Unwelcome Inheritance by Lisa Sue Woititz janet g. woititz

Author:Lisa Sue Woititz, janet g. woititz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

The Teenager Your Parents Warned You About

My eleven-year-old son is in the other room eating cereal and watching a movie on Netflix right now, and when I look at him and compare my life to his, it’s hard to believe reality. At his young age, I had such adult concerns, and my childhood was long gone. He just ran outside to play baseball, and I draw comfort from the fact that he doesn’t live in fear that one of his parents might come stumbling down the street drunk for all his friends to see. I also draw comfort from the fact that he hasn’t come home drunk or high himself.

My diaries remind me that at age twelve, less than a year older than my son is now, I was drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, using other drugs, and worse. My parents didn’t know where I was most of the time. Knowing all too well what trouble untended young people can get into, I fight the urge to hover and overprotect my son because he says he “likes the feeling of being trusted” when I leave him home alone to go around the corner for milk. I remind myself that my son is not me, that my family of the present is not my family of the past, that we have recovery tools and a better understanding of addiction than I had. Although I am far from perfect as a mother, these small signs of progress are reassuring.

Due to school district zone changes, I was sent to a new school to complete seventh and eighth grades. Most of the faces there were new to me, and for the first time in my life, I felt that other kids wanted to hang out with me. As a big group of us began to bond together, I worried constantly about fitting in, being left out of things, or being booted out of the group altogether. My mother wrote about this in her book Adult Children of Alcoholics:

Feeling different is something you have had with you since childhood, and even if the circumstance does not warrant it, the feeling prevails. . . .

. . . As a result, socializing, being part of any group, became increasingly difficult. You simply did not develop the social skills necessary to feel comfortable or a part of the group. 2

Mom knew how I felt inside, but if she knew the danger I put myself in just to impress the other kids, she would have been devastated. She also would have been very scared to realize that, as with many children of alcoholics, the level of excitement and risk I needed in my life to not feel bored was dangerous.

On April 27, 1978, my diary entry reads, “I’m afraid that one day they’ll just decide that they hate me and want to kick me out of our group. I’m scared shitless about that. Those people mean so much that if that happened I’d be just as well off dead.”

It was

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