To be honest, because my last post was so negative and self-pitying and also written while I was not 100% straight, I really expected to be kicked off this board. Imagine my relief when I logged in today and found 5 caring, sympathetic responses! You guys really are great (I'm almost tearful as I write this).

I'll say upfront, too, that I'm not sober now (daughter is at her dad's). I made a promise I would not post on this board again while not sober - for my own sake, and for the sake of the people who are struggling and probably the last thing they need exposure to is drunken unreal crap. So I am sorry for yet again transgressing that rule, and I'm really going to try and stick to my promise to only post when sober in the future. There is very little point, in my experience, in trying to talk about one's alcohol problem when one is already drinking. Because the whole time, in a way, the boozy person who moans on about their drink problem is still 'having fun' on some kind of self-indulgent level, even if they are miserable that they have relapsed (at least, that is how it is for me).

But pretty much everything I put in that last post was true....I mean, I wasn't boozily slanting things in order to make myself look like more of a victim. I read it today, before I had had a drink, and thought, wow, even though I was a bit out of it when I wrote it, it does actually sum up pretty well my true feelings of anger and rage towards ex and parents.

My ex was bona-fide abusive. I've stopped kidding myself about that one, but he hasn't - he actually wants me to come back. I never had my eyes blackened or my bones broken....the physical abuse I got from him was 'mild' compared with some of the stories of the women I met at the women's shelter. It was mainly all about symbolically humiliating me, I think, and making the point that he was bigger and stronger than me, and if push came to shove (as it were) he could physically bully me if he wanted to (to be honest, I hit HIM a couple of times myself!)

 He mainly used to slap my face, or shove me, or kick my ass (literally) or chuck furniture around. But that was the least of it. It was the really the ongoing control freak stuff that made the relationship impossible. He was always suspicious that I was having an affair. Or that I wanted to have an affair. I had a very close male friend, someone I had been to university with, and been briefly involved with romantically. We always remained very good friends but because I had (albeit twelve years ago, when I was barely out of my teens) been sexually involved with this guy, Joe (my ex) just laid down the law, said that if I talked to or saw this guy I was 'disrespecting' him. I suppose I can understand his point of view, in a way. Perhaps I would not have been so thrilled if he had had an ex-girlfriend he was still really friendly with. But it wasn't just this guy....I wasn't allowed to talk on the phone to ANYONE, including my mother, for any length of time. If I was out with the baby for too long, I had to account for myself. Couldn't do anything without thinking: how will Joe react? He even accused me of being a perverted 'exhibitionist' because of an evening I would sometimes turn on the lights in our house but forget to draw the curtains!

Anyway, I digress. Toni DON'T worry about giving me advice....your post was wonderful, really brave and open, and also really gave me food for thought. It sounds like you had one hell of an awful childhood.

Actually, my early childhood was in most respects pretty good. My parents were together, and at that stage neither of them were huge drinkers. My dad, however, was addicted to gambling (he seems to have traded this addiction for alcoholism over the last 15 years or so...although he still gambles quite a bit. In fact, he is currently in Melbourne - that's the big gambling town in Australia - for no other reason at all than to hit the casino and the races).

Since my late teens/early 20s, however, my parents have often been really awful to me (I'm 33: I should be at the stage where I don't care anymore, but I do, I'm still very dependent on my mother: maybe I'm wearing her out a bit....). Not totally awful, though. Eg, when I needed a car after I left my husband, they paid for half of it. But every 'gift' I've had from Mum and Dad comes with big strings attached, if you know what I mean....

Actually, one of the main reasons why I moved in with my ex, before we had the baby, was that at a party on Australia Day (Oz equivalent of 4th July) my drunken father started picking on me about how much money I was costing him. At the time I was on a post-grad scholarship, living in a 'lovely' apartment that my mother had discovered and really pushed me to move into, even though I couldn't afford it. She said she would help me out with the money side, and indeed she did, but boy-oh-boy, did I have to 'pay' out of my ass in terms of hearing about how 'ungrateful' and 'exploitative' I was.

Anyway, at this party my dad just totally rounded on me, screamed in front of everyone that I should 'get out of his pocket', really humiliated me big-time (since I was at that point really proud that I was doing a PhD and had won a scholarship - albeit not a very lucrative scholarship....I didn't want everyone to know I couldn't pay my bills).

Two or so weeks later, when Joe (ex husband) said he thought we should live together, I said yes even though I really didn't want to move in with him, because his controlling tendencies and apparently inexhaustible capacity to pick fault with me were already very obvious.

Eg my voice was too loud: I was embarrassing in public (he hated me making conversation with staff in shops, for example): I was a drunkard (true enough, that one) and had to be 'banned' from drinking: I had been promiscuous in the past: I was untrustworthy: I was lazy, a slob, I wore dirty or awful clothes: I could never meet my thesis deadlines: my hair (which was very long at that point) was "poor hair" and I looked like a junkie: I had no class ..... etc etc.

The only reason, to be honest, why I let Joe move in with me, was because I figured that if he was splitting the rent with me, I wouldn't have to rely on my parents anymore.

People reading this (if they ARE still reading, I know it's long) may well be asking: why did I not simply get a job to supplement my meagre scholarship instead of moving in with 'Mr Wrong'? The short answer is I couldn't seem to get, or keep a job. I had always been 'bright' at school, and because of this my mother always wanted me to 'concentrate on my studies' when I was a teenager, so I wasn't allowed to go work in a checkout, like most teenaged girls do.

By the time I really needed some kind of low-level, casual work, I was too damned old and inexperienced to get any! I worked as a barmaid for about 3 weeks: got sacked cos I wasn't fast enough. Same with my waitressing stint (that only lasted one night). I got nervous and confused and stuffed up all the orders.....I think I even gave out the wrong change so the till was out (maths was never my forte. lol!).

