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substance abuse in your family > children and teens > special stuff for teens > keeping the house together

ALEXA SAYS: KEEPING THE HOUSE TOGETHER

It’s worse than ever. Mom and Dad are always fighting. And almost every night after dinner, Dad just takes off. No one knows exactly where he goes, just that he comes home drunk. Actually, Mom must know because she is the one who goes out looking for him and drives him home so he won’t get killed in an accident. Naturally, that leaves me to take care of getting Ben and Isabelle bathed, fed and into bed.

When they walk in the door, the fighting has usually already started again. Mom goes: "I don’t care what you do, but what about the kids?" And then Dad yells back, "If they didn’t fight so much, I wouldn’t have to drink." Sometimes Dad throws things at her – once he threw the hall lamp. Last night it was a plate full of spaghetti.

She doesn’t realize she is just making things worse. How does she think we feel when we hear them. Maybe they think we don’t know what’s going on because we’re in bed. Of course we hear!!! Ben and Isabel sometimes even crawl into bed with me. When everything calms down, I carry them back to their own room. I can’t sleep anyway until she slams the door to their room and goes to bed. I try to tune our with my Walkman. At least I try to. The worse thing is that when they fight at night, my whole next day is totally ruined. I try to talk to my friends about it sometimes, but they don’t understand. They just say everyone fights.

I am sick and tired of being the mother in my family. I mean, we have a mother, and she doesn’t drink so there is no reason why I have to be the one who cooks and cleans. I know she is really worried about him, but what about us? Don’t we count? If she can’t get it together, she should just leave him. Maybe then we’d all be happier.