Personal Narrative: My Father's Addiction

Since, my father would drink on the job with his coworkers and we all know there is no tolerance of alcohol consumption on the job, he never kept a job. This affected him financially on attempting to raise four kids while keeping up with the bills. Even when he did work and got paid on Friday’s he would waste a large consumption of his check on alcohol and never worried if he had enough to pay the bills. The outcome of alcohol physically damaged my father on his health. He is a diabetic type II who never took his insulin when needed or checked his sugars. For the years of having uncontrolled diabetes he currently has damage to his feet and on a higher dosage of insulin with various times of injecting the insulin. The outcome of alcohol severely affected his relationship with his family. My father and his children relationship is at a hate and love mode by the damage he caused to the family. By the things I and my sibling had to experience as children there is not trust in his words. He would always say he would quit but never

Without a steady source of income, the bills normally acquired by a family (mortgage or rent, groceries, utilities, and so forth) begin to accumulate, affecting the families financial situation further. In the book The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls gives multiple descriptions of how devastating alcoholism can be on a family financially. Jeannette’s father, who was an alcoholic, would often only hold a job for a few months at a time, and moved quite often to avoid bill collectors. “We were always doing the skedaddle, usually in the middle of the night” (Walls 19). At one point, he even resorted to stealing from his own daughter. “One evening in May, when we’d been saving our money for nine months, I came home with a couple of dollars I’d made babysitting and went into the bedroom to stash them in Oz (her piggy bank). The pig was not in the old sewing machine” (Walls 228). One can see this not only takes a financial toll, but an emotional one as well.

¨In the morning he would wake up groaning like the demon in a Kabuki drama; he would vomit and then start sipping again. He terrified us all, lurching around the tiny room, cursing in Japanese and swinging his bottles wildly,¨ (Houston 50-51). This is a quote from the book Farewell to Manzanar. In this point of the book Jeanne’s father was an alcoholic. He would drink himself to sleep every night and just wake up and do it again. As a child it is hard to go through this because you can never really understand why a father would do this. Especially when he has a loving family that is there for him during it all. It’s hard to comprehend why someone would put themselves through that physical state knowing that it was hurting the ones they love.

Through out my entire adolescent years, I always witnessed my father drinking alcohol on a daily basis until he was inebriated. Even though until this day, when he claims that yes he was an alcoholic but responsible, that was not always that case. Most of his working income would go to the liquor store near our home because he could not live a day without drinking a beer. He would always be passed out because he was completely drunk and he ended up damaging his liver but he did not seem to care. My father would always tell me when I would just stare at him drinking, “back when I was young your grandpa, my father, instead of feeding us, he would give us pulque (traditional alcoholic mexican drink) in order to forget about our hunger. That is why I drink.

Change of behavior caused by alcohols has negative impacts on one's surrounding and will, eventually, creates a rift among loved ones. Alcoholic can do anything without thinking for the future as long as they get the money to buy alcohol, ones may use the rental money for the house to buy alcohol and the worst case could happen is he loses his jobs. With this, drinker cannot be dependent on and divorce is inevitable as he could no longer support his family. Not few child abuse cases caused by alcoholic parents. Studies have shown that "2/3 of child abuse case involves alcohol" ("Facts about alcohol"). Family members also began to avoid friends, hide problems and cover up for the drinker as they are ashamed of their family member who is alcoholic. "More than one-half of American adults have a close family member who has or has had alcoholism" ("Dawson and Grant") Moreover, there is higher chances for their teenager child to be alcoholic too as they are used to seeing their parents drunk.

There are many down sides to alcohol abuse and dependence like ruining relationships or obtaining health conditions. Alcohol abuse and alcohol dependence are slightly different, but they are both dangerous and upsetting. Personally, my parents got divorced because of my dad’s alcoholism. My mom had asked him many times to get help but he never did; he didn’t believe it was a problem. Sometimes he has mood swings and gets angry or sad all of a sudden. He also forgets something has happened or something I told him just hours or days ago, asking me the same question two or three times in a day. My dad isn’t the only person in my family who has had alcohol problems though. A couple of my uncles have, too. My dad is just the closest and one that

My relationship with drugs first began during my senior year of high school. While most of my peers attended their first parties years earlier, my first was not until I was already 17 years old. I still remember feeling so cool for attending my first party and having my first sip of alcohol. The feeling of being drunk was unlike anything I had ever felt before. I felt liberated, like I could break out of my quiet shell and be that fun, goofy person that everyone wanted to hang out with. Prior to this night I had never used any type of substance, legal or illegal. Since then I have continued using alcohol while also trying various different types of drugs including caffeine, marijuana, tobacco, and adderall.

