By Anne M.

Not long ago I was reading a book for work called The Essential Drucker. Written by a famous management guru, Peter Drucker, it contained his collective wisdom gathered over many decades and even reflected some of what I frequently heard in A.A. meetings.

One night, around nine-thirty, my middle son came in my room to kiss me good night. Having recently graduated from his fifth grade DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program, he became distraught when he saw what I was reading. “Why are you reading a book about being a drunkard?” he exclaimed, visibly shaken. While the episode was humorous, the irony couldn’t be ignored. The truth is that for several years I was essentially just a drunkard. Fortunately he was just too young to remember it.

My children were 1, 3, and 6 years old when I came into AA. Over the years I had often pondered when the “appropriate” time would be to tell them my terrible secret of being an alcoholic.  My husband, a “normie,” wasn’t much help. Various sponsors had had various ideas about the timing, and some friends in the program wondered why I hadn’t told them already.

Finally, in all of my wisdom, I decided 16 was the right age for them to be when I revealed my truth. For one thing, it was sufficiently distant in the future that I could forget all about it, a not inconsequential consideration.

Choppy family waters
The years passed, and our first-born, a daughter, turned 16. I knew she would be the toughest one to tell because she is most like me, displaying at an early age all of the “isms” I am so intimately familiar with. She already felt “different,” and claimed she must be adopted, since she felt no affinity with our family. I decided to wait to talk with her. Rocking the already tippy boat of our household, one that consistently seemed to be in moderately choppy waters already, felt unwise. Our late-in-life marriage, the quick addition of three children in five years, rampant ADHD with undertones of OCD in the father and children, and financial challenges galore were to be topped off by the revelation of my alcoholism? Maybe not just yet, I reasoned.

So it was that my daughter was 17 when my hand was forced. It happened because one evening two of her high school friends came to an A.A. Big Book meeting I was leading at the school she and they attended during the day. It was an awkward moment … no kidding. When the meeting ended I secured half an hour’s grace period from them so I could hurry over to where my daughter was swimming and tell her my deep dark secret. “I think it will really help her,” her friend said as I left the meeting.

So I told her. “Geez mom,” she said. “When you said you had to talk to me I thought someone had died!” Initial relief, however, turned into astonishment, or something close to it. For months afterward everything she said to my husband was divided into BMA (before mom’s announcement) and AMA (after mom’s announcement). Finally, eventually, the news was integrated into everything else she was learning about the world, and became a sort of non-issue.

The door is open
What is the upshot? I’m not so sure I know, and I doubt the effect has ended yet. Like a peb-ble thrown into water, I believe the information continues to move outward. Certainly my daughter now sees me for the fallible human being I am, and that is good. When, as happens too regularly in our town, another drunken teenager wraps a car around a tree and dies, we can discuss it openly. She knows I am coming from an authentic place and not one of judgment or piety that few 18-year-olds can relate to. We can talk openly about addiction, and I can worry about her to her face rather than behind her back.

I wouldn’t say we are out of the woods yet. No parent of teenagers is. But we do have a shot at keeping an open door on our communication, and for that I am very grateful. I believe knowing what she knows will help her. If knowledge is power, as it surely is, she has the right to know about our propensity toward addiction, and I pray each day it will empower her in her struggle against this disease, which I believe she will surely have to fight.

And then, of course, there are still the other two children I must tell. Fortunately they are only 15 and 12 … and that means I can put it off, for at least a little while.