I hope we're having a good day this weekend ...

Counting days by good and bad ones replaced the ordinary calendar. Thankfully I migrate to another city during the week, only coming home for weekends. I can escape the situation and usually turn off the thoughts about my dad, a well appreciated opportunity that the rest of the family doesn't have. Five days a week it's me, my life, my wants and needs. I do things that other students do, attend classes, study, go out for lunch or just for fun, attend various events, drink and dance, try to keep up with my interests, check FB and mail, stay up all night chatting with roomates, go for a walk in the park with my date, overcook pasta, order food to take home, miss a bus and catch the next one wet from the rain because I forgot my umbrella, get everywhere 5 minutes later as agreed. Last couple years number of classes decreased, economical situation changed and I started working, so I now proudly represent a group of trendy young people working in offices sitting behind computer screens all day long. Yeah, by the end of the week I might even get a bit more sarcastic and cynical.

Now, here's why I love my life:
On fridays I return Home, to a calm village with a little church, where everyone knows everyone, get news on sundays after mass, go for a cup of coffee or tea to a neighbor, make barbeque on the front yard, let the cat sleep out over the night and take the dog for a walk in the forest. Does is sound too idyllic? Trust me, it's is as beautiful as you can imagine. Considering that the people always add that something which makes the perfection of nature a bit less perfect. No matter what, my home is a place of natural beauty, away from the smell and the noise of the city, where I can let the stress out and relax in peace.

Then, as a part of my growing up experience, I got used to using the term 'bad day'. We were having more and more of them. My dad started having 'bad days', weekend, weeks ... until there was another 'we're having a good day'.

'Bad day' to me and my family is a day of weakness, when there's one bad thing too much so you give it all up and become a bad thing yourself. Negativity, depression, hatred, disappointment, resentment, anger, fights, silence. Your senses notice a different tone of voice, cold look, that awful smell. Negative energy spreads from my dad to all of us and it turns out to be yet another heartbreaking weekend of painful truth.

Yearning for stress-free environment and acceptance of my loved ones I returned home coming onto another 'bad day' too many times. It sucked out the rest of my energy for the week and the only thing that was worse than that was going back to my 'other' life, starting a new week feeling half dead, too often wishing I was dead.


Sometimes hoping that things will change, hoping that people can change.

Days turned into months, months into years ... nothing changed

Just now I remembered a little detail of that day, one that I pushed aside in my memory ... Before he left for work that day, I noticed that he prepared a bottle of juice to take to work, which was strange because they could get that kind of juice at work from those things with drinks and junk food. It was the same bottle, the same color of content ... He was taking a small juice bottle of wine to work and he was hiding it from others carefully.

After that evening dad seemed to realized that the whole thing went to far. He decided to stop drinking beer until summer, which meant couple months. He was sober for couple of weeks than his mood changed and again there was another weekend of hard drinking. No beer. Just more wine and stronger liquor, spirits.

Whole family, neighbours and his friends knew about his 'no beer' mission and nobody saw anything strange in this. It was kind of popular in that period to have goals like this, somebody decided not to drink any alcohol for couple of months, another person quit on certain kinds of drinks, others were starting to eat healtier and workout. The generation in their 50ies was making new resolutions for the new half century of their lives. For the first time they calculated how much working years they have left before their retirement, started dreaming of their new freedom with limited budget yet all that time that they will have. Women went to bed with warm feet, men with cold ones. Women accepted they were going into menopause, men just whined about the strange changes.

Ups and downs come and gone ... The only thing that really changed is how everybody accepted the new condition they were in and went along with it. We all grew old a little, us kids grew taller, changed lines of our faces a little, started thinking a bit differently, our parents gained couple wrinkles, pounds and wisdom of the old ones.

But my dad was still drinking.

The how

It's been couple years now since I've first realized how far the situation was. I probably knew before, somewhere deep down, but the moment when I truly, rationally accepted the fact that my dad can't control his drinking, will stay in my memory for good.

The society in which my family lives is one of those that very aggressively force alcohol into your live. The good host always offers wine and beer first, if you refuse both, they offer you something stronger, if you refuse that, they make sure you're not being shy for some reason before offering you no alcohol drink. When men of the village get together to renew ones roof or something, women form troops which take care that none of them get even close to  being 'thirsty'.

When I was a little girl, I thought guys never even drink anything else but beer and wine. And I never thought my dad was ever drunk during the day. If we went out in the evening and dad drank a glass too much, mom was always driving back home. Even though secretly, I thought my dad was still a better driver even with some alco in his blood, than my mom when she's tired ... Anyway, my dad never drove when he drank that one glass or a bottle too much.

One day, when I was still a young driver, I had to pick him up after work, 10 pm. He wasn't waiting for me yet, so I moved to the passanger seat like I was used to ('if there is a man in a car, it should be him driving, because men are better drivers', another brilliant idea of my environment). When dad got out of the company, he looked a bit strangely at me, asked me why did I move, but still - sat onto the drivers seat and off we went. When he got to the exit from the parking lot, I knew he was drunk. Completely drunk.

Usually it takes us about 15 minutes to get home. I didn't look at the clock but it was definitely longer that time and those couple minutes were one of my worst ones. We were driving in the middle of the road, moving to the right just in time to avoid cars passing by. We nearly crashed too ... It was late and there weren't many other cars, we were lucky. But we couldn't completely avoid one of the oncoming cars and broke the side mirror. Dad stopped the car, I unleashed my seat belt, 'GET OUT OF THE CAR, I'M DRIVING HOME!!'

He shrugged his shoulders, 'What's done is done, I might as well drive all the way home.' We were only half way.

We got home safety, without any other accident, yet the world seemed to start collapsing. My dad, who never drinks and drives, just sat behind that wheel completely drunk, coming home from work with his daughter on the passanger seat!

The starting point has to be tough

It took me much too long to figure out the most basic title to this blog. What is it about? What do I want to write about and what for? My family, my dad, or is it all just about me, needing time and space to express the confusion of thoughts that are mingling with most various ideas coming to my mind.

Am I setting a goal, objective, or am I on a mission? What is the difference between these words? How can I fully express myself after deciding to write in a foreign language? Does any of this matter?

Everything matters. I want this to be my way of contributing to a better present, creating a stronger foundation for my family's future. Writing has helped me before, however this time the topic is a bit too much for me to simply put it on a paper, which makes blogging the perfect choice.

My dad has problems with alcohol. I honestly believe he's not yet an alcoholic but he definitely needs help with it. I'm 24, soon to be graduating from university. My family is just another family, with a teenager, money problems and cable TV. I hope there are yet many years of stupid fights, jokes that only us five understand, things that we'd never talk about together, colds and flus that we'll share, in front of us. I don't want life as it is now to change suddenly for a such seamless life companion as only alchol can be.

I've accepted the fact that it has gone over the edge and that we got to a point where we can't seem to find any good way to move on without consequences. I am not asking for help, I just want to share this experience with 'the web world'. And if anyone wants to share his or her thoughts, I'd be grateful for a comment ...

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