dq wk 4 100 words per question with refrences (No PLAGIARISM I'll dispute)

You know, I didn't want to look at me as a person and what my responsibilities were. I didn't want them.

I, for years, didn't think alcohol was a problem in my life. Alcohol was to get drunk and have a good time.

I saw him being dead as my escape. That was the only way things were going to get any better for me.

I probably started drinking a lot when I was, well, 16. I drank until I was in my mid-'40s. I don't think there really was a point where I became an alcoholic. I think it was just a gradual thing.

I wasn't born an alcoholic. It just became part of my life. And I didn't know how to have a good time without it. I didn't drink because I liked the taste of alcohol. Sure, a cold beer tasted good on a hot day. But probably I was basically a shy person and when I drank I could do all kinds of different things. I wasn't shy anymore.

And I, for years, didn't think alcohol was a problem in my life. Alcohol was to get drunk and have a good time. Sure, the hangovers were painful. But I used to think it's worth. I had a good time, so you've got to pay the price.

I'd work hard. And I thought I was a good provider. And I had the right to go out and get drunk, as long as I provided for my family. And I think I did. When things were better on the farm a few years than they are now, as long as I bought things and provided things, everybody should be happy.

I could never give them myself, because I was so concerned about me and if I could have a good time and the things that I could acquire. Material things were very important to me. Most of them I had to finance and struggle to pay for them. But it was all right. It didn't bother me then.

From a medical and a scientific perspective, it has been amply shown that alcoholism is an illness that will happen without the person's permission. It's a type of condition that goes across cultures and certainly across all socioeconomic and education levels. Over the years that I've worked in this business in treatment, we've treated psychiatrists, doctors, mothers, aunts, uncles, kids, truck drivers, bus drivers, steelworkers, nuns, priests, other clergymen, and so on.

Both my parents drank. A lot of the times walking in the front door I was never sure what I was walking into. So I would run ahead of everybody else. If I were bringing friends home, I'd run ahead of them just to make sure that things weren't to out of control.

I wasn't really sure that there was a problem. I was so used to everything that was going on, it never occurred to me that we were different than anybody else. I thought everybody lived like that. Pretty funny.

I think I was about 13. I was grade seven. And a good friend of mine was killed in a farming accident. I went to his funeral. And I remember coming home that day and going down the basement-- that's where my dad kept all his booze-- and taking a little bit of everything, pouring it into this sealer jar. And it was full. It was full.

And I remember thinking, this is what I want. I deliberately set out to get drunk. That's what I wanted to do.

And the first time it happened, I remember thinking, this kind of fixes everything. You don't remember everything so vividly. The pain isn't so intense. You can kind of pull away from it. And that's what booze did for me.

Although a social drinker may drink for some effect, an alcoholic drinks strictly for effect. There's a desire to change the way he or she feels. It's a desire to-- there's all kinds of things that they hope that the alcohol will do for them. They hope that it will improve their confidence.

They become dependent on the substance, rather than seeing it as just a social lubricant. It's a dependency. It's a thing that they start to want to use just to be able to maintain sort of a normal lifestyle. And that takes a while, but the simple truth is that that begins to happen.

Booze was so acceptable. Everything involved booze, everything. Sports, social get-togethers, anything, you name it, it was right there.

It was such a part of life that I didn't think that I would lose control the way my mum and dad did. For them, their drinking, to me, it was a moral issue. But when I drank, it was like an anesthetic. It was a way to forget.

But I never drank alone. That's why I never thought I was an alcoholic, for years. And probably I purposely would not have a drink on my own, because I-- realizing now in the back of my mind, I knew that would be a person that was an alcoholic, that would have to sit down and, geez, I need drink. I'm going to have a drink and I'll feel better. I usually had to have some company around or I'd go someplace or I'd go where I knew I could have a drink with somebody.

I thought an alcoholic was down to his last dime and was on Skid Row and was drinking wine out of a brown paper bag. But an alcoholic can be anything. You can have a million dollars in your pocket and be an alcoholic and have everything in the world that you think you need. But I guess the best description I've heard of what an alcoholic is is somebody that alcohol causes a problem in any area of your life. If it causes a problem, then you've got a problem with booze.

I figured the people that were alcoholics were the ones that were in the bar every day, certain time, had to have drink type of thing. And Rose hid a lot from me too. I didn't see all the drinking that went on.

For the longest time I didn't think Rose was an alcoholic. I just thought she drank too much. So what's an alcoholic? There's a lot of naive people out there. And I was one of them.

