by Lisa Martens

Created on: April 27, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

My aunt has a severe problem with alcohol. I use the present tense still because I realize the problem is something ongoing, and every day is a struggle for her. I will call her Beth to preserve her anonymity.

When I was a child, Beth was the golden member of the family. She was intelligent with a full-ride scholarship to St. John's University, and she wanted to be a pharmacist. Not only was she bright, but she was the oldest child, and so my mother and her two other sisters looked up to Beth as a role model.

Beth was always the responsible older sister and, to me, the responsible aunt. My mother had me when she was just a teenager, so we were all very young, but Beth always tried to make everything fun for me. She knew every park and carnival to go to. I saw chocolate being made, I hugged Big Bird, and I won every stuffed animal when I was with Aunt Beth.

That changed sometime after Beth graduated from college. She didn't go out and find a full time job. In fact, she didn't want to let go of her college years. Beth kept working at the pizzeria she'd worked at part-time to get herself through school. She went out. A lot. And she drank.

That was in 1993. Fast-forward to 2005. Aunt Beth, still living with her mom, worked as a waitress. She got divorced from a man who also had an alcohol problem after he caught her cheating on him. The golden girl from the family had fallen - hard. She no longer had intelligent conversation. Mainly, Aunt Beth liked to talk about guys she met in bars. Since her husband, she dated a string of alcoholics, including a British man named Phil who began stalking her and was eventually deported. Despite the glimpses of maternal instincts I'd seen, Beth was still childless and she doubted her ability to even have children.

Aunt Beth could not admit to anyone that she had a drinking problem and that it was destroying her life. My mother forbade me to get into a car with her, since she constantly drove drunk. She began to be excluded from family events, and she gained a belly that looked unnatural on her slim body. The responsible Aunt Beth we had all known had disappeared.

Since my grandmother, Aunt Beth's mother, also abuses substances, my aunt didn't feel that she had a problem. Her actions were, oddly enough, condoned. Any attempt to talk to her turned into a defensive argument. Aunt Beth only thought that we were all "ganging up" on her.

This changed when one of my other aunts introduced Aunt Beth to a court officer named Jeff. Jeff was in

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