She asked the blonde girl if she could read a bit from the book. The girl sat up straighter and then read, ‘Sometimes those who are close to the alcoholic begin to pretend. We accept promises and trust the alcoholic. Each time there is a sober period, however brief, we want to believe the problem has gone away forever … This is our denial.’ She paused for a moment and looked at each of us before reading, ‘Perhaps the most severe damage to those of us who have shared some part of life with an alcoholic comes in the form of the nagging belief that we are somehow at fault. We may feel it was something we did or did not do – that we were not good enough, not attractive enough, or not clever enough to have solved this problem for the one we love. These are our feelings of guilt.’

‘Thank you,’ Sue said as she took the book back from the girl. A million thoughts went through my mind. I couldn’t believe how the things I’d heard were so similar to how Mum acted and how I felt and thought.

I looked at the surfer boy and wondered what was going through his mind, if this was his first meeting too or if he’d been before.

‘Does anyone want to start with some reflections on what we’ve just read?’ Sue asked, looking at each of us.

‘I’ll start,’ said the surfer boy. ‘My name is Ryan and I’m a proud member of this group. Mum’s been a real pain again, but it’s not really Mum that’s annoying me, it’s Dad. It’s like, yeah, Mum took off for a night and wasn’t there for my surf comp, but that was all right. I surfed and knew that Mum was sleeping it off. But Dad, he’s been a real grumpy arse the last week. He’s so unpredictable, he scares me. I know what Mum does, she goes and gets drunk and doesn’t show up to things. With Dad, one minute he can be okay, the next minute he’s shouting at me … That’s all I have to say tonight.’

Wow! I thought, and I wanted to scream, That’s exactly how my dad is. I mean, Mum is always messing up but Dad is who I’m scared of when everything goes wrong. He gets angry and he acts as if he’s defending me at first, but then when I don’t say anything he loses it and blames me for everything. Sure, I try to protect Mum and sometimes I lie to protect her, but surely, he has to understand why I’m doing it? I want her to be better. I don’t want any more fights. I want Mum to sort her shit out, and for him, Mum and Caitlin to sort their shit out.