My father’s addiction dominated my childhood – but I thought I’d escaped relatively unscathed. Lockdown made me reconsider
It’s a global pandemic and I’m late for a Zoom quiz because I’m wiping up my dad’s urine from the kitchen floor. As I mop and clean, my dad teeters over me, earnestly maintaining that he hasn’t pissed himself, but instead simply spilled a very large glass of water. But he’s very, very drunk, and the crotch of his jeans is dripping. After 10 minutes of back and forth on this, his drunken logic kicks in, and he motions to sample the liquid as proof. “It’s OK dad,” I say. “I believe you.”
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