DID YOU GROW UP WITH ALCOHOLIC FATHER?

How did that affect your upbringing?

One thing we never talk about enough is male alcoholism and the impact it usually has on families. 

You sit at home and you hear your drunk father coming. You are having dinner but the moment you hear him at the door you scatter to your bedrooms to avoid the violence that comes with his drinking. 

You are afraid that he will beat you up again. Your sister is afraid she will be insulted again. You all run to bed thinking he will leave you alone. You pretend you are asleep when he calls out your name(s). You cover yourself completely thinking he will ignore you when he comes into your bedroom. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Your mother, though, never runs away. She has nowhere to run to. They sleep together, on the same bed. She has to serve the man of the house when he comes home, and more often than you can count, she is always the one who endures the beatings. It hurts you. It still hurts that you couldn't do anything for her as a child. You still remember the helplessness it made you feel. 

Sometimes she was slapped because she didn't open the door fast enough. Sometimes it's because the food wasn't warm enough. Other times it was because the food was horrible. He beat her up claiming she cooks the same thing everyday even though he never left money behind to cater for what he wants. He would ask for meat knowing very well she could barely afford the greens she put on the table without his help. 

He often came home drunk and he would break everything. Plates would fly everywhere. Your mother would wake up with a black eye. Your brother was always beaten up while trying to defend his mother. And sometimes, your father stole money too. He knew where your mother kept her savings and in desperate times, he ravaged through her purse looking for change. The money that was supposed to feed you that night. 

She never complained though. She understood it would end in a beating. She stayed silent. Hoping she will see another morning without a broken lip and a black eye.

That is the reality of most people who grew up with fathers who drank and yet alcohol is always presented as a men's thing and as a taboo for women. 

I would like to see a world where male drinking is as shunned as women drinking because it is the true cancer in our families.

It is the primary course of domestic violence just like it is the primary course for financial troubles that women usually have to make up for.

Society will tell men not to marry women who drink while ignoring everything drunk men do. 

In whatever you do as a woman, make sure you end up with a man who can control his drinking. You do not want your children to relieve some of the childhoods most people experienced out here.