I did have one great job for a while, one twelve hour day a week proof-reading for an ad agency, but then the company went bust (my boss at ad agency was reallly nice: I made a mistake once that cost the business five grand but he still didn't fire me, he knew I needed the money and was a really nice man).

Aside from that, I used to get a bit of teaching work at the university at which I was doing my PhD.  And that always went fine - it was pretty low key and I felt confident, at least - but then my teaching 'internship' ended and I didn't get anymore teaching work until I had finished my PhD (that is just the policy of the university - they will give the grad students one year of teaching experience, but then no more until you have taken your degree).

Joe, himself an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher had connections with the university and got me a job teaching Aboriginal  kids who had gotten into university via an anti-racist 'alternative action' type program (ie, the kids were smart and had passed an entrance exam, but hadn't finished high school and therfore were at a disadvantage with their literacy).

I am certainly not a racist, indeed I have more or less dedicated my life as a scholar to analysing and fighting against racism.....but I felt so awful teaching these black kids.  A lot of them were from tough backgrounds and really having a hard time, being on campus at this almost entirely white university....I felt like this patronising, privileged white f**khead, poncing around. I got really nervous before the classes, used to take pseudoephedrine (the 'upper' type drug you get in cold and flu tablets)  beforehand, which made me more nervous and jumpy still. I also made up some really dumb and, in retrospect, insulting lessons in order to demonstrate how to analyse literature (eg, one day I forced these kids  to consider the 'themes' of Little Red Riding Hood. God, they must have HATED me).  

Anyway, after about six weeks I was politely fired from that job (they told me a more senior staff member's fellowship had fallen over and he needed the work). One of the girls from my class, a really nice girl, told me the truth: she said 'you're always so NERVOUS, we can't follow what you are saying!'.

Joe was disgusted with me (he had done this same job for two years before me, and made a huge success of it).

Sorry,  this is turning into a damned novel.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, I became almost psychotically depressed. Was convinced my PhD thesis was 'evil' and that I would go to hell if I ever finished it: when a journal accepted one of my essays for publication, I actually emailed them begging them not to print it because it was an evil document that went against my religious beliefs! They went ahead and printed it anyway.....that's still the only thing I've ever published, btw.  

So I suspended my PhD and got a job with a dodgy ambulance chasing law firm as the 'office dogsbody'. Really hated it. I was 28 at the time and my immediate superior was an 18 year old girl (she was a nice girl, but in my 'pride' I felt insulted at having to be guided by someone who looked, to me, like a 12 year old). In the meantime Joe and I were fighting so badly I had to go back to live with my parents. It was while I was staying with my parents that I found out I was pregnant (it was really miraculous, my pregnancy. we had been using contraception, been really careful....in retrospect I think it was an act of God, because, to be honest, if it were not for my child I would be in a seriously bad way by now, I'm sure of it. Either dead or in the gutter).

Anyway, I returned to my apartment (which Joe had taken over) and told him the good news. His immediate reaction was 'I feel so virile!'. Then he wanted me to have an abortion. Within about half an hour of finding out I was expecting a baby, I already felt like it was impossible for me to have an abortion (don't get me wrong, I'm pro-choice, but my personal feeling once I discovered I was preganant was that I could not terminate the pregnancy. Even though I was only five or six weeks along, I couldn't help but think of the embryo as a person, and I just could not face an abortion).

Joe quickly saw that my mind was made up in this respect....and oh boy, the fights we had. he was super pissed off. I feel sorry for the neighbours we had at that point....it was a non-stop screaming match. I told the law firm I was expecting and they fired me, supposedly for always being late (I was only ever five or ten minutes late) and for taking too many sick days....this because about two months into the pregnancy I tripped over in the street and broke my nose and had to take a day and a half off, which didn't go down well, since I had only just started the job.

I'm still not sure how I managed to be so catastrophically clumsy. The doctor who stitched up my nose said he thought I had probably fainted briefly because I wasn't getting enough iron. Which I probablywasn't, because at that point Joe was a vegetarian and insisted that I be one too....every damned night I had to come up with a different vegetarian dinner, but on the sly I was going to MacDonald's and wolfing down hamburgers, two, three at a time....really craved meat.

Joe to this day thinks I broke my nose because I had been drinking at lunch. The ladies at the women's shelter I went to after I left Joe obviously did not believe that JOE had not broken my nose!

Poetic justice, I suppose....  

I am not at all pissed off with Toni's suggestion that I could use some therapy. But the fact is, my head has been 'shrinked' a lot, ever since I was 20. I've had issues with depression and also anxiety problems, and since I was 19/20 there's never been a time when I haven't been on anti-depressants and/or tranquilllisers. In my early 20s I used to self-mutilate a lot while drunk, and also ended up in hospital more times than I can count from both deliberate and accidental ODs on sleeping pills and painkillers. I was referred to a lovely psychiatrist, a really nice guy, not at all pompous, and in some respects he really helped me a lot. But like many psychiatrists, he was inclined to to be dubious about AA. He did not think AA could work for me, since I was in his opinon too 'forward thinking' and too much of a planner, and therefore unable to embrace the 'one day at a time' ethos.

He recommended I abstain entirely from alcohol for 12 months (a moratorium, as he put it) and then experiment to see if I could drink moderately. He even produced some statistic to the effect that most heavy drinkers can become moderate drinkers after a 'moratorium' of 12 months.

Well goes without saying that I couldn't even do twelve days, let alone twelve months. Aside from my preganncy/breast-feeding time, the longest I have been sober since I was about 15 was via AA....

ah, well, must be off. THANKS for putting up with me! Thank you so much. Hopefully next time I post I will be a better, sober Sycorax, even if I feel like shit.

Sycorax