Rules of Engagement

"Don't make me come in there!" my mother used to yell when, in her eyes, we were misbehaving. It was no empty threat and we paid attention. Angry, which she was most of the time, she was not pleasant. Angry and drunk, she was a terror though most of the time we could outflank her just by virtue of being younger, faster, and unimpaired.

She began drinking in her teens and continued throughout her life. In the beginning, it was out in the open and I doubt anyone paid much mind. She married, had children, and at some point after that, had become a full fledged alcoholic. She maintained the cover of social drinking but had also begun drinking alone and in secret, hiding her bottles and denying it. Her entire life became a lie which she worked desperately to conceal from the world outside and with her family's help, she mostly succeeded. By the time I was in 5th grade, the war was on and like any good war, it had rules. Any reference to her drinking ( or being drunk, or having a problem, etc. ) was off limits. Out of the ordinary behavior was not to be acknowleged. Beer bottles discovered under the dirty clothes were to be discreetly disposed of and not mentioned. If her afternoon bridge parties got out of hand, we were to go to our rooms and shut the doors. We were never to confront, challenge, or in any way provoke her. And under no circumstances short of the end of the world, were we to talk of any of it to anyone outside the house. We understood that she could more or less keep it together as long as we kept to the rules. My daddy explained this to us with pain filled eyes and each time there was a new horror, there was a new rule.

Addiction, however, is a progressive disease and things got worse instead of better. She began drinking earlier in the day until she was having morning sherry instead of morning coffee. She stopped caring for the house, stopped getting dressed, neglected the dogs, gave up bathing and hygiene, began throwing meals together with whatever was on hand. My grandmother moved the afternoon card parties to her house and refused to come to our's. My daddy spent more and more time working and she was stopped a number of times for driving while intoxicated. Rules or no rules, the secret was becoming harder and harder to keep. She stopped going out in public after a well meaning teacher called, concerned about her slurred speech and aggressive attitude, and my daddy reluctantly began delegating the shopping, cleaning, cooking, and the answering of the telephone. She was, by that point, too concerned with her next drink to notice that it was all unraveling. And her children were beginning not to care. We learned how to live and work and go to school around her, ignoring her presence as if she had become a piece of bulky furniture, unwanted and in the way but not worth the trouble of moving. We kept to the rules, kept out of her way, stayed apart from her spiraling descent into alcoholic madness and life went on.

Once the children were grown, my mother and daddy reached some kind of understanding. They lived apart except for weekends and each went their own way, lives still connected but no longer touching. From Monday to Friday, she didn't interfere with his work and he left her to drink in peace. The war had cooled and the old rules still worked.