addictionwife

Hi everyone, I'm pretty new here, and started for a different matter. Just sort of thinking about my Mom today because I'm really proud of her and it occurred to me that I should share her story (our family's story more like). My Mom was never a big drinker when I was growing up. In fact, I can't ever remember seeing her drink anything but Lipton Ice tea or coffee, lol. Then after 22 years of marriage, my Dad made an announcement that rocked us to the core. He is gay. I know now, after years of growing and gaining the ability to look at it from a different perspective that she always knew, but him admitting it was something entirely different for her. They divorced about a year later, when I was 19. This I suppose is the start of when I noticed her drinking more and more. Then she found out she had breast cancer. She came through it like a champ health wise, but it ruined her financially. Over 300k in medical bills, and it took every penny she had. So now she was broke, and her job fired her about 6 months after she came back from medical leave. She was forced to rent out her house and move in with her boyfriend since she couldn't pay her bills. Her lifestyle continued with the drinking for several years, only now we were starting to notice and become alarmed. It seemed like her life revolved around it. After living with her boyfriend for about 7 years or so, he started to get on her big time. She smoked and drank too much and he didn't like that she didn't have a job. She had managed to get a few jobs over the years but nothing ever lasted long. To complete her unhappiness with her life she was forced to move in with my Dad, her ex husband. No one else could take on the financial responsibility. He bought her house from her and let her continue to collect the rent money so she would have something, but basically she depended on him. At this point in time all she did was sit around the house in her bathrobe and smoke and drink all day. I was pregnant with my first child and newly married when she had her first heart attack. We begged her to go to rehab, to quit drinking. I said she could come live with me and my husband, that we would help her in any way we could regardless of the financial strain. She wouldn't come live with me. She continued to smoke and drink. My sisters and I got to the point where we couldn't let her see our kids. She was drunk by noon every day and the last straw was when she dropped my 5 week old niece, who was a preemie and had breathing problems. We begged and threatened and nothing worked. We begged my Dad to stop buying her booze. He couldn't do it. He didn't have the strength to put up with how she behaved when he tried, so he always caved. She had her second heart attack almost 2 years to the day of her first, only this time she was brought in by ambulance and the er surgeon told us that her blood alcohol level was so high that he was surprised she wasn't dead. She had to have a quadruple bypass. She came home and did quit smoking but continued to drink. At first she would hide it. Eventually she didn't bother to even hide it anymore. The last week of April of this year, she went back into the hospital. My Dad had to call 911 because she passed out in the bathroom. He almost didn't call because we were so used to this sort of thing by now, but he did. I couldn't even begin to list all the things that were wrong with her this time. Pretty much it was the result of being drunk 24 hours a day, not eating or even moving. She was in the hospital for 2 weeks. The first week was a nightmare. She didn't know who she was, or who we were. She told the nurses that Bush was the president and called her nasty names when she was corrected. She was abusive and mean and exhausting. The second week there she sobered up. They kept her on morphine to help her cope with the withdrawls but she was still in pretty bad shape. But she was more herself. The self I hadn't seen in about 12 years. She came home the 2nd week of November. She hasn't drank anything since then. She's different than she was before, there is no denying that. She's very bitter about the path her life has taken, and sometimes that comes out in pretty mean ways, but she's not drinking. She loves her grandkids and is involved with them for the first time in their lives, and involved in Mine and my sister's lives again. I'm very proud of her. I know she suffered and that her life has been harder than anyone deserves. I'm sorry for the long dramatic story, it was therapeutic for me to get it out though so thank you to those who took the time to read it.