This is the hardest chapter for me to write.  Even now, I question whether I should include it in my first memoir.  Maybe it should be included down the road when I could look at it all in hindsight.  There are multiple struggles that I detail throughout this book, but this one is by far the hardest one to endure.  

    If you know me on a deep, personal level, you know that I don’t drink.  There have been times when I have consumed small amounts socially, but there are a couple of reasons why I have never drunk alcohol more than that.  For one, I don’t enjoy it.  I have never found a beverage where I said, “I have to have that on a regular basis.”  I don’t enjoy the taste of any kind of alcohol; give me a Coke or a Sprite and I’ll be happy.  Second, I choose not to drink because I don’t want to be another statistic, especially when it comes to my family.  

    Alcoholism rages in all sides of my family.  Over the years, I have learned of terrible stories, stories of members long gone who took their last breath in a flea-bag motel, with no one by their side.  What were very hard working people later became a mere shell of themselves as they became consumed by the disease.  For years, I thanked God for sparing my immediate family of this destructive poison.

    But that is no longer the case.  I’ll just go ahead and say it: My father is an alcoholic.  It pains me to say it, but it also gives me a great relief to say it out loud.  I spend many years trying to hide it from family and friends, to the point where I became mentally exhausted from the effort.  The same goes for my mother and my sisters.  If you catch my father on a sober day, even he will admit the truth and tell you that he has a problem.  Knowing that other people know my “darkest secret” still makes me uncomefortable, but at least I can now sleep at night without dreaming of trying to keep it unknown to those I care about.  

    As I write this, my father and I are estranged.  Forthe first time in my life, in 2021, I have felt it necessary to break off all communication from him.  I have blocked him so I don’t potentially receive any text messages or phone calls.  We’re no longer “friends” on Facebook, as I wondered if he would try to reach out that way.  I had to do it for my own peace of mind.  If a mechanical feature keeps me from being able to reach out to him, maybe I won’t get triggered by the things he does.  

    It didn’t always be like that.  Before my teens, I believe he and I had a good relationship.  Even to this day, he is the hardst-working person I know, with a heart that would make him give you the shirt off of his back.  He, along with my mother, made sure I had ever opportunity available to me.  He also pushed me to shoot for the stars, encouraging and supporting me about my writing.  

    With what I knew about my family at an early age, I prayed that my father wouldn’t succumb to alcoholic gene that appeared to touch so many people I knew.  He was my hero, a man who could overcome anything.  I believed that he was too strong to give into something so easily.  

    I was eight years old when I learned differently.  I noted every time he would secretively go off and us children could not follow, as well the times we wanted to take a sip from his cup and he refused, no matter or pleas.  It amazes me how a child can pick up on things like that.

    Even though I suspected, I never saw it with my own eyes.  I wanted to think differently.  But one day my curiosity got the best of me and I snuck off to where he would hide, without anyone looking.  There, my fears were confirmed: beer cans everywhere.  I began to worry that his fate was sealed, that there was nothing I could do.  A part of me wanted to just ignore whe I had learned and pretend that the truth didn’t exist.  But a part of me wanted him to know that I knew.  Maybe if I showed him how much I didn’t want him to drink, he would stop.  I rushed off to my where, where my writing supplies were already scattered about.  

    I returned to the scene of the crime moments later and deposited a brief note that he would have to stumble upon.  I don’t remember what all I wrote or what happened once he read it, but I remember the first two sentences I wrote as clearly now as the day I wrote them:

    “Daddy, I know your secret.  You are drinking beer.”

    My eight-year-old self only had so much control and when really finally hit me, I became hysterical.  Nothing could comfort me.  Unless I was asleep, I was crying.  I feared that everything was bound to fall apart, now that I knew the truth. 

    I remember my mom coming to my room the day after my discovery.  I could tell that my emotional distress wore on her heart.  Even though her words didn’t help me at the time, she gave me a valuable lesson.  She said that my father enjoyed drinking beer the way that I enjoyed drinking soda.  Not eveeryone who drinks alcohol becomes an alcoholic.  

