Coach’s mom: alcoholic. Coach: long-suffering codependent.
Soccer mom’s coach’s mom problem
Dear Doug,
For three years, my daughter has been on a soccer team with a wonderful coach. The coach’s mother, however, is a loud, mean witch. She taunts referees, yells insults to coaches and parents on the other side and screams at girls on our team to play the way she wants, even though we otherwise enforce a no-coaching-from-the-sidelines rule. Would an anonymous note to the coach or her mother be appropriate?
Signed,
Soccer Mom
Dear Codependent,
Other columnists would tell you that everyone already knows the coach’s mom is a trouble-maker. It must be adversely affecting the kids and, therefore, something must be done. Such columnists would suggest having a private word with the coach, all the while acknowledging the coach is in a difficult spot.
You bet the coach is in a difficult position. Her mother’s behavior is not only affecting her in her coaching career, but no doubt also in her home and every other facet of her life. She may have lived with it while growing up for twenty years and has suffered, along with everyone else, ever since.
In many similar situations, family members don’t link behaviors to likely alcoholism. They’ve grown up with it and, because they see the same (or even worse) behaviors between drinking episodes (or simply don’t see the drinking) they often fail to connect the dots between the behaviors and the heavy drinking or using. The biography of actress Betty Davis by her daughter, B. D. Hyman, discussed over five wonderful pages of Drunks, Drugs & Debits (pp. 166-170), is instructive: Hyman doesn’t mention her famous mother’s drinking until page 47 of the book (My Mother’s Keeper), doesn’t mention it again until page 114, never even mentions the possibility of alcoholism until the family doctor explains she’s going through alcoholic withdrawal on page 269 (after a series of strokes put her in the hospital, where she didn’t have access to her drug of choice) and concludes that the best explanation for her mother’s serial misbehaviors was her need “to prove who’s strong enough to win.” Your coach could easily be as unaware as was B. D. Hyman.
The coach needs a different private word: intervention. The intervention should focus on getting the coach’s mother out of your lives, utilizing the services of a qualified interventionist who understands how to deal with the coach, who is severely codependent. Until and unless the coach’s mother has several years of sobriety, the problems will continue, both on the playing field and everywhere else the mother goes. The coach can deal with her mother later, with her own family.
(Source for story idea: Ask Amy, October 12, 2011.)