This is Alice-related, I promise.
I felt down last night and mishandled my emotions by overdosing a second time on one of my medications. The effects of the first overdose were piled onto those of the second and the night was long, let’s just say. (So much for sobriety, yeah?) This might sound weird but I want to know more about Alice’s addiction habits and how they impact her world, and the worlds of her children.
I want to know when she hits the booze. I want to know when her source of comfort flits to a bottle of wine or (possibly) her medication. I personally have about 20 triggers—I’m not exaggerating. What are hers? When she’s in a good mood, like when she’s just posted something harmful to Ioan and hasn’t (yet) faced the consequences or been screenshotted and posted to Tattle or felt inclined to delete it? Or does she resort to drinking solely when she’s down? When she finds a new photo of Ioan and B? When she visits Tattle (because we all know she visits Tattle) and sees how many people see her bleeping game? When she feels lonely? There are so many other triggers but those are two primary ones…
I want to know how often the girls see her this way. Does she put them to bed first and then recover a precious bottle? I want to know if she hands them off to a friend’s/Gloria’s house first. I want to know if she does it while they’re awake and active in the home. I want to know if she does it in their presence—no, I mean literally, do they see her pouring herself glass after glass? I want to know what they think. I want to know what they gauge about their mother’s emotional state. If Alice only drinks when she’s sad, I want to know if they now associate alcohol with depression, as a tool strictly used by those addressing some sort of inner strife. If she also drinks when she’s happy, I want to know if they now perceive an endless, unhealthy number of glasses as a typical joy-based ritual (which would be normal if Alice didn’t partake so much). I want to know what she has told them about her drinking habits.
I want to know how they react to her when she drinks. I want to know if they’ve yet developed enough social and worldly experience to understand that what she’s doing is dangerous, to herself and to others. I want to know if they have the sense to reprimand her. I want to know if they feel helpless on the nights when they need her for something and she responds to their needs in a sloppy, perhaps almost dissociative manner from the amount of alcohol (and pills?) sloshing in her system. I want to know if they ever themselves are curious about alcohol, even if it’s just a childlike curiosity, and how that could potentially evolve over time into an alarming fixation. Because if they’ve witnessed her drinking enough times, they’re going to internalize and normalize it. I grew up normalizing a lot of my mama’s addictions, and I have quite a few of them now. The girls are at a higher risk of adopting her toxic habits in the future.
I want to know how the girls respond when they visit a friend’s house and fail to see a wasted mother looking after them. I want to know what the girls think when they observe mothers who don’t day-drink (if Alice does that, though I’m sure she does). Sure, Ioan stopped drinking, so they’re used to a father who doesn’t, but I wonder about a mother, specifically. I want to know how they feel when they witness this not-wasted mother: joyful, relieved, unaffected, frightened, uncomfortable, confused? I want to know if they ever compare Alice with other mothers in ways more meaningful than “Katy’s mom let’s her go to the movie theatre so why can’t I?!” I want to know if they internally ask themselves, “____’s mother doesn’t drink wine so why can’t mine stop?” And I wonder how they cope with it all.
I should have warned y’all that there would be a lot of questions in this post with no really answers, I’m sorry. Was just having a bad, addiction-based night and it led to all of these questions about Alice’s own addictive tendencies. I just wonder sometimes. Like, you can answer some of these questions if you want to, or you can wonder along with me if it’s something for which we haven’t yet found truth. Up to you, as always.
[For the record: I’m alright now, don’t worry. For all of last night I was slurring my speech, puking, hallucinating, shaking from restlessness. I didn’t tell my parents anything, I didn’t want them to know and freak out. There’s a doctor a few neighborhoods over who said I was a little too close to hospitalization for comfort, but that the worst is over.
I’m currently smoking in the back garden grass with coffee—there’s some heavy mind fog going on, I keep turning my head from left to right like a weirdo, more restlessness, some twitching, and my legs feel really hot and pins-and-needles-y but it’s MUCH better than what it was, so yay. I gotta work on my coping habits, I know…]
www.mankind.org.uk
www.womensaid.org.uk
www.childrenssociety.org.uk
www.timeanddate.com
