Supernormal. Мэг Джей

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СКАЧАТЬ Problem drinkers are likely to suffer from an array of related health problems, to lose their jobs and their relationships, and even to die an early death. But make no mistake: Those hurt most by alcoholism are not the problem drinkers, they are the children of problem drinkers. While alcoholism can cut an adult’s life short, problem drinking in the home undermines child development from the start.

      Children of alcoholics lead different lives than their friends, and they are likely to face multiple adversities at once. Mothers or fathers, or both, can be alcoholics, but because men are twice as likely to be problem drinkers as women, the most typical stressor children live with is violence, particularly directed toward the mother. An estimated 60 percent of domestic violence cases occur when a parent has been drinking, and 30 percent of child abuse cases involve a parent who is under the influence of alcohol. Even children who are never struck by a parent are still likely to be “hurt on the inside” in myriad ways. Compared with their peers, children of alcoholics are doubly at risk for verbal abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect, mental illness in the home, parental separation or divorce, economic hardship, and having a family member in jail. Because mothers tend to be the primary caretakers of children in both intact and divorced families, some research suggests that life at home may be especially difficult if the mother is an alcoholic. When mothers drink, children are less likely to be fed and cared for in even the most basic ways. When fathers drink, some mothers attempt to buffer their children by protecting them from the consequences or simply by limiting their exposure.

      Ironically, one of the ways families try to limit their children’s exposure to alcoholism is by not talking about it. When life feels very scary, parents, like their children, often go silent, too. They try to keep on behaving as usual as they hide their problems from friends and relatives, and even from themselves. In his memoir, Not My Father’s Son, actor Alan Cumming writes about how his family responded to his alcoholic father: “We never actually addressed what was really going on: that we were living with a tyrant, someone who, I believe now, was mentally ill. As our silence grew, so did our denial.” This is not unusual. According to educational materials from the Hazelden Foundation written especially for children, having a parent who is an alcoholic can be like having “an elephant in the living room”: “People have to go through the living room many times a day and you watch as they walk through it very . . . carefully . . . around . . . the . . . ELEPHANT. No one ever says anything about the ELEPHANT. They avoid the swinging trunk and just walk around it. Since no one ever talks about the ELEPHANT, you know that you’re not supposed to talk about it either. And you don’t.”

      Lots of children, not just children of alcoholics, grow up with elephants in their lives: physical abuse, mental illness, neglect, poverty, sexual abuse, abandonment, divorce, domestic violence. Whatever it is, most children are too scared and too confused to talk about it—and besides, they notice that others would prefer they didn’t. Left alone with complicated grown-up problems, young minds draw their own conclusions about the world.

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      When the elephant came home from work in the evenings, he sat down in the living room and drank brown drink after brown drink. Emily liked to sit on the edges of the room, watching television from behind some drapes like a little mouse. The more Emily’s father drank, the more her brothers wrestled on the floor during commercials. “Pipe down!” yelled Emily’s father. “Go to bed!” he shouted when the family programming ended. “We’re hungry!” the twins demanded. “It’s not a school night! It’s summer!” they stalled. When the elephant got out of his chair and charged the boys, this was Emily’s cue to scurry off to bed.

      From her room, Emily heard four-way shouting as bedtime came and went. Her brothers hurled refusals and challenges. Her mother pleaded for her father to let her handle the boys, or maybe even for him to stop drinking and go to bed himself. Many times, this worked. Sometimes, it did not. On this particular night, Emily heard the noises of a fight turning physical. Grunts and slaps. Boys crying. Her mother shrieking. As annoyed as she was afraid, Emily got out of bed and walked toward the noise, ready to perform. Upon entering the living room, she saw one brother standing on a chair with her mother blocking the way to him, fending off her husband by sticking out both arms and a leg. Her father leaned in toward mother and son, leading with his elbow, the back of his hand ready to follow with a good smack. From her father’s other hand, the other twin was hanging heavy, dangling by his arm held hard and fast in his father’s too-tight grip. Emily could see red finger marks where the brother had twisted and struggled and gained an inch or two.

      When parents lose control, some children try to be heroes by taking charge themselves. Older children may try to reason with their parents, while the younger ones shift the focus to their own silly or bad behavior, as Emily’s brothers did; or, like Emily, they distract their parents with seemingly innocent misdirection. Pretending to be half asleep and much confused, Emily asked for some juice and the action stopped. Her father dropped one brother and backed away from the other, and then he stomped upstairs and slammed his bedroom door. Emily’s mom sent the brothers to bed. She poured Emily something to drink and sent her back to bed, too. When Emily heard her mother turn off the television, Emily turned toward the task of falling asleep. Asking for juice was an old trick.

      The next morning, the twins had bruises and marks on their arms, so Emily was sent to swim team practice without them. She pedaled her bike down to the neighborhood pool and thought about what to say to her coach, wondering if he already knew her brothers were not coming, if maybe he knew about the night before. She disliked the idea that people might be whispering about her family but she also imagined—or perhaps wished—that the adults talked about her more than they did. The way the grown-ups always had details worked out in advance about car pools and swim schedules and block parties, Emily pictured organized community meetings, ones where the adults got together and sat in rows of chairs and talked thoughtfully about the kids. If not that, maybe at least there was a phone tree.

      This was all but proven that summer day. Emily swam laps, same as always, but her team must have been moving slowly because the coach gave them all a loud talking-to. Emily hung on to the concrete lip at the end of the swim lane and pressed the balls of her feet into the smooth tile wall as she listened to her coach yell to the group, “Stop thinking about everything and your brother and get your head in the pool!” Psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott suggests that, as children try to make sense of the world, one way this process goes wrong is through coincidences, as coincidences “lead to muddle.” The coach’s words that morning were one of those unlucky coincidences that fed a false worldview. To Emily, his words were meant just for her, and they felt like code. We all know what goes on at your house. No one is going to talk about it. No one is going to do anything about it. Shut up and swim, he was saying. This is your lot.

      ***

      Emily did shut up and swim. In the years that followed, she swam her way to out-of-town swim meets on the weekend and then to a college far away from New Jersey. When faced with the college application prompt, “Describe a challenge you have overcome,” seventeen-year-old Emily had trouble thinking of one. She felt blank. Finally, she wrote about a state swim meet when she won a blue ribbon despite being quite ill. Not for a moment did Emily consider writing about her father’s alcoholism, probably because she still did not have a word for what had been wrong with her father; nor did she know that what she had lived through was a bona fide adversity. In retrospect, though, Emily doubts she would have written about her father’s drinking had she been able to. Alcoholism seemed a seedier challenge than what colleges were really looking for, she thought, and it was one for which, in her family, there had been no uplifting blue-ribbon triumph, the kind that everyone seemed to want.

      Psychoanalyst Carl Jung said in his autobiography about his own secrets around growing up depressed and with a depressed mother, “It would never have occurred to me to speak of my experience openly,” and so it was for Emily. Never once did Emily talk about her father’s drinking with her friends at school, and not a single time did she mention it to her boyfriends, or even to a man she СКАЧАТЬ