Hugs ML :)

Welcome and you are not alone in your feelings. There are wise wonderful people on this board and all of us have a story that may not be exactly what you are going through, however we know the end result of living with the disease of addiction. We have all lost our own way and been consumed our own addiction which is fixing our loved one.

I hope you will consider going to a f2f alanon meeting, again you will find you are not alone in your feelings. You will find relief as well. Even if it's just an emotional release. I felt I carried the world on my shoulders and it was all my responsibility because no one else would take their share. :)

I'm so sorry that your mom is ill and going through this isn't easy on anyone. I believe firmly in the 3 c's we did not cause the addiction, we can not control the addiction and we will not cure the addiction.

My MIL is similar in the sense that she's young and pretty much an invalid and she's done this all to herself based upon her own choices. Between smoking (she's on oxygen) and alcohol she is basically a prisoner in her own home. She has caretakers come to her house because really she can't be all alone for days at a time. Her whole life is 4 walls, books and sometimes a tv show. It's so sad to think she will never be an active grandparent and ironically she is the youngest one. She has to want to get better and she's basically said she's not going to stop. The best we can do is make sure she is safe (she has a first alert, we make sure that she has help), we tend to specific needs, there are things we don't do for her. At this point we don't buy her beer and she doesn't ask us to, there are many who are willing to step in and do it for her. That's fine, that's their choice. She fully understands that she's killing herself, I don't know what we can do to make her stop. Rationalizing with an irrational person is like nailing jello to a tree. We figure she has about 4 years left give or take, I only pray she doesn't have to suffer and it's quick when it happens. Basically she's going to drown because her lungs don't process the liquid through her body. Her body is already showing signs of shutting down. She's been hospitalized 3x in the past 2 years over misc things. Not minor as had the situations continued she would have passed on. I have the ease that she's not my mother, I've just always believed the situation was not good for my mental health and my husband is to the point, it's not that he doesn't care, he knows she's going to do what she wants to do and he's accepted that. He has brothers however they are totally MIA in this situation. I actually keep out of it because she wants to pull me into her set of chaos, and while I have no anger directed at her, it's better for my mental health to stay out. I would meddle and it's really not my business. I can't make medical decisions on her behalf so that is up to her children who are all capable adults.

I don't know what I'm trying to say sorry for my rambling, oui I've been on a roll lately .. good grief. Anyway, I think my point was that the best thing you can do for yourself is put the focus on you. Especially being her caretaker at this point, is finding ways not to make yourself so enmeshed in a situation where you won't know where you stop and the addiction begins. It's way to easy to worry yourself sick over someone else's addiction. Honestly, as a caretaker you need your head on straight, because we're dealing with situations that are unreasonable go against everything logical in our brains and while the addict has the benefit of a buffer we do this sober. We can certainly love the addict, do things to help support them (emotionally) until they choose to stop, it's on them. Her dr has to know she drinks and she will not be a candidate for any kind of transplant. Again my MIL, continues to smoke and the dr has straight out told her she will not get on the list until she stops and at this point she won't live long enough to survive the transplant operation. Sounds harsher than I mean it to, it just is what it is.

I am so sorry you're going through this.  I do hope you wlll find an Al-Anon meeting (they say to try six because they're all different), because you absolutely should not have to go through this alone.  There are also online meetings on this site.  But nothing beats face-to-face.  You will find other people who know first-hand what you're going through.

Sadly there is no way for us to stop their drinking -- if there were, there'd be no alcoholism. I know the emotions can be overwhelming. My mother died because of her smoking addiction and the grief felt as if I were being swallowed alive. I could see the end coming for years and it was very, very hard.  I didn't have any recovery of my own then. If there's one thing I could do differently, I would have found my own program of recovery. The insanity of addiction sucks us in too, and we can easily become as insane as the alcoholic or addict. It happens so gradually that we don't even notice it. I do notice that your mother's world is alcohol, so that she can't even pay much attention to her family; and you say that your mother is your world, so that you can't even go out or pay much attention to your boyfriend.  That terrible anxiety you feel when you think about letting go is how she feels about the bottle. And you also see how urgent it is that she should take better care of herself -- that same urgency applies to you and how you take care of yourself.

Read all you can on here, get Al-Anon materials and read them, find a meeting and a sponsor, and there are miracles in store. Keep coming back. Hugs.