How to help my daughter
Hello, My name is Mary and I am a mother of three beautiful girls. They are 17, 14, and 12. I believe my oldest daughter is an alcoholic and my family is searching for ways to help her.
The first time we caught our oldest drinking was a year and a half ago. We went out of town for a basketball tournament our two younger daughters were playing in and let her have the house to herself. We came home at noon on the Sunday that ended the weekend to find her friends passed out around our house, Empty alcohol containers everywhere, and our daughter sleeping in the bathtub covered in vomit. We grounded her and thought it was a one time event. She was severely punished and we believed it was an isolated. She broke our trust and had to come with us on the out of towns after that. But she was just a kid who messed up.
However lately things had been weird. She would stay the night the night at friends houses more often and come home not feeling well. We had our suspicions but we were not going to jump to conclusions.
But then for about the last two months multiple nights a week, after dinner our oldest would go to her room for the night and not be seen again after dinner. Sometimes even after school. That's not uncommon for a teenage girl but her whole general demeanor changed when she left her room. She was irritable all the time or just plain out of it. If we went out to eat as a family she would refuse to leave the house. We didn't get it.
Tonight I got it, earlier this evening our 14 year came to us in the living room crying. She said our oldest yelled at her screamed at her and knocked her over and was acting really weird. So we went upstairs to talk to her about what happened. First, she refused to let us. But doing what parents do we got in. She was drinking from a Mountain Dew bottle but it had a blue tint and she had a bottle of UV blue out on her desk. Half drank.
We asked her if she was drunk and she didn't say anything. We told her to come over and talk to us and she fell down getting out of bed and then starting screaming at us. After she quit screaming she started crying and we took her downstairs to sleep on the couch with a glass of water. I told her we would have a conversation in the morning. We went through her stuff to find 9 large empty bottles of UV, some other vodkas, as well as an opened pack of Mike's Hard Lemonade. She had obviously been drinking quite a bit when she locked herself in her room and now her strange behavior seems more obvious if she was drunk.
We went through her phone also to find pictures of her at parties drinking with her friends. Some pictures obviously more drunk than others. I saw my daughter that way once, and twice tonight and I never wanted to again but it was all right there in front of me. She also pictures of herself in her room drinking. Her doing not so flatter things after drinking too much. She had also been texting a boy a lot, we didn't recognize his name but he had been buying drinks and they'd obviously started some kind of relationship over drinking. She had some pictures with him too.
Tomorrow our daughter isn't going to go to school. She has obviously done it hungover before but tomorrow will not be one of those days. She is going to have a talk with us, but honestly I don't know what to say. I will probably stay up all night thinking about. Our little girl was drinking under our roof, with out us knowing. I just don't know what to say or how to help or what to tell my other two daughters. Please, I just need help thinking of the words.