I was raised in southern home where ladies didn’t speak unless spoken to, daddy was always right, manners were literally spanked into your bare ass when your words weren’t spoken correctly, lady chores – mainly in the kitchen – were taught while still sipping from a bottle, stockings and slips were always worn Sunday mornings and the walls of the home never leaked the secrets kept within. I learned to keep secrets. I learned to keep “shameful” adult secrets. This was normal, so I thought, for a child to carry the darkness of the family for the sake of appearance and possible embarrassment. There were few however, that knew of the tornadoes that ripped through the sacred walls of steel in that little yellow house I grew up in. Yes, yellow, the color symbolic of happiness. The irony…
Both my father and stepfather are alcoholics but my mother, she never drank. Disliked it actually for she was also raised in a home of alcoholics. Alcoholism raised generations in my family and that disease, yes I said disease, devoured it along the way. It wasn’t until I had children of my own that I couldn’t handle the weight of what this disease had done to me. I was sinking, the earth cracking beneath my feet as I was sinking and suffocating on the reality that I too was an alcoholic. I had no pride to swallow and at that point and I shared my secret with loved ones. The sins of my fathers were no longer mine to carry and I slowly opened up and set myself free. Free to break the cycle in my family tree.
This is just a sliver of my testimony and thanks be to God, my children and loved ones who have encouraged me to share my story. Doors have opened and I have helped people along my 412 days of sobriety. I will not silence myself nor allow the disease of alcoholism to live in my home.
My walls are no longer made of steel and I keep the windows open…
Open for love to flow out and then back in again. That’s my new cycle.
Today I am 412 days sober…