I always thought she was just a very emotional person or-- I don't know how you would say that-- high strung? And I knew there was problems at home for her, so I attributed a lot of that to it. But when I thought she had a problem would have been probably five or six years ago, maybe. About three or four years before she quit drinking, I think.

It was kind of a gradual thing. You kind of think how many more times do I have to do this stuff? It was a gradual thing. It progressed into where I thought, there is a problem here.

Obviously that kind of an alcoholic pattern is disruptive as hell in a home and just really keeps things on edge. Unfortunately, as I mentioned a while ago, the family don't know what's going on. They just know something's wrong. And they know mom, in this instance, is drinking too much and really changes when she drinks.

But again, there's a tendency for the family to deny almost as much as the alcoholic will. And it's a denial illness, you see. So even the kids say, well, maybe we should just write mom off.

Or the husband or wife will say, I'll look after this. This is our family laundry so we'll look after the thing and so on. And so it becomes a double whammy for the family, in that sense.

I barely got to see her when I was younger. For school events and all that, she was mostly sleeping or out to the city or something, doing something. Well, she just came home drunk every night practically, with her friends. And her friends would party around.

And at first I thought that's what adults do all the time. But then it kind of got carried away a lot. So I got really upset.

I know Steph, she was afraid to let Rose out the door. And Denny, she liked it, free rein. She would go do whatever she wanted, because we weren't really parents. We were just there, kind of looked after the place. So it was good.

When Rose quit drinking and things started changing, and we started laying down consequences for actions and stuff like that, starting to do what parents are supposed to do, they didn't like it. I mean, this is different, you guys. Come on. What happened to the time when we could run over to the neighbor's place and stay overnight any time, any day of the week or whatever?

They were more upset at first I think with Rose quitting drinking. The one was anyway. The other one wanted Rose to quit drinking very badly. It was something that she would-- where you're going, out to the bar? And she'd have a temper tantrum or something.

And it was pretty scary for them, I imagine. They've seen some things that kids shouldn't see. Things happened that kids should never be in a situation like that.

Well, I knew he was drinking. And he'd have a few drinks here and there. But I'd never seen that with alcoholism.

So I didn't know. I didn't know what an alcoholic looked like. I didn't know what an alcoholic behaved like. I thought, well, he's having a good time.

And I wasn't used to partying. I wasn't used to being in an environment that there was drunks around all the time. And the dirty jokes and just the jokes period were funny for a while. But then they start getting repetitive.

And it was a constant party that was come and go and come and go and come and go. And in between, I was trying to spend time with the kids and be a responsible parent, I guess, for all four of them. And things just were not working.

He expected me to be grateful because in his first marriage he had gone to town to drink all the time. And in this marriage, he brought everybody home to drink. And so I was constantly cooking for and catering to the whole community, the whole crowd that was here all the time.

It was nothing for us to have 25 people a day show up. And I'd be feeding them breakfast, dinner, and supper, and pouring drinks for them and everything else. And it was just a constant zoo.

And I expected that it would cease, or that it would get lessened in intensity after I'd been out here for a while, after I'd been on the farm for awhile. And it didn't. It just kept going on and on and on and on and on.

And finally I remember sitting on the couch one day crying and saying, I can't handle this company anymore. Can we stop this? It's getting crazy. And Bob didn't know what I was talking about.

And Michael's got grass to cut, I guess. What about your plan? You going to go back to your plan?

Yes. I'll start that next week, probably.

I was terrified to do anything. And then when I wouldn't do anything, I'd catch hell for not doing something, like yard work or something. There's always grass to be cut around the yard and things like that. I'd be scared to sit still or else go out and do some work in case I wreck something when I'm out there cutting the lawn with the garden tractor or whatever.

I always got mad at him. I don't know. I never thought there was any excuse for it. But he wasn't all to blame. I mean, it was the drinking and Mom did a lot of crazy things too. I mean, now that you look back and see, it's easier to see what was going on.

It was pretty crazy out here sometimes. I don't know. I never really resented him. I always thought it was a little bit of both going each way. I thought Mom was getting a little bit too picky about his drinking and stuff like that.

I didn't really consider him an alcoholic or anything like that. He just seemed like a social drinker to me. He'd have some friends out and they'd have a few beers, well, usually a few more than a few beers.

I never really got mad at him for anything like that until we moved away, I guess. I got a little bit mad, because moving in and out and in and out and in and out like [INAUDIBLE]. And you move away for a week and then you come back. And that was when we were moving away for a year and got to pack up everything and go.

One of the obvious emotions that a child in an alcoholic home is going to feel is fear. They're going to experience a tremendous amount of fear as they grow up. And because of that fear, they will develop various coping methods.

