Recovery Kids
Growing Up In the Shadow of the Twelve Steps

by Ellen St. Cyr

Some people grow up with religion, some with strong family traditions of sports or the great outdoors; others have board games, cherished books, or new age retreats. Growing up with a parent in a Twelve Step program means that before you know what it is to drink, you know what it is to not drink. People with sober, recovering parents, aunts, uncles, family friends, and even grandparents, who routinely celebrate with club soda at sober gatherings, assume from an early age that the whole world is dry. They become fluent in the concepts of recovery before they actually know what a lot of it means, finding it hard to imagine that the rest of the world might have a different relationship to alcohol and drugs; that everybody isn’t either actively caught up in addiction or safely ensconced in recovery.

A secret club with its own language

Children growing up with AA and NA as a natural, prominent part of their daily lives nevertheless sense that they are part of a secret club, which is what every child wants, really. Eleanor, whose parents met at an NA dance in 1984, went to her first meetings in utero, and later in a Snugli. "While other kids played at going to a pretend job," Eleanor says, "I’m told that I would announce, ‘I go meeting’ when I first started talking. One of my earliest memories is sitting at a table coloring and when my mother shared I would go sit on her lap, wanting to be part of it all." For the Ala-Teens, it is an everyday thing in their homes to hear "I’m going to a meeting," "I’m going to see my sponsee," "I’m doing my Fifth Step with my sponsor," or "I got a commitment at [fill in the blank]." They can translate even the more arcane comments, such as "He’s on my Ninth Step list," "I gotta do a Tenth Step with her," or "Watch out for your pigeons, he’s a big Thirteenth-stepper."

When you’ve been part of the Twelve Step world your entire life, recovery-speak is the lingua franca of childhood and your family’s fluency in it is no mystery. Many recovery kids are surprised when they discover that grown-ups can have proper surnames, not just a letter of the alphabet. Children whose "happy, joyous and free" households were built on the Twelve Steps and are informed by the Promises are terrified and appalled to encounter "civilian" clans who take for granted an intolerable level of misery, resentment and secrecy unknown in their own families.

The burden of anonymity

The double-edged sword of it, though, is that relapse can happen to anyone, for any number of reasons: job loss, moving, depression, demanding careers, exposure to a drug of choice in a medical setting. Suddenly, there are slips and then there can be rehab and it dawns on a recovery kid that there is a deep purpose to every affirmation professed by a family member. Chris, a 20-year-old whose parents met in rehab, was so happy his mother survived a bad car accident, he didn’t even think about the dangers of the morphine she was given in hospital. She had been home a week when Chris knew she was in relapse—and in denial. "It was scary. I knew about relapse, and I knew it could end with a funeral. But I also knew the program—it had always been like a flotation device for our family, and it was going to keep us from going under. But it was hard, having to confront her in an intervention, and not being able to really talk about it with anyone."

The program, of course, is anonymous, and when you’re growing up and trying to find your identity, keeping what has to be a secret for the sake of one’s elders’ professional or personal reputations, can become a burden. An already self-conscious teenager is acutely aware of how people respond when they let the secret slip. Grownups might look at the recovery kid with pity; the kid’s friends either don’t get it, or they can’t wait to tell everyone. Recovery kids often learn the hard way why the program is anonymous to outsiders. Some may eventually appreciate that anonymity to protect their own recovery.

Inheriting the bad with the good

Treading the waters of adolescence can be terrifying for children of recovering people, as it is for their watchful, worried parents. The danger of slipping into addiction is so great that those teenage years can be like waiting for a ticking time bomb to explode. But many program children manage to skirt addiction, despite the genetic predisposition. Certainly many do inherit the addiction gene, and they must deal with the disease in their own way. More than anyone struggling with active addiction, these people know where to go, and many will hopefully, eventually, end up in the rooms of the same church basements and public buildings in which they spent their childhoods. They will know that the club they grew up in is a powerfully transformative, all-inclusive, unique democracy, like an ancient village where everybody knows your name. But as they grow up, even if they do not use drugs, even if they have not had to visit a parent in relapse at any number of rehabs, it will be revealed to them that the initiation fees are steeper than they ever guessed, and the pain of early membership is shared among the whole family. It isn’t pretty.

For every adult child of alcoholics and addicts, the experience of recovery is something that will stay with them, an intrinsic part of their character and how they view the world. It may be unconventional growing up in a Twelve Step world (though it’s getting more common all the time), and it can certainly be difficult at times, but if you ask any recovery kid how they feel about a family tradition started in Akron, Ohio in 1935 by a couple of shaky but sober drunks, and carried on by millions all over the world, they’ll tell you it is far, far better than the alternative.