Sleeping Dogs

"Let sleeping dogs lie," my daddy warned me as I headed for the stairs to wake my mother. "Or", my grandmother added curtly, "They'll bite you in the ass."
"She isn't feeling well," my daddy said with a sharp glare in my grandmother's direction, "Best not to wake her quite yet." Nana cleared her throat - only she could do it so meaningfully - but said nothing.
"She promised to take me to see Aunt Jenny's kittens!" I protested with all the indignity I could muster. My daddy and grandmother exchanged glances.
"Tomorrow," Nana said quietly, "I'll take you tomorrow."

There is always a tomorrow in a home where alcohol rules, always room for a new and improved promise of sobriety and change, even when the alcoholism is never named. My grandmother and her son in law disagreed almost violently on the subject of my mother - my daddy chose to ignore it, want to fix it, overlook it, deny it or take the blame for it. My grandmother saw it as a lack of moral fiber, enhanced by her only daughter's willful selfishness and expectation of always getting her own way. Neither saw it as a disease, as something that might respond to proper treatment. Neither could comprehend it or understand that it manifested itself in behavior. They argued incessantly about to handle her, how to lay down the law and force her to come to terms. If it had been what each defined as an actual drug addiction, I suspect my mother would've been packed off to some far off rehab hospital very early on - but alcohol was and remains, a legal drug. So all my daddy and grandmother really wanted was for my mother to learn how to drink responsibly, the way they did - and when she didn't or couldn't or wouldn't, they reacted like offended parents trying to discipline an unruly child.

Nothing worked, not Nana's rage and not my daddy's helpless pleas. I learned to keep my distance from my mother, especially when she was drinking. And soon I learned to be humiliated by her, ashamed to have come from her, frightened that I would become like her. By the time I was 12 or so, I had come to hate her with a resoluteness that lasted my entire life. I didn't understand the disease but I knew the effects and the pattern. Everyone she came into contact with was harmed, damaged in some way, and she took pleasure in it, spreading the blame like butter and bitterly enjoying it. She was happiest when she was most miserable - she liked the fact that she could inflict her misery on others without consequence.

"Let sleeping dogs lie." my daddy said. Pretend it isn't the whiskey, blame it on anything but the beer. Don't say the word alcoholic because once you do, you can't take it back and it would do more harm than good.

"Shine a light on a problem," my grandmother reckoned, "And it's not half as scary as the dark."

Aunt Jenny's kittens would wait for another day and my mother slept on while her mother and husband bickered the afternoon away over a game of gin rummy and a family in disarray.