We Want to Know: How have your parents’ drinking habits affected your own?
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Drinking Diaries
We drink for different reasons: to quench thirst, to loosen up, because it tastes good, to enhance a meal, because we're addicted, as part of a ceremony, to celebrate, to mourn. We drink when we're happy. We drink when we're sad. And then there are the non-drinkers, for whom abstaining may be as much of an issue as drinking. This is a place where women can spill their drinking stories--from lamp-swinging hilarity to bottle-under-the-bed despair. At DRINKING DIARIES, you will read, and be able to share the details, the deep questions, the wide and wild range of experiences that pertain to women and alcohol.We’re Going to BlogHer 2010!
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Caren Osten Gerszberg, Drinking Diaries co-founder, is interviewed as part of a discussion on women and drinking. View the video on ABC News NowShare Your Stories!
We invite you to share your drinking stories. Perhaps one of the essays we posted has inspired you, or maybe you have your own story to share. Please try to keep your stories short (under 500 words if possible), and it works well if you stick to one topic or theme, but feel free to write what you want. You can e-mail us at drinkingdiaries@gmail.com. Please send your story, as well as your name, e-mail address, a brief bio and any links you'd like to include. We may not be able to publish every story, but we will try to post as many as possible each week. We look forward to hearing from our readers!Posts by Date
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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
So many ways… I look at people who’s parents don’t drink and see such a different home environment. I can’t even begin to list all of the ways my parents’ drinking affected not only my drinking habits, but my life as well. Now that I’m not drinking and the rest of my family still is I definitely feel like an outsider. It’s almost as if drinking were a kind of club and now I don’t belong to it anymore.
Why don’t the authors of this blog start actually BLOGGING instead of asking for contributors from the readers?
My parents always drank freely and often. It was a happy type of thing, whether at the holiday table, evening dinner, or one of the many parties they hosted at our home. They loved to dance, sing and whoop it up–and i’m sure the booze helped free any inhibitions (not that there were many). As a result, I’d always treated it the same, drinking for fun and to enhance a meal. Only in the last 10 years, as I’ve watched my mother’s drinking turn into an addiction have I questioned what drinking now means to me.
In response to KG, the authors of this blog have posted essays and comments, however it is the blog’s mission to give any visitor a forum to express their own views, feelings and perspectives, rather than focus primarily on our own.
In response to today’s question, there’s no way I would be the same drinker I am today if my mom wasn’t a recovered alcoholic. In response to her alcoholism, first I abstained (see my essay on DD), then I went wild (college and after) and then I pulled back to the point where I cannot drink without stepping outside my body and evaluating myself as I drink. Drinking a glass or two of wine is fun for me, but anything over that, and I am filled with dread and remorse and anxiety that I am drinking too much and that I will become an alcoholic. If my mother hadn’t gotten sober, I’m not sure what would have happened to me as a drinker–I shudder to think….
My mother was a teetotaler and my father only had one or two when they went out socially (which was rare) so I never observed them drinking. Though she never said so explicitly, I think my Baptist mother did not really approve of drinking. When I went off to college and discovered alcohol, it was like partaking in “forbidden fruit”, drinking alcohol felt like delicious rebellion to me. Though I no longer drink the way I did in college, I still enjoy a glass or two of wine with dinner most nights of the week. However, if I’m dining with my mother, I usually don’t have a second glass but last Christmas, when she was visiting I indulged myself by sneaking one while she wasn’t looking. It made me feel like a rebellious teenager all over again!
My Mom was an active alcoholic while I was growing up. It affected me incredibly during that period. I went to live with my dad when I was 12. I didn’t touch alcohol at all until I was nearly 18 (legal age here). I absolutely abhorred alcohol. But as an adult I have probably drank too much. It’s sad because I’m doing exactly what I said I wouldn’t do. I think it’s because I have a lot of unresolved issues with my mom about her drinking. She’s been sober for 16 years now, but she still is not really recovered in her mindset, at least in my opinion. That causes stress on my relationship with her, so yes, I think her drinking had an effect on me.