Again, they may try to keep the alcoholic in the home, if it happens to be a violent alcoholic, keep him or her from reacting. They may take on the role of looking after not only the other kids in the family but the non-alcoholic spouse, who often becomes pretty dysfunctional in terms of trying to carry on with the alcoholic drinking. So they become helpers and managers and very, very fearful. They can become very unhappy people.

They were hurting. I remember a couple of times that Renee packed her bags and walked all the way down the driveway and was running away from home. And I'd stand in her room watching her hurting, in a lot of pain, but never able to say. I'd blame that on Bob too. If you weren't such a horrible person and didn't treat us so terribly, my kids wouldn't be running away.

And Michael wouldn't say anything. He'd hide in his room. The doors were closed while the partying was going on.

I wasn't even aware. I thought, all the doors are closed. They're asleep. They won't hear all of this garbage and the fights and all of the crazy behavior. Oh, god. It was so sick. I didn't know that they were hearing everything.

Physically, I felt really worn down. And mentally, the same thing, I think. How much more of this can I take?

It was like that almost every day. Sometimes I was afraid to go to work. Sometimes I was afraid to come home, because you just never knew what was going to happen next.

I hated coming home. All I was thinking about on my way home was, oh god, I don't want to be there. I don't want to live like that anymore, because it was living in hell. And I actually thought that I had to die for things to get better.

But after I don't know how many years, we were married probably 10, my wife decided she'd had enough and she moved out. And I still loved her. And when she left, I was glad she was gone. I got rid of this problem. Nobody's going to give me a hard time anymore.

But I wanted her back. And we still saw each other. And she suggested that maybe if I did something about my drinking, go to get some help, that she might consider coming back. So I did.

It was just a progression of incidences that led me to this point my life where I said, enough is enough. I just can't-- I remember waking up after my last drunk. And I had talked to my family about counseling or getting help or doing something about this problem. I had come to the conclusion I had a problem.

And my youngest daughter had said to me, Mom, you promised if you drank again that you'd get help. And looking at her, looking in her eyes and just seeing that defeat, like promises made, promises broken, it just took a little something away from me.

I went because I wanted my wife back and my family. But I soon learned that I had to go there for myself. It sounds selfish. But I was the one with the problem. I was the one that needed help. And I was the one that had to change.

And it took me a few months to learn that. But once I realized that I've got to work on myself and change things in my life, that's really when I started to grow, because I've learned that from the time you start to drink alcoholically, that is the time you really quit maturing. Really, I was a 16-year-old in a 40 year old body. I was irresponsible in a lot of areas of my life, didn't give a damn.

I think the next day I had gone in and I'd talked to a counselor. And fortunately, he was an addictions counselor. And he had also lived through the alcohol addiction, so he knew where I was coming from. And he knew what I was feeling at that moment. And I felt comfortable with him right from the very beginning.

And things just kind of went on from there. It was a snowball effect. It was like, OK, you've got to do this, if you're ready to do this. I was ready.

It's nice to know things that will change around here, I'm sure for the better, because we have been through hell and back. And we know we can look back, with a lot of remorse and guilt, but it was because we were afflicted by a disease called alcoholism.

Now we're starting to be able to laugh about it. I think that's really healing too.

Yes. There was a lot of resentments, even up until a few years ago. But we learned to let those go and work with what we have.

We didn't get sick overnight. And I think the wife of the alcoholic is just as sick as the alcoholic. The kids look at the alcoholic and he's got the booze. And so they know why his behavior is nuts. But then they look at the mother and they think, well, why is she crazy? And the understanding, you just don't understand it.

But with the help of a couple of support programs, we didn't get sick overnight, like I said. And it's going to take a while to get to a point where we have a healthy family, and where we're healthy ourselves.

The person I am today was shaped by yesterday. I wouldn't have the gifts I have today if I hadn't have lived through the stuff that I lived through. I'm sorry that my kids had to live through it. But I'm accepting of what was and what is.

I would like to think that I would never have to drink again. Today I know I'm not going to drink. I can't answer for tomorrow. If I let myself slide and I didn't keep up with my support system, I could see it as a possibility.

Well, I'm not recovered. I never will be. I'm recovering.

I'm not going to drink today. I didn't have a drink today. I might drink tomorrow. But I haven't had to for the last five years. And I hope I never have to.

But I just live one day at a time. I think about tomorrow and what I'm going to do. But tomorrow's not here and yesterday's gone.

I can't change what's going to happen tomorrow. And I can't change what happened yesterday. And today is the most important day of my life.