Children of Alcoholics Don’t Know Alcohol Is Waiting for Them in Their Thirties – Chris M.
About This Speaker Tape
Chris M. tells a story that starts sideways from the usual AA narrative. He didn't love his first drink — he hated beer, shook one flat and stirred sugar into it at 21 just to prove a point. His biological father was an alcoholic; his mother divorced that man when Chris was two and moved them to Alaska. What Chris didn't know at the time was that alcohol was waiting for him in his 30s, when his father moved to Georgia, started showing up with new bruises, new dents in his car, another lost job — and the pain of watching him die slowly became unbearable. Chris discovered that drinking numbed it. That was the line he crossed.
The middle of the tape is a catalog of functioning-alcoholic concealment and near-disasters. He worked in IT from home, so there were no DUIs, no missed meetings — just a case of wine a week his wife silently restocked, then Taaka vodka from Tower Liquor after a clerk on Beaufort Highway recommended it, then pint bottles hidden in couch cushions, in trash cans his wife never emptied, and once tied to a rope slung over a tree branch on the property next to his house. His son fell off the changing station onto a hardwood floor while Chris was hungover. His wife found him face-down in Modu-chan soup and had to lift his head out. After his stepfather's suicide, a doctor prescribed lorazepam on top of his drinking, and Chris walked his infant son in a Baby Bjorn down a busy street in a full blackout he only learned about later. He checked himself into Peachford expecting Hollywood robes and saunas, brought his laptop so he could keep working, watched them confiscate it, then had his life threatened in the common room by a stranger while trying to escape a snoring roommate.
His father died at Emory Hospital on Claremont Road with pneumatic pads squeezing his legs to keep his blood moving. Chris read a goodbye letter his Al-Anon uncle had written because he couldn't write one himself. He drank more afterward, not less — alcohol was his solution for that pain too. Nine months of sobriety after Peachford ended in a shot-glass ritual: he poured exactly one ounce, sat with it for an hour, smelled it, picked it up, stared at it, then drank. Six more years. The turnaround came in his master bedroom when he realized the alcoholic progression was both predictable and the thing that had killed his father. He walked into the Monday Night Blue Chip meeting at the Nava Club, said he needed a sponsor, picked one of two men who offered, sat in the gazebo outside and started calling him daily — even from the Caribbean, standing under the one light in the hotel complex where his voice-over-IP app would work.
The Higher Power section is the heart of the talk. The stepfather who raised him in Alaska was physically abusive and a community pillar who wrote checks at church that covered up what he was doing to the kids. When nine-year-old Chris finally couldn't hold it in and told the church-school principal what was happening at home, it was squashed by Sunday. By his 30s he hated the word itself. He got around it by treating the steps as an experiment: follow the prescribed actions, evaluate the result. Two years in, he can be in the park with his son and actually be there instead of mentally at work. He uses his IT skills for AA service — spreadsheets and Google Maps, not gutter rescues — and says the thing works if you abandon everything and give yourself to it unreservedly.
Discussion
Be the first to share your thoughts on this tape.