Abby Connolly
Supporting any relatives with alcoholism comes with unique challenges, and sometimes, you have to make sacrifices to keep them safe.
One woman’s wife wants her younger sister, who is a recovering alcoholic, to stay in their home. However, that means she also wants her to get rid of all the alcohol in their house.
Her wife has a 26-year-old sister named Beth, who is a recovering alcoholic and recently got out of a rehab program. Beth has been staying at someone else’s home, as it’s a sober house meant to transition her back into her daily routines.
Since both of her in-laws passed away during the pandemic, which made Beth’s drinking even worse, she and her wife are the only family Beth has.
Recently, her wife told her she wants Beth to start living with them.
“I am not totally against the idea of Beth living with us [and] I agree that she should have supportive people around her,” she said.
“But what I don’t agree with is my wife’s insistence that we remove all alcohol from our house. My wife isn’t saying that we have to stop drinking to show solidarity with Beth, but that we should remove all alcohol from the house, at least at first. It’s not like I’m an alcoholic, too. I may have a drink two to three nights a week. But, when we bought our house, it had an unfinished basement, which I turned into a bar/game room. It’s pretty fully stocked. Like, stocked enough that we don’t have room anywhere else in the house to store all of it.”
To throw away all of that alcohol would be a huge waste of money, and it would require her and her wife to host several frat parties to get through it all quickly.
As a compromise, she considered putting a lock on her basement door, but her wife didn’t like that idea.
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