My alcoholic mum passed out while driving me home from school drunk… and died in a pool of her own blood and vomit at the age of 50
Mum-of-three Nicky Bowman, 47, reveals the true horror of living with an alcoholic mother
ACCORDING to recent research, one in five kids in the UK struggle with the effects of their parent’s drinking.
Young mum Stephanie Davies has recently revealed her own struggle with alcohol, which saw her going into rehab after turning to drink in the wake of her relationship with Jeremy McConnell.
To mark Children of Alcoholics week 2018 mum-of-three Nicky Bowman, originally from Surrey, reveals the day to day horror of living with an alcoholic mother.
My mum, Nuala Cantello, was a chartered accountant, and an intelligent and beautiful woman. At 30 she would stop a room when she walked in. At 50 she died in a pool of blood and vomit.
My earliest memory is of my mum leaning over me to tuck me into bed, and she smelt fantastic, her hair was put up and she was in a sparkly dress.
You might think “What a lovely warm memory” but, in reality, it gives me a knot in the pit of my stomach. Even then, at the age of three, I remember feeling bad because I knew that her being dressed up meant a party – and a party meant trouble.
She was a party girl, through and through. It wasn’t that the drinking was so bad then, it definitely progressed after that, but even then she would overdo it. She would come back slurry, stumbling and weird, from the perspective of a child, and I didn’t understand why but there was always be fighting, lots of shouting and dramatics.
As I got older the drinking got worse. I never had a birthday party in case she got drunk and I never brought friends home from school because I never knew what I was going to find.
At first, she would either be on the drink or off the drink so sometimes she’d be fine. But if she was drinking I would come home and find her passed out on the floor, or in a rage or just not there at all. We never knew where she went.
I remember very clearly being about seven, in a public loo, and Mum was in the cubicle next to me. I heard the noise of a gin bottle being opened – the metal lid on a glass bottle. That noise still bothers me to this day because I remember feeling it was my fault that she was drinking in the toilet. It was my fault because I hadn’t watched her closely enough.
Guilt is an emotion all children of alcoholics get used to.
Mum would often forget to pick me up from school and sometimes, when she remembered, she was drunk and driving.
On one occasion, she drove into my teacher’s car and another time, when I was 13, we were on the motorway and she passed out at the wheel. I had to steer the car on to the hard shoulder and call for help.
It was the most frightening moment of my life. I genuinely thought I was going to die.
One day when I was 14 or 15, she’d been fired from yet another job and we got a call to say, ‘We fired her but we are worried about her because she was in quite a state.’ We went out to find her and we found her passed out on a bench in Maidenhead High Street. The contents of her handbag were strewn all over the place and she’d wet herself.
She was wearing my tracksuit bottoms, I remember, and it was my job to strip her down, shower her and put her to bed.
I remember being very angry and even hitting her. I was so disgusted I couldn’t bring myself to touch the trousers so sort of pulled them down from the side and then used my foot to push them off. It was disgusting.
Christmases were a complete disaster. I have spent a Christmas day in McDonald’s just to get away and I didn’t want to be at home because that’s the one day that drinking from early in the morning is acceptable, even encouraged.
In the latter years she would have made some feeble attempt to wrap the presents but they looked like they’d been wrapped by a toddler. She was completely inebriated.
One Christmas day, when I had just met my husband Vince – and this was the day I knew I was going to marry him – my mother sneezed and a whole bunch of snot and God knows what came out and landed on her face and her front.
Vince said, “Do you not want that bit, Nuala.” It didn’t faze him. So I thought. "That’s the one for me. He can cope with her so he must be a good sort."
Like my three older brothers and my sister before me, I left home before I was 16. By then, she was drinking all the time and was never ever sober.
She would wake up first thing in the morning and have a glass of gin and drink all day.
After she died we found bottles of gin in the back of the glasses cupboard, gin in her knicker drawer, in the toilet cistern and in her handbag.
I never sat down and said, ‘You are ruining my life. Stop drinking.’
It’s odd looking back on it but it isn’t talked about. My dad, Larry, would never divorce her and I imagine it was hard for him but we really didn’t talk about it. It’s the proverbial elephant in the room and every child of an alcoholic says the same. You don’t talk about it.
One night, when I was 23, my father and I had been out for dinner with some friends and when we came home she was face down in the living room in a big pool of blood.
When your liver ruptures you puke blood. This had happened to her a few times before but this was much worse. She was incoherent, in and out of consciousness, covered in blood and sick.
We called an ambulance, my father cleared her airwaves, put her in the recovery position and when the ambulance came, the paramedic put her on the stretcher and said, ‘Isn’t anybody coming with us?’
Both my father and I said, ‘No, she’s alright.’ So she went to hospital on her own and died there on her own.
I feel like I should regret that but I don’t really. We’d been there so often before and she was such a pain.
Research from Nacoa (National Association for Children of Alcoholics) and others have found that alcoholism is a genetic thing, a physical imbalance. My mum’s father was an alcoholic, his father before him and she started to use alcohol as an escape as lots of people do. At the end of a difficult day, you have a glass of wine, but it’s a slippery slope.
Five years ago, when I was 42, I started to see signs that I could be sliding down that slope as well.
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I was drinking too much, I was drinking on my own, and I was very definitely looking for the drink. It took me the best part of a year to come to terms with it and stop but I haven’t had a drink for five years.
My kids – Kieran, 21, Holly, 11 and Billy, nine – have grown up knowing about how my mother lived and died. They need to know that it’s there in our genes and if they don’t have it their kids might, so they too can spot the signs if they come.
At the age of 47, I’ve finally forgiven my mother for ruining my childhood. If I hadn’ t lived through what I did then, perhaps I wouldn’t have recognised the signs and I might have done the same to my kids as she did to us, so in a way I’m grateful for that.
For more information on Children of Alcoholics Week, go to the .
Young mum Stephanie Davies has revealed that she is an alcoholic and went into rehan after trying to kill herself.