My dad was already a drunk when my mom merried him, I just don't thin she realized it. Five years down the road she was fed up. That's what happened.
I don't think we're understanding each other here. I know that for someone to make that change, they have to want to. I'm not saying that all us kids standing together say "Daddy, get sober for us" is what made him enter rehab. But I do feel that my mom divorcing him is one of the things that made him see he needed to change...and he needed help. He had already gone through one divorce, so maybe it was the possibility of losing another family that scared him into taking a closer look at himself. The way he tells it now, if he were single, he probably would have kept drinking much longer. It was the realization of: "Maybe it's not them...it's me. This is the second family to kick me out." that really got his attention. To be completely honest, I was too young to remember most of his alchoholism and too sheltered to see the rest. My family, I'm discovering, had the lovely habit or "protecting" me from everything when I was a kid. In fact, one of my first memories n the topic was going to his rehab to feed the ducks. I didn't know until I was about 15 that the memory was from the pond at his rehab center. When I would talk about it, my mom would just say: "Yeah, that time you fed the ducks at daddy's old apartment?" Nice, huh?
Anywho, sorry if I offended. It wasn't my intention. I've been around addiction quite a bit and have seen just about every outcome...but other than cigarettes, I cannot speak from personal experience. Keep up the good work! 91023i2ndw;l