I was in the band in college and my sections drank and smoked a lot. There are many people that I went to school with that started smoking and drinking because they were pressured by their friends. I was one of the people that was pressed to drinking alcohol. I turned to drinking alcohol when things went south with one of my best friends. Also during that time I continued to have father issues, and I was doing an internship that was not going well. So I turned to alcohol as a way to help me get through my problems. I later discovered that drinking did not help with the issues that I was having; it only made it worse. Later on I got kicked out of my internship because of my alcohol abuse and went back to school to finish my

Addiction is a disease that I will battle for the rest of my life. After being sexually assaulted at the age of twelve, I started to self-destruct. Lack of parental support, less than pristine living conditions, and an addictive personality paved an expressway to a life of addiction. I chose to hang with undesirable people, and was introduced to Marijuana, LSD, Ecstasy, PCP, Cocaine, Heroin and eventually what became the love of my life, the prescription painkiller Morphine. Never did I think that trying pot would have a domino effect. It led me to try harder and more addictive substances ultimately turning my life upside down. Often publicly

Alcoholics go through money just as fast as they do their alcohol. Fiscal disciplinary actions are almost unavoidable when a person develops an alcohol addiction. Just financially supporting the habit of drinking alcohol alone can off balance a family budget. An alcoholic may take money aside or hide spending money for the wanted alcohol. Some liquor can indeed be quite taxing to a budget, especially when an addict’s tolerance keeps growing. Alcoholics sometimes depend on other family members to step in and help with their finances. This is where family member can become the alcoholic’s enabler without realizing it. “Families are desperate to fix the drinker’s problem, to show them there is a better way to live, because one believes it will demonstrate how much they are loved and they will return the love” (Al-Anon Faces Alcoholism 2012, page 6). Sometimes alcoholics may steal possessions or money to support their addiction. Alcoholism can have a tremendous financial impact on an individual and families. With increased finances coming from the budget and going to the increased need for alcohol, “financial duties, such as bill payments, can be put at risk because it is 'necessary ' for the alcoholic to get a drink”

This is a form of emotional neglect, and because of this neglect all three of my uncles and my dad have no idea how to talk or express themselves. They can not even talk to their own children or wives. My father and uncles were drinking when they were young, but only two of the four turned into alcoholics. When my grandfather died, one of my uncles was drunk at the funeral and was asked to leave by our family. This is what happens when parents use drugs while raising children.

Growing up as a child I was not raised in the best environment. Both of my parents had two complete different personalities, but were similar in many ways. Both of my parents dropped out of high-school and I remember them being addicted to alcohol at a very

My father is an alcoholic and so I have addiction in my genes. I have an addictive personality and I always have. I will never excuse the choices I made, but I will say I would never go back in time and change it. That part of my life has had the biggest impact on me and it made me who I am today. To this day, I work very hard to control my biological genetic addiction and I've been consistent with my sobriety and I have become a completely different and better person. I have been sober for two and a half years and I plan to keep that

When I view someone who gets drunk, I see them lose a part of themselves. What really gets to me is the fact that my mother tends to drink daily, and the larger issue in my eyes, is that she had a gastric bypass surgery done years ago which brought her stomach to the size of f ½ a cup. Because of this, it is easy for her to get drunk after two or three beers, roughly. For the longest time, I thought of her as an alcoholic. My issue was I never told her to her face about how I really felt about her actions with drinking. I can not stop someone from drinking nor will I try because it is called free will, but if someone is drinking just to escape from problems and stress, then there needs to be help to deal with that issue. Find a healthy way to deal with stress like talking to family, friends, or even a counselor. My mothers needs learn to capture the best parts of her life because running to a bottle is not going to solve

My sister started using alcohol while she was 19 years old. She is addicted to alcoholism. In school, she used to sneak on weekends to buy the alcohol in the nearby mall. At first, our parents were harsh on her, and she was transferred to a nearby school so that parents could monitor her behavior. Since our parents were busy almost all week, Becky could ensure she got a bottle every day before the sunset when the parents could have arrived.