"Yes, your family history has some sad chapters. But your history doesn't have to be your future. The generational garbage can stop here and now." ~Max Lucado
Walking out of my favorite bookstore on Saturday afternoon, I saw a little girl, maybe 7 years old, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a book in her lap, while her mother stood nearby perusing the stacks. As I passed, I overheard the girl ask if they'd be leaving soon, and I was taken back to my own childhood, and all the times that I’d asked the same question. In my case, I was asking my father if he, my brother and I could leave, but we weren't in a bookstore. We were in a noisy bar room, and my brother and I spent a whole lot of time there. My mother worked nights to help make ends meet in the late 1950s. My father always answered my query with, "In a little bit. Charlie just bought me a drink." If it wasn't Charlie, it was George or Hank. "Here, go play the jukebox," and he'd toss us a quarter. My brother and I would swirl around on the sticky dance floor for a few songs before tugging at his shirt again.
My father only drank beer, but don't let anyone ever tell you beer drinkers can’t become alcoholics. And even though I swore I'd never become my father, once I got to college, I became a daily drinker with no regard for anything other than my obsession for that next drink. And by the time I became a mother at thirty-three, my preoccupation with alcohol had blossomed into full-blown alcoholism. I was a functional alcoholic with a high tolerance for booze, so unless you were a trained professional, I hid it pretty well. But make no mistake, I became my father the first time I took my 18-month-old daughter into a bar for the first time, sat her up in a high chair, fed her a meatball, and deluded myself into thinking this wasn't a barroom because they served food.
Fast forward. Blessedly, my three grown children have had a sober mother/grandmother for over 14 years now. Twelve-step work saved my life and slowed (hopefully, halted) the curse of generational alcoholism.
Today, that 18-month-old daughter I’d dragged into barrooms is a beautiful mother of three children of her own. I love our Thursday mornings when she and I routinely take her brood to the library.
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