How I Knew My Relationship With Wine Was Unhealthy

This is author Joyce Maynard's second part of a three-part series on drinking. You can read the first piece here. I was 12-years-old, which would make the year 1966 -- and I was home alone, except for my father, who was upstairs asleep. But he was not so much sleeping as passed out. Knock at the door: a police officer. "Do you know anything about the Oldsmobile outside?" he asked me. It was our family car. Abandoned in the middle of the street in front of our house. With the motor running. "I guess my father left it there," I told the policeman. This wasn't the first time. "Don't worry," he said, when he learned I was the only other person in the house. "I'll pull it into the driveway for you." Then he drove away. No ticket, no further discussion, then or ever. I never told anyone what happened that night -- including my mother, or my father, who probably wouldn't have remembered. In our family, as in most during those years, we didn't talk about drinking. I'd never heard the word "alcoholic." I just knew I would never let myself get drunk as my father did. And in all my 62 years, I never have. But there are other ways to experience a drinking problem. Fifty years later, I recognized I had one. My occasional glass of wine had become a nightly ritual. One afternoon it came to me that I was checking my watch to see if it was 5 p.m. yet -- the hour I'd told myself it was OK to open a bottle, though if there was a bottle already open from the night before, I might po...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news