It Will Never Happen To Me

I grew up an only child watching my own mother slowly die by drinking two bottles of wine a day. Every day I believed my mom chose to do what she did and I never understood why she could not stop. On drunken nights she would often cry to me and tell me she never wanted to be like her father, who was an alcoholic and died of a heart attack during her senior year of high school. I loved my mom so much and it was hard for me to understand the nature of this disease, first as a frightened little girl and then feeling powerless and angry as a young adult. I thought: "She picked it up so why can't she put it down?" I tried countless times to convince her to go to rehab or Alcoholics Anonymous—anything at all that could help her—but her denial was too powerful.