When Your Parents Can No Longer Be in the Same Room

Drinking, fighting, breakdowns and survival: How a dysfunctional family doesn’t have to destroy you.

My parents split up suddenly and messily when I was 21.

I was at university the day it happened, my sister delivering the news over the phone and summoning me back home. She was panicked; my father was erratic and crazed, fuelled by booze, shock, anger and grief. My mother was similar, but minus the drinking.

I will spare you the details of why they split, but suffice to say my mother hadn’t been faithful and my father had found out. It was all true, but in her defence, she had been living with a violent alcoholic for decades. I should know, I was there.

The catalyst for their explosive separation and subsequent divorce was a phone call from a jealous wife one ordinary weekday afternoon. My father’s nuclear response followed afterwards.

This story is about living in the fallout of that response. This is about how a family of four is ripped asunder, my sister and I left to awkwardly mediate between parents, our own trauma pushed aside to caretake for two 50 year olds, both having their own individual breakdowns.

This is about how my dysfunctional family had always been falling apart.

This a story about life.

I arrived home on the fraught instruction of my sister. I had put aside a week to be back in Barnet, Greater London, though I didn’t know what use I would be.

On my return, I discovered my father’s drinking had escalated to super-human levels. Due to my mother’s indiscretions, she was painted as the villain and was therefore somewhat removed from the picture, even though I knew what my father was like.

I’d witnessed the violence, the hospitalisations, the home destructions, the police interventions. He was a domestic tyrant. I’d fought with him myself, physically and verbally. I think we all had. Our family life was a straight-up mess, I’m not going to lie.

At 20, higher education had provided me with an escape route and I was able to extract myself from that quagmire of volatility, only to be dragged back in again…

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