A little more time, a little more knowledge

This time of year is difficult for me. Although Mother's Day changes from year to year it will always be ingrained in my memory as the day my dad died.

Now those of you who follow this blog or read it from time to time know that my father was an alcoholic. It was the discovery of this that started me upon my journey of knowledge. Discovering at the age of 13 that your father loved a whisky bottle more than you was devastating. Discovering the first name off his lips was Johnnie or Grant rather than Tracy was as if I didn't exist. Why was I even there? The pain of the realisation of your own insignificance was to say the least traumatic.

The journey I have taken could fill a thousand volumes of my favourite book, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and one day maybe I will write it all down rather than give you snippets in blog form. Yet this Mother's Day for the first time I really think that I will remember my father with fondness. It is almost like a veil has lifted. My own struggles with life, love, children and health have taught me many important things. Not least of all I am normal.

I decided a while back that it was time to let the resentment go, time to remember the man for who he wanted to be and ultimately underneath who he truly was. Only then you see would I gain release from the trauma of the past. I always kept blaming myself you see, thinking that it was somehow my fault that my father didn't love me, but that was the wrong way of looking at it. I was really blaming myself for the helplessness I felt at my inability stop my father drinking.

The professional in me knows that the person has to want to change and change cannot be forced upon someone, the son in me was just missing his daddy.

So if you find yourself out there in a world of misery due to alcohol either from over drinking or from seeing yourself over drinking please remember that change is inevitable. Sooner or later people begin to understand that when alcohol is in the bottle you have total control yet when it goes into your throat it starts to control you. People are not bad because they drink however they are foolish if they do not learn about what drink really does to you.

On Mother's Day this year I ask you to remember that the faults of our parents are not the fault of the children yet the children must seek to understand, and forgive, the faults of the parents else they teach their children to be their parents.


Peace and Happiness to you all.