The Problem with Alcohol

She sits in the passenger’s seat of her father’s SUV. She watches as he chugs one can after another; little droplets of danger dampening his goatee. He whips a can at the floor of the car; briefly taking his hand of the steering wheel causing the car to slide to the right side of the road. She looks down at the floor of the car and pushes her hair away from her face. Her father: an alcoholic. Her: a girl with a father who she wishes he would get better.
He drops her off at school and drives her home too. He is friends with everyone in town: the mayor, the senior citizens, even Mrs. O’Grady, the principal that all the kids are afraid of (to a certain extent, anyway). He’s just another citizen in the small town of Fair Haven. He’s just another father to anyone else. Everyone, except her and she plans to keep it that way.
But maybe, just maybe, if she had alcohol education when she was younger she wouldn’t have that secret; that dirty little secret.
According to Dr. Frank Trichina, graduate of Yale University in 1979, 32% more children try to hide their alcoholic parents then in any other country. But that isn’t all there is in this world. A poll taken by Helping America’s Youth (HAY) shows that 6 out of every 10 children don’t tell people about their parent’s alcoholism due to protection of the parents. All of these children don’t have alcohol education.
Today, that young girl sits in the back seat of her mother’s Volvo, wishing that her father could be with her at that very moment. He and a five year old girl are now just memories left unforgotten. {c/}