    She was right, not everybody who drinks are alcoholics.  And that’s why I beleive my conversation with her that day is so important to me, because I could have gone on with life believing otherwise.  She saved me from myself and I will always be grateful for that.

    Years passed and I don’t recall a period in that time where his drinking was an issue.  My father continued to hide his hobby and it was just an open secret that nobody talked about.  I guess, in the back of my mind, I held on to the one hope that my mother gave me as a child, that his drinking could possibly never be a problem.  

    All of that changed when I was a graduating freshman, on the heels of being fifteen.  By then, my parents had started their own company, a profitable one but not without it’s stressful moments and hard work.  It was a Friday evening in the early Spring and the plan was to travel up to Highlands to enjoy a lavish meal at resturant owned by a clent of my parents.  My dad arrived from work and it was clear that he had had a rough day.  As soon as he arrived, he visited his homemade “cantina” and tied one on.  By the time we were ready to leave, my dad had drunk to much for my mother to feel comfortable with him driving.  She got in the driver’s seat, my oldest sister in the passenger side with me and my father in the back.  

    We had only travelled a couple of miles before he pulled out an unopened can of beer out of his pant pocket.  I’m sure I brought it to everyone else’s attention and the three of us asked him to not open it in the car, that surely he had had enough at home to tie him over until we returned from our trip.  That didn’t stop him, though.  He chugged away.  We all really had a problem when a second can appeared.  The majority of us agreed that going out to eat was not a good idea and we needed to return home.  

    My father, one of the most mature people I know, began acting much younger than I was at the time, whining because we couldn’t handle him having a cool refreshment after having a long day at work.  We all began arguing with each other, disagreeing what an acceptable amount of alcohol consumption was appropriate before arriving at an elegant resturant, which was owned by one of their clients.

    The conversation abruptly ended when my father had had enough and chucked the full can towards the front of the compact BMW convertible, hitting my mother in the back of the head and spewing alcohol all over the car.  I was speechless.  I couldn’t react to what had just happened, frozen in my seat.  My father had degraded my mother in a way that I can only describe as sick, hurting her and soaking her body and clothes in alcohol, just because she had asked him not to drink in the car, with her children watching.  I didn’t think her request was unreasonable.  

    At that moment, I believed that their marriage was effectively over.  I couldn’t fathom how a relationship could overcome what had just transpired.  My parents had always taught me to respect and treat others the way I wanted to be treated, especially females.  If my father couldn’t follow this simple, yet important rule, what else was there to save in a marriage?

    Once we made it home and we all go out of the drenched car, my father did what he had been unable to do within the confines of the car.  He threw beer cans, both empy and full, all over the driveway.  He cursed at my mother.  He acted in ways that not only made me fearful of him but embarrased for him.  I knew that my grandparents had taught him better than  that.  How could someone act like that in front of their children and towards their mother?

    The evening concluded with my father crying in the back seat of the BMW and us children falling asleep next to our mother in our parent’s bedroom.  I prayed that what we had experienced that night was all a dream, actually a nightmare that I would soon wake up from.  I didn’t want my family to crumble around me, but I also didn’t what had happened to happen again.  

    I don’t remember how, but we were all able to move past that night without any real solution to the problem.  I refer to that weekend as the start to our family’s long-term rollercoaster.  My dad would have a knockdown, drag-out episode (the rollercoaster’s intense drop) and then we would move on with a piece of ourselves lost in the process (the rollercoaster’s incline, with another inevitble, future drop).  We could expect this cycle to complete itself every sixty to ninety days.  

    When I turned fifteen, something happened to make my dad decide to get sober.  What it was, I can’t remember.  It was probably another episode of his and my mother threatened divorce.  He said he was getting sober for his family, which experts say is not the right way to go about it.  You have to want to get sober for yourself and the rest falls into place.  We didn’t take what he said as a warning sign; we were just happy that he was trying to stop drinking.  But because of his self-imposed obligation to his family, he resented us every day.  We still couldn’t be around him because his attitude, his comments towards and about us were unbearable.  We would all automatically go to what we referred to as “our corners”.  My mom and I would hold ourselves up in our respective rooms, Miranda would stay in the secondary living room to watch TV and Mekenzie was so young, she mingled amongst us all.  As for my dad, he would camp out in the center of the house (the primary living room), the TV up so loud that it agrivated the whole household and we would take turns chewing him out for keeping us up into the wee hours of the morning.  

    During those two years he proclaimed to be sober (I now have my doubts that it was actually two years), he would attend the local Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.  it was actually a family affair.  My dad would go to his meeting and across the hall, my mom, Miranda and I would attend the Al-Anon meeting.  Sometimes, we would sit in the AA meetings with my dad.  

    A lot of the people in those meetings envied my dad.  They had no one in their life, let alone someone willing to go to an AA meeting with them.  We were there during every milestone my father made (thirty-day chip, six-months, one year and two years).  Some of us also sat in with him during their special speaker meetings.  I would listen to these tragic stories and would look to my dad, hoping that the words we heard would keep him on a more permanent path to sobriety.  

    As for the Al-Anon meetings my mother, sister and I would sit through, there were times where I came out feeling very hopeful and uplifted by what someone may have said and then there were times where I thought I was wasting my time.  Don’t get me wrong, Al-Anon is a wonderful program and I hope to one day go back to our local meetings.  But there would be times I would go in there, after my dad had said something hurtful towards me or my mother, something to the effect that he wished he was drinking again, if it wasn’t for his family telling him not to, and I just wanted to scream and throw things around.  My father was the alcoholic, not me.  Why did I feel compelled to sit there and try to find ways to help myself heal?  Why did we continue to allow ourselves to endure this emotional distress?  I wanted someone to tell me how to either cure him, help make me numb to it all or give my mother the courage to walk away.

    All that said, the people I sat with in those meetings were wonderful.  I remember most of them and catch up with them when we run into each other.  Despite the feelings I just mentioned, at least I could look at them and still do so and know that I’m not along in this.  Other people have been hurt and if we can’t rely on the abuser, we can rely on each other. 

    We all thought that things were going to change in these two years.  Yes, we were all still miserable, but we also knew that God didn’t create paradise in a day.  It would take time and at the end of the day, we believed we were on the road to happier days.  

    Disappointment truly makes the knife cut deeper.  The night before Thanksgiving, 2008, I was the last one up in the house, pacing the floors.  It was late in the evening and my father had not returned home.  I don’t know where he had gone or what he was doing, but he wouldn’t answer my calls and after so much time had gone by, I started to get worried.  

    He finally pulled it in and a relief swept over me.  He’d be in at any second and I could finally retire for the night.  I waited and waited and waited some more.  He never came into the house.  What was he doing out there?  Was he alright?  Was it really him that entered the driveway?  I went outside to get some answers.

    It was cold outside.  I walked to what was indeed my father’s truck.  There was music playing very loudly.  What in the world was he doing in that truck?  I opened the door, ready to overload him with questions.

    I didn’t have to ask anything.  He sat there, drunk as a skunk, beer cans littered all around him.  My suspicions were finally confirmed.  In my heart, I believed that he had broken his sobriety weeks before, but had no proof.  Whether that night was the first night in two years he had consumed a drink, I still don’t know.  But it didn’t help my reality from crashing down.  

    If we got into it out in the driveway, we did a really good job of not waking anyone up because no one came out to see what in the world was going on.  All I could think about was how disappointed and sad my mother would be when the truth came out.  When I told him that she needed to know, he threw curse words at me, which I responed in kind.  Before walking away, I told him either he told my mother the truth before we got ready for our Thanksgiving activities or I would.

    My dad decided to fess up to his mistake.  I’m glad he did, but it didn’t make the truth any easier for the rest of us.  As expected, my mother was distroyed and all of our Thanksgiving plans occurred with bad tastes in all of our mouths.

    The cycle has continued ever since.  Every time, the rollercoaster goes a little bit higher and comes down a little bit further.  All five of us give up a part of ourselves with each ride.  My mother, God bless her, has to endure hurtful, untrue statements about her every time he falls off the wagon.  And with the strength she believes she doesn’t have, stays with him, hopeful that things will return to the “normal” we are accustomed to at that time.  I tell her over and over that God has a golden thrown waiting for her in Heaven, for being the saint that she is.  

    It wasn’t until I was twenty-nine, in 2020, that I decided to leave my family home.  It was a rash decision, fuled by emotions and whatever alcohol that was in my dad’s system at the time.  I talk about that episode more in depth in a later chapter.  I could have left a lot sooner.  I had the financial stability to go out on my own, but I didn’t.  Why?  I guess because I needed to be the man of the house that my father hadn’t been in years.  Someone had to be the parent and it wasn’t going to be him.  My sisters, my mother and I bicker at each other all the time, but it only through the relationship we have with each other that has kept this family together.  I stayed because of them.  

    Sometimes I wonder how low a person can go with this disease.  And yes, it is a disease.  I don’t blame him for this sickness that he has, I blame him for what he decides to do about it.  Every time he has an episode, I fell like he has finally reached rock bottom.  But then the next episode happens and I think that one is it.  

    My father has had some close calls up to this point.  By the grace of God, he hasn’t killed anyone with his drunk driving (we have been told that the police are aware of this, saving us the difficult decision of reporting him).  Because he didn’t have a record and because my mother solicited letters of recommendation from members of the community, a judge dropped drunken disorderly charges filed against him when he went on a bender, spent a couple of days in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina and was arrested in Spartanburg on his way back.  He hasn’t had any accidents while working drunk on the job site and the business has managed to stay afloat, despite the times he has had to stay at home because he had drunk himself to sleep the night before.  How much more does a person have to endure to realize what they’re doing to themselves? 

    Once again, the family and I believed that the most recent attempt to get sober was the one that would stick.  In the Spring of 2021, he told me he needed to do more to get sober.  His health has been steadily declining, his fellow AA members would try to set him straight when he would show up to meetings drunk and he would continue to (luckily) avoid killing himself or others via his drunk driving.  He told me that he was going to go to more AA meetings and would make an appointment to see a therapist.  

    After twenty years of this, I am now sceptical of anything he says, does or promises.  I agreed with him that he did not look well, but didn’t know if this was enough to really show him that what he was doing was slowly killing him.  I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him with his concerning words.

    “I need help.  I’m not well.  I need to do more to get better.” 

    For the first time in a long time, he told me he loved me that day.  And for the first time in a long time, I told him I loved him, too.  What he said gave me hope because I had always told him that talking to someone about this, someone who is not family and not in daily involvement in his life, could help open his eyes in ways that none of us ever could.  “Get to the root of the problem and the rest will fall into place.”

    To my surprise, he followed through with what he promised to do.  He went to his meetings at least once a day, sometimes twice, if his schedule allowed it.  Then he signed up for therapy.  I couldn’t help but smile when my dad said the therapist was firm with him, saying if he didn’t plan on giving it his one hundred percent to walk away before they started, because she didn’t have time to deal with quitters.  Unless he couldn’t avoid it, he was at every session.

    It hurts my heart when I say that everything fell apart once again when he stopped going to his meetings, stopped attending his therapy.  It didn’t take long for things to fall apart after that.  He drunkily drove to New York State to purchase a car he can’t remotely afford.  Upon his return to North Carolina, he saught refuge with his brother and sister-in-law, religious fanatics who waste no time in turning him against his wife and children when the opportunity presents itself.  By the time he had returned to Franklin, he was accusing my mother of chronic mental abuse and accusing us both of manipulating him until it drove him to drink.  

    When he is sober, his family is his everything.  He is head over heels for my mother and loves spending time with his family.  But when he is not, we are the furthest thing from his mind.  False resentments push him to drink harder and faster, which causes the accusations to be more crazy and hurtful.  

    What gets us all is the accusation that my mother has brainwashed us kids into believing that he is an alcoholic.  Remember, it was my mother who tried to normalize his drinking.  To accuse her of that is to say that his children are not capable of forming conclusions on their own.  We are educators, medical professionals, writers and artists with high, indisputable marks on our skills and intelligence.  We have eyes in our heads.  We don’t need our mother to tell us when is going on.  We see it for ourselves.  He and he only has drug himself into the ground and only he is the one who continues to make our relationship with him more fragile.  

    When my father stated his intentions to leave my mother, it gave me no pleasure in voluntering to help move his things out of the home they had worked so hard to build and pay off together.  But at the sime time, it gave me a relief that I had never felt before.  It was time.  We all had endured to much.  And if he made the first move to sever our family, we needed to let him.  It would hurt, but we all deserved to live a happier life, even if he chose not to be.  

    Moving my father out of my family home went just like I thought it would.  My mother wound up hiding in her closet, fearful of what he would say or do.  He made loud, hurtful comments towards me and her.  And we would have my uncle on speakerphone, denying the same allegations that he put in my father’s head to begin with.  He would lash out at everybody, confused and inconsistent.  Anger was his only motivation.  

    As terrible as that day was, the hurt that my father had once again brought into our lives, I truly believe that God was working on all of us that day.  Without any provocation, my mother’s closest friend arrived at the house, just as things was getting more intense and heated.  Had she not arrived, I fear it would have gotten physical on my father’s end.  Her being there, and him knowing that one more person knew the truth, putting him even more in the minority, he left.  As he pulled out ofthe driveway, he looked at me in a way he had never done before, and we had had many altercations over the years.

    “The truth will come to light,” he said, speeding off to what I would later find out to be the haven of my uncle’s home.  

    “I’m sure it will,” I responded.

    What he said was another false dig towards my mother.  But the statement, in a different context, is actually spot on.  To those who don’t know, they’ll one day learn the truth of my father’s illness.  It may come from this writing, or it may come from Mobile Patrol, but the truth will come out.  I can only hope that he won’t be too far gone to make amends once that happens.  

    That was the last time I have spoken to my father.  If he has reached out to me, I wouldn’t know because me blocking him every way I know possible.  I didn’t come to that conclusion lightly.  If there was a sliver of a chance that I could help him right now or maintain a relationship with him, I wouldn’t have done it.  But he pushed me to his point.  Nobody else can be blamed for the strain that has forever altered our bond.

    As I say how much I have endured over the past couple of decades, I must disclose that I’m not an innocent party here.  In the heat of certain episodes, I have said things to and about my father that I didn’t mean and regret saying to this day.  When he gave up his sobriety in November of 2008, I told him that as long as he was drinking, he was dead to me.  In June of 2021, I called him a drunken piece of trash.  Those words haunt me as I write this, and I pray to God that I am forgiven for what I have said about a parent.

    Whenever I discuss my life with my father, I try my best to pair a negative fact or comment with a positive one.  I started this chapter off by saying how good of a person my father is and I would like to stress it more now.  When my father is sober, he is the nicest, kindest, hardest working person I can imagine.  And in the years that I have been alive, he has tried to impress his good qualities on me.  I’d like to say that he has done a good job in that department.  And some days, when I look at myself in the mirror, I can catch myself looking more and more like him.  That’s not a bad thing, either.  I want to carry out his good qualities in a person, becaue they’re so hard to come by in this world right now.  

    I love my father with all my heart, but right now, I can’t be around him.  I pray every day that he sees the light and returns to his family, even if those relationships are carried out in new, different ways.  I’ve only wanted him to be happy and I hope that when his time comes, he he can proudly tell his maker that I was the best son I could be for him.    “God, grant me the serenity, to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”

This chapter is copyrighted by Tyler Cook (2021) and will be published in a future project.