I'm not drinking any more, but I'm not drinking any less

There are two conversations held every day in my home on a loop. The first is regarding the degree of freshness of two barbeque chickens, simultaneously on-the-go, sitting in the refrigerator. 'Is this the New Chicken or the Old Chicken?', my mother will ask before she prepares a sandwich, or what my father will grunt at me after he returns home from the night shift at his 'concierge' job. The second running dialogue involves my father's drinking habit. After he cracks open his third beer before four P.M., my mother will say, 'you're not drinking any more are you?' To which he will perennially respond, 'I'm not drinking any more, [pregnant pause] but I'm not drinking any less' and crack up laughing as if we haven't heard that line uttered repeatedly since he sprung for an early retirement three years ago.

Maybe it's because my teenage years were so disrupted by patches of illness that I tend to valorize any film or television depiction of what it's 'really' like to be a high school student. When I was a teenager I had to drop out of high school twice, spend forty days in an outpatient program for severely 'mentally ill youth' and two painstakingly long hours locked down in inpatient, before signing myself out 'against medical advice' out of complete and utter fear of my flat-mates in the youth psychiatry wing.

Many speak fondly of their first time experimenting with alcohol as an adolescent, even if it resulted in bed spins and projectile vomiting with their friends. My First Time involved consuming multiple coolers my father purchased for me, his daughter (a minor), and watching the first twenty minutes of the movie Mad Love on the bastardized, Canadian version of the Disney Channel, better known as Family Channel. I would not make it through the rest of the movie, which was a fairly unrepresentative depiction of bipolar disorder, because I felt compelled to run from the basement, to the second storey of the house, screaming. My bipolar mother, who averages 1-3 hours of sleep per night, was predictably, already awake and leapt out of her bed, completely naked except for a pair of ladies Jockey briefs, snug across her FUPA. I can't recall much from the events that transpired afterward, but I will never forget the sight of my mother's breasts, swinging with abandon as she shot out of her bedroom to wrap her arms around me.

A true Irishman, my father saw nothing wrong with aiding and abetting his teenage daughter in her quest to shave a few years off her miserable life by plying her with kiwi-mango flavored alcohol. Compared to family drinking standards, I was already behind the learning curve. My father had his first taste of liquor at the age of five. He had been living with his aunt at the time because his mother was in hospital with 'tuberculosis' (read: receiving multiple rounds of electroshock therapy) when he happened to stumble upon a tiny bottle of whiskey, which he nursed until he fell asleep.

My parents thought that by chance, alcohol consumption could help to offset my out of whack brain chemistry, even though it serves primarily as a depressant. When our family physician prescribed me drugs earlier that year and told me he expected a recovery within eight weeks, I believed him. So, it was as much of a surprise to my parents once it really sunk in that there would be no 'recovery' period and they would spend the rest of their days caring for a dependent with career mental illness and 'hoping for the best'. I don't think it was poor parenting that lead to the serial purchases of cigarettes and booze or forbidding me to get my driver's license, thinking I was on 'too much medication' to get behind the wheel. It was some convoluted form of love.

Later, my father would earn the nickname 'whiskey nose' from his two best childhood friends. I would only come to learn of this moniker myself as for a moment in time, it was the password for his EZ Rock 97.3 FM online account and one morning, as I was answering the 'Daily Trivia' questions on his behalf, I made him explain the symbolism. While my father's old pals became architects and share a firm together in Dublin, my father is a glorified, part-time security guard, semi-functional alcoholic who resides with two generations of bipolar women. As much as I resent his daily intake of liquid hubris, the hundreds of times he's driven drunk and the equally as many times he has been banned from an establishment or shamed me publicly, I guess I can't really blame him. If your family winced when you opened your mouth to speak and you are still deluded enough to continue to ask your only child year after year if she will write an essay for a certain holiday themed contest entitled 'Why My Dad is the Greatest' and when she refuses, you write it yourself and forge her signature, your drinking problem is the least of your worries.