced bottle of Jack Daniels buried in her bedroom hamper.
It got worse and worse over the next few years, but for some reason it was never spoken of or acknowledged. Out of the blue, she said that she was going to AA meetings around 2000 - the first and only willing admission that any drinking at all goes on - and mentioned them for a few months, then stopped mentioning them and started drinking again. I probably should have encouraged more accountability back then, I think now, but I was 12.
Two years ago she moved to Indiana, next door to my mother. The problems are hard to ignore. I assume that she is driving like this. She must be, sometimes. When she's drunk, she's very strange. she repeats sentence fragments over and over again and makes sounds. When my fiance's mother met her for the first time, she was drunk, and my almost-MIL assumed that she had Tourettes. I was too ashamed to tell her otherwise for a long time. She can't have a coherant conversation when she's drunk, and it's most evenings. She shows up at my mom's house, drunk, just making no sense. Any given family dinner or gathering, she may be drunk. She may not. She hides it in the bathroom linen closet now. If she goes to the bathroom sober, we wait and hang on every word she says when she comes out to figure out if she drank. This is killing me. And still, with all of this - she does not acknowledge a thing. I have a wonderful, supportive, intelligent fiance whose grandfather is an alcholic, and still, I'm too ashamed to talk to him about it very much. My own grandfather quite literally drank himself to death two years and a month ago. This is ripping me apart.
A year or so ago, I approached her about it. Lovingly and as openly as I could stand to. I acknowledged that I do know that she drinks sometimes, and that it hurts me when she does. I told her that I would rather not be around her when she's drinking. She really didn't even directly acknowledge it then at all, but for a while, she was sober around me. She's not anymore, and really, "sober around me" doesn't mean anything. It's not going to protect innocent people who get hurt if she drives drunk. It doesn't help her, or her husband, or my mom.
I'm hoping to start a family soon, and I don't want my children to go through this with her. I feel like I need to "do something," but what? I know that I can't force change on another person, but I don't know what measures should be taken to enforce boundaries, and I feel like the unspoken agreement among us all to never speak of what's going on is enabling her drinking. I do not know what to do. What can I do? Any words of wisdom, or support, or advice, anything, would be so helpful. The general opinion seems to be "can't change her if she doesn't want to be changed," but it is hurting me beyond belief to be around her when she drinks, and I don't want to do this to my children, and I don't want to do the wrong thing because I don't know what to do. I apologize for the long post, and thank you in advance for your input.