Hi,

This is my first time posting in anything like this but I feel like I'm at my wits end. I think my 63 year old mother has a drinking problem. We live in separate states but almost everytime I come home to visit she's passed out in a chair next to an empty glass of wine (even if its early in the night - like 8pm). Before we go out to dinner she has 2-3 glasses of wine and then more at dinner. When she drinks she become very irate and says extremely hurtful things. She pretty much just attacks and insults all of us in our family when she drinls. Sometimes in the evening as I'm going to bed I receive nasty text messages and emails from her unprovoked out of the blue.

She also takes sleeping pills to fall asleep once she goes up to bed every night and the combination of that plus the drinking really scare me. I can't talk to her about it because she either gets angry or lightly acknowlegdes it but never stops it.

She treats my father to whom she is still married very very poorly and acts like everyone has wronged her. The problem is my father is so afraid of upsetting her he just defends her and when she insults us he tells us just to let her be and not stand up for ourselves because she will take it out on him. I feel like because of this he is just enabling her and this irrational behavior.

If she is an alcholic she is a funcitonning one as has she keeps a very demanding career but drinks like a fish in the evenings after work. In highschool I remember her slumped over the kitchen table next to a bottle of vodka on a few occassions. She never drinks socially with friends unless its at a group dinner, she mostly just drinks alone. Its extremely upsetting and disturbing to me and I'm not sure what to do. Can I help her if she doesn't want help? If so how? If not, how to I handle the emotional pain this is causing me?

I'm getting married soon and part of me thinks I should just cut her off and walk away from the family but I do love them and I don't know if that would help anything.