[ceramichornets]

Sorry I haven't been on in a while. Things have been pretty crazy.

So my parents have had a drinking problem for at least as long as I've been alive (I'm 21). They drink multiple types of alcoholic beverages every day, starting from the moment they wake up until they fall asleep. My mom is more of a functioning alcoholic. She still has a job and friends. My dad is mildly functioning, he is disabled and spends most of his time either at his computer or in his chair watching TV. Sometimes he plays golf.

They've had this obsession with wine for a long time, and I realize now that it's truly an obsession. A good portion of my childhood memories take place in wineries. A lot of our decorations, our plates, our cups, have something to do with wine. They drink up to an entire bottle each per day. People might suspect they have a drinking problem if they see them out at bars because my mom acts very strange when she's drunk, but it's when people come over that they see how bad it is.

Yesterday was my mom's day off, so she and my dad did what they usually do; they went to the casino around 10 or 11 AM, drank and spent about 3 hours there, then went bar hopping to their favorite places and saw their friends. They didn't come home until about 7:30 PM, which is when the trouble started.

My dad has been falling a lot lately. It usually happens when he sleeps in his chair in the living room, which is his preferred spot because he feels he sleeps better there. However, he is much more likely to get up, and when he does he's usually under the influence of pain meds, sleeping pills, and heavy drinking. Combined, these drugs make his legs go weak. One particular fall caused him to tear his rotator cuff in his shoulder and he had surgery for it about two weeks ago.

When he got home yesterday he physically could not get out of the passenger seat (my mom had been driving and was too intoxicated to help him). His left arm is in a sling and his right arm is very weak, so he had to rely on his legs, which could not move. It took my boyfriend and I about half an hour to drag him across the garage floor and into the entrance of the house. From there, we had about 16 stairs to cover and then 50 or so feet to get him to bed, but he's 160 pounds and we simply couldn't lift him anymore. He was going to crawl his way up the stairs but he couldn't do it, and was resigned to sleeping on the floor of the entryway. I tried to get my mom to help, but she was incomprehensible and fell down the stairs a few times. That's when I dialed 911.

They took my dad to the emergency room, ran the usual tests, took blood, x-rayed his arm, etc. They said his blood alcohol level was 253 (they didn't specify where the decimal was but implied that it was a lot). I was able to take him home at midnight, and I got him and my mom together and told them that I'm not going to watch them circle the drain like this. I removed the easily accessible alcohol last night and everything else today. Left enough behind that if they drink in moderation, they might be able to wean themselves off of it and avoid withdrawal.

My question is: Is there anything else I can do? I informed my older brother that lives a few states away. He had no idea it was this bad and is going to try to do something about it. I've got their main source of alcohol (30ish bottles?) tucked away in the only place I could hide it, but I can't stop them from going out and drinking all day. I need some way to get through to them. Any and all advice is welcome.

Thank you for listening, I just needed to vent.

[r010159]

Answer = tough love.

Please do not takes responsibility for their problems.

[Skitz13]

It's going to be very hard for you to do anything if your Dad wont admit he has a problem and yes I agree tough love. Don't enable them which is so easy to get wrapped up in.

[Curiosity77]

Can you move out? It sounds like living there is not good for you. You can't fix them. Maybe consider trying an alanob meeting. The people there have been through the kind of thing you are going through, so might be able to give you better feed back and support. Sorry to hear you are going through this.

[~Christina]

You wont be able to help them to be honest. Are you able to move out ? You could call the police when you know they are out drinking while driving ? Maybe that would be a wake up call for them .. Its extreme of course but they could easily cause an accident and hurt people or worse ..

Im sorry you have to deal with this mess .. Some hoe remove yourself from this situation .

[ceramichornets]

Thanks, guys. I've been working very hard not to enable them but sometimes it's so hard because after all the **** you have to go through on a daily basis you just want to please your family. And they've already been pestering me about where I hid their "souvenir" wines and keep promising me that they won't drink them (I don't believe it for a second because I've been on the very dark path of addiction before and know how desperate a person can get).

Unfortunately, I can't move out. I simply don't have the means to. It's unfortunate for my parents, too, because they've tried to disown me since I was thirteen or fourteen (sometime after my first F in school) and have been trying to kick me out ever since. I've been bordering on homelessness for about six years now.

My friends and I are gearing up for this apartment we found which should be ready around December, so hopefully that will give me the courage to move past my depression and work harder to get a job. I applied for a bunch of places again! It took a lot of effort but I did it. We'll see what happens now.

Edited to add that my parents have already received DUI's, which have traumatized them and only furthered their drinking habits. Nearly everyone in my family is like this so they think it's normal to be this way. I would love to join an alanob group, but the only one in my area is for those 18 and under.

[BipolaRNurse]

As the saying goes, the first thing to do when you're in a hole is stop digging.

Is there really no other place you can stay? A friend's house, another relative maybe? I have the feeling that your moving out may very well be the only way to wake your parents up, even though you say they've been trying to get rid of you for awhile now. When conditions have gotten so bad that even their enabler (you) can't stand to be around them anymore, it might send a message.

Or, it might not, but in the meantime you're not there to clean up after them. You CAN. NOT. SAVE. THEM. It's not your job to be their keeper. You need to get out and live your own life. No amount of caring and love that you give them will make them change. Maybe nothing will. That's not your call. Your choices are limited to these: either get out of their house and let them drink themselves to death, or stay and watch them drink themselves to death.

I know. My parents were a little more classy (or so they believed), but they drank like fish themselves and were more or less pleasantly stewed all of the time. They drove drunk, they got into loud arguments, they could be mean and nasty. Yet they judged me because I was your basic falling-down drunk, not an upper-middle-class lush like them. I went to the local town watering hole to do my drinking, while they went to the city to do theirs "so no one would know". Ha. The whole town knew, and the one they felt sorry for was me.

Fast-forward to now: I am 22 years sober and 10 months abstinent (I had a 'slip' last fall, but instead of drinking I used pills). My parents are long dead; although alcoholism wasn't on the death certificates, it should have been. One of the main reasons I think I've been able to stay sober all these years is because I got away from the original problem drinkers in my life. Only then was I able to shake their twisted ways of thinking and figure out how to live without booze.

So please, do whatever it takes to get out of your environment and stop trying to save your parents. You cannot do it. I wish you the very best.....you are going to need it. Be strong. Be well.