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A week from this Thursday, we are having family friends visit us from FL. As if there isn't enough tension in the house already between my mom and dad....now we have company coming...should we pretend like nothing is wrong with my mom or should we have an intervention of sorts...from my experience with my brother in the past they didn't work...my AM has a tendency to refuse to talk about her drinking and when it is brought up she gets angry. She has made progress in the past few months...she's going back to work now (she took off a month to have her knee replaced and subsuquently a second month off because she was very very depressed). She wont talk to a therapist about said depression. (she is a psychiatric nurse and RN). she won't talk about her drinking. my family and I have told her many times how much the drinking has affected each of us...maybe with her recent cut back in drinking we can only hope she's seeing how bad it is...is that pointless to think? sorry for the rambling...so back to the original question, do we just let things be or confront her?
The experiences of thousands of Al-Anoners have shown that confronting someone about their drinking really doesn't work. If it did, no one would drink to excess. In my experience, what would really help is if you had a back-up plan for what you would/will do if her drinking gets out of hand while the friends are there. Go out for the day? Find something else to do? Although the temptation is to deny that the drinking is bad, this makes things even weirder for visitors -- they can see plainly that there is a problem, yet everyone is behaving as if nothing is wrong. So you might even want to plan how you would acknowledge it. "As you can see, Mom has had too much to drink. It's painful and we wish there were something we could do to help her. But that's not how it works. Let's try to have a good time as much as we can. Do you want to go to the Gardens today?" Or whatever works for you. Take good care of yourself.
Thank you for the suggestions. It should be interesting to see how they handle it...when my mom usually drinks I end up leaving the house and going out for a few hours and do something fun, which helps me to take my mind off it.
