Alcohol didn’t start impacting my family right away. For years I was a social drinker. I would have a few drinks out with friends on the weekend. Maybe a couple of drinks during the week. It wasn’t until I started having a tough time at work before the social drinking became something more.
I was competing for a promotion. Working long hours. I felt pressure to make it to the next level of my career. Bills were stacking up at home, we had a new baby on the way, and I felt like I had to get the promotion. I started keeping a bottle at the office. Whisky was my go-to choice. When I felt the pressure, I would just have a quick drink to dull the worry.
Before long, the quick drink a few times a week, turned into a drink before lunch. A drink after lunch. A mid-afternoon drink…all before leaving the office. Then there was the after work drinking. When I didn’t get the promotion, the drinking escalated. I barely spent time at home during the week, stumbling in after everyone was asleep. I used the weekends, and how hard I had been working, as an excuse to drink even more. I opted out of family outings and just sat in front of the TV drinking.
Things started to get bad at home. Instead of my wife fighting with me about drinking anymore, she just started taking the kids out on her own. She didn’t want them to see me. I started drinking even more to dull the pain of the mess I had made of my family life.
It also started catching up with me at work. I was written up after coworkers reported smelling alcohol on my breath. I started slipping up, mishandling files, forgetting appointments. After several write-ups, and once I started losing clients, it was an easy decision for the company to let me go. It felt like I had been kicked in the gut. My answer to the pain was more alcohol.
A few weeks later, while I was home drinking to dull the pain and my wife had the kids at the park, I got a panicked phone call from her. My son had fallen at the park and my wife was worried he had broken his leg. I immediately grabbed my keys and ran out of the house, getting behind the wheel. I had driven drunk many times before. But I was exceptionally drunk that morning, and very panicked, when I took a corner too quickly and crashed through a fence a couple blocks from the house. I was knocked out in the accident.
As an ambulance took me to the hospital, my wife waited at the park with my son, who did have a broken leg, and our baby, for me to arrive. I didn’t. She found a way to take care of our kids that day and get to the hospital. I was charged by the cops after I woke up. By the time I was released from the hospital, my wife had already moved our kids across the state to her parent’s house.
I literally had nothing left. No job. No family. Charges against me. Alcohol addiction ruined my life.