I'm 22 years old and the daughter to an alcoholic mother. My mother, it seems, has dealt with addiction through tout her life one way or another. My mother's parents divorced when she was young and by the time she was a teenager her father dealt and used cocaine. They were close however he was frequently incarcerated. Meanwhile my grandmother began dating another drug dealer in the early 80s when my mother was a teenager. My grandmother soon became a drug addict her self and completely let go of her role as a parent. My mother's older brother had since left to New York and also got sucked into crack boom. (He's now homeless and has completely succumbed to his addiction). While my grandmother disappeared for days on end my mother was left to care for herself and her younger sister. My mother went to school and nearly graduated from her all girl catholic school but my grandparents stopped paying tuition and my mother was denied her diploma. Around this time my mother connected with my father. My father was four years her senior and already had 3 daughters with two different women. My father was not a bad man, very handsome and intelligent and madly in love with mother. Despite this, my father had his own faults. Coming to America when he was just 16, he was undocumented and uneducated. Like the rest of his family and he turned to selling cocaine and heroin as a means to support his family. While my mom gave birth to their first daughter (my older sister) my father was doing time and my mother who was 20 was left to support herself until his release. After I was born I understand my father's addiction to heroin became increasingly worse and he would disappear for days. Sometimes he would arrested and deported and come back under a false name and we would have to call him "George" instead of his actual name. Finally, a couple of months before my 5th birthday my dad went missing again but this time it was different. He had been murdered by another drug dealer. Kid napped and taken to New York where he was tortured, killed and dumped. My mother was never the same after this and this was the earliest of her alcohol problems. My mother was so lost in her bereavement that she would leave my sister and I alone in our apartment to go out and drink. I can remember her telling us not to open the door for anyone "not even Jesus Christ" she would say. My grandfather ended up moving in when he started to get sick and developed liver disease. His company was comforting and by this time my grandmother stopped using drugs and also spent a lot of time with us. Things started getting better when my mother, who had earned her GED when I was a baby, left her job as a bilingual paralegal at law firm for a reputable job at a politician's office at the federal government. There she met my stepfather who coincidentally was a recovered alcoholic himself. From the day I met him he's never once relapsed and is now over 15 years sober. My stepfather moved us all in our first one family home, my grandfather too. This was the happiest I saw my mother in my life. I was in elementary school and it seemed like we were all blessed with a new beginning. We got two family dogs and had family outings every weekend. This lifestyle began to deteriorate when I was in middle school and my grandfather passed away. My mother who had cared for him the whole time was heart broken. She started drinking more frequently was losing sleep. With the death of grandfather came a whole new set of problems. My mother wanted more children and my stepfather did not. Also, my stepfather's weekly traveling for work was taking a toll on my mother who had to handle everything concerning us girls and the house completely on her own. My mom drank more and at first I didn't notice, I thought she was being fun. It wasn't until I was in high school that her alcoholism became clear. She would pick fights with my step dad or my older sister. One time while trying to throw a yankee candle at my stepfather as he was leaving the house she accidentally threw the candle at my neighbor's car windshield shattering it. Our family and home were falling apart. Even then, I didn't realize my mother was an alcoholic. After my high school graduation my parents finally divorced, my sister gave birth at the same age my mom was when she had my sister and even though my niece was a beacon of hope for all of us, we couldn't mend our family. I realized my mother was an alcoholic when the four of us, my mother, my sister, her infant daughter and myself moved into a house on our own. There was constantly alcohol in the house, even if there wasn't anything else to drink. We all began drinking on a regular basis, it was part of the norm. I was 19 and could ask my mother to run to the liquor store for me at any time. My mother's friends called our house a sorority because we were always partying and without men. This got old fairly quickly and within a year we were at each other's necks. My mother would be gone for 24 hrs and come home still drunk. I would borrow her car and find nips and bottles hidden in different compartments. She would drink until she blacked out. This stayed the same until one spring day we all got the terrible news that my mother was diagnosed with lung cancer. My grandmother was the matriarch of our family and despite the mother she was to my mother and aunt we all loved and respected her. She was wise and loving. Three months after her diagnosis she died and the mother I thought I knew died with her. My mother was inconsolable and nearly drank herself to death. She was arrested for refusal and had a breathalyzer installed in her car for 8 months. Sometimes I would need to use her car and unfortunately the machine did not work like the movies. It would not only request a test to start your car but it would also randomly request tests while you driving and if you didn't breath in it correctly it would request it again or else the car would suddenly shut off. I quickly became a breathalyzer professional. My mom somehow was still able to keep her career and was what we called a functioning alcoholic. She would go to work, make dinner, clean the house and pay the bills all while being drunk. But she couldn't keep that up for long, she fell apart more and more by the day. Her grief overcame her and she was missing stretches of work to go in and out of rehab. Her work performance was dwindling, she would be missing from her desk and drinking in the parking lot. She was drinking all day and night and became an insomniac quickly. My sister and niece moved out soon after my grandmother died, my sister was a target when my mom drank and after a terrible physical fight my sister left. My mother and I moved from the big house to a two bedroom apartment. I had just turned 21 and despite everything that was happening with my mother I was in my own world. But now it was my turn to deal with her and so far I've gotten the worse. In the last year my mom has been to detox another six or seven times. She was forced to quit her job of 15 years, only 5 years shy of her retirement. Because she quit her job she lost her health insurance and can now only afford to go in for detox but cannot afford treatment. She went to AA for a little while but stopped after her second refusal in which she crashed into a meter maid's car and left the scene. After being confronted by the police almost immediately after the crash my mother was of course drunk and combative. She spent the night in jail. When she was released the next day she was still drunk and instead of apologizing tried to remedy her drunken guilt by promising me a vacation to Cabo. I refused and threatened to leave her. She continues to drink and can't sleep more than an hour. Her panic attacks are more frequent then ever. Her blood pressure is constantly sky high. At night she is a child that screams and cries all night begging me to never leave her alone. She refuses to sleep in her own bed and hasn't in almost a year. She spends her days and night on the couch. The house remains a mess unless I clean or she's detoxed and sober which is every couple of weeks. I feel so alone. I sometimes cry myself to sleep imagining the day I might walk in and find her dead. There have been times I come home and the stove or oven is left on while she's passed out. She nearly burned the house down once leaving ramen cooking on the stove at 3am, the fire alarm woke me up. I've found her passed out on the floor face down or half naked. As much as I'm terrified of finding her died a part of me is begging for the relief. I feel guilty and resentful all at the same time. I don't know what to do, I don't have the means to move out and even if I could the guilt of leaving her alone is overwhelming. I don't know what to do anymore or where to turn.