“I had split her into two people: for me, there was my mother, whom I really adored, and then, there was the other. The other is who she became when she drank. And I really despised her.”
During her childhood and adolescence, Camilla Gallapia grew up with an alcoholic mother. She talks about her daily life as a child of an alcoholic and the consequences of this situation in her comic book Daughter of an alcoholicpublished by Larousse in 2023.
The discovery of alcoholism
When she was nine or ten years old, Camilla discovered that her mother was alcohol dependent through his big sister who announces to him: “Mom has a drinking problem, but don’t worry, it’s over.”. Nevertheless, for Camilla, this is where the story of her mother’s alcoholism begins: “Once I saw what was happening at home, I saw everything“. Even if the little girl doesn’t understand everything about alcoholism, she knows it’s “something very bad, very ugly and very poorly considered.“. Even though his mother was very loving, one day, alcohol took over and the roles were reversed.
His daily life as a child of an alcoholic
For Camilla Gallapia, female alcoholism is located in the home space: “with us, it was really behind closed doors, at home“. On a daily basis, the girl’s mother sleeps a lot. Meanwhile, Camilla searches for the bottles she hides around the house to stop her from drinking more. “I was lucky to live in a home where there was no violence at all but it was something that could have gone wrong“, analyzes Camilla a posteriori. She talks about the difficulty of the feelings she experienced during her childhood. The designer evokes the guilt she feels at not being able to help her and sometimes hating her, but also the weight of shame and secrecy.
A lack of support
Today, Camilla’s mother has died and even if the author no longer has any resentment towards her mother, she regrets not having been able to know her better. “My mother was always aware that she had a problem“, explains Camilla. She has done several detox cures but At no point in her medical journey was follow-up offered to her husband or her two daughters. Camilla Gallapia regrets this lack of support: it took her 25 years to be at peace with her story. “We need to get out of this taboo where we can’t say what’s happening because, for children, it’s a double burden.“, she says. Addiction is an illness that is all the more complicated by the isolation of sufferers, which is why Camilla Gallapia fights to bring it to light.
The glamorization of female alcoholism
While watching films and series, Camilla noticed that women who drink are rare and glamorized. For example, in Desperