My Dad, his bottle, and what he left behind...

My father was an alcoholic. There was a time when I believed that the only effect that had on me was to keep me from getting drunk. I’ve never been drunk or used illegal drugs. Being from my generation, many people find that amazing, but most of them have never seen the things I’ve seen. In an off-handed way I can thank my father for my aversion to brain altering chemicals, it’s true. As I grew older I realized that my fathers alcoholism affected me in many ways and most of them were not so positive.

When you live with an alcoholic you can never predict what will happen from one day to the next. One day my father would come home in a good mood, smiling and patient. The next day he might be in a rage and decide to knock my mother around while yelling and threatening to kill her. When you live with that day in and day out, you begin to live with a knot in your stomach. You prepare for the yelling and screaming and, because you’re prepared for that, you can’t really appreciate the good days. The knot eventually stays with you all the time. The innocent child in you hides behind the walls you build up for yourself deep inside. Everything in your life is met with a defensive reaction. You begin to wonder: “How is this going to hurt me?” about everything. You never really relax or let your guard down. Life becomes one traumatic event after another and the moments in between are spent trying to prepare for the next one. It alters everything in your life.

If it happens to you when you’re very young, you develop the constant fear of having your mother killed and losing your father to prison. When you’re too young to control anything in your life, you’re completely at the mercy of someone controlled by alcohol. No kid should ever have to live like that. No kid should ever have to get a butcher knife for his mother to keep his father from killing her. No kid should ever have to see his father hit his mother at all. It’s no way to live…believe me.

In my life, my experiences as a child living with an alcoholic have made me pray for peace more than anything else in life. Since it’s most peaceful when I’m alone…I’ve spent most of my life alone. I’ve had relationships with women but I’ve never let them get too close. The child still hiding behind the walls remembers too well that when you let someone into your heart they can really hurt you. Even close friends aren’t allowed too close. It’s hard trying to explain to a child living behind walls that things have changed…

It’s hard for me to accept weakness in others, but it’s really hard to accept it in myself. Weakness invites attack so you have to always be strong. It is really hard for me to forgive. I have found that I just can’t too many times. God, in His grace, has shown me that He can do it through me if I’ll just step aside and let Him. I’m still learning…slowly.

Never letting anyone too close, wanting to be inside where it looks warm and inviting but always staying outside looking in…and living with the remnants of a knot in my stomach. It can be exhausting.

I can thank my father, and his weakness for alcohol, for all of this. He taught me to live in fear. He forced me to be strong when I just wanted to be a kid. He left me with the legacy of never being able to be too close to anyone. He made sure by his example that I would never want to get drunk…or be like him in any way. My father taught me how to be a man by teaching me how not to be a man. He threw away the chance to get to know a neat little kid. But, he was my father…

Bobby Gene Perkins (Born:1937, Died:1991)

I forgive you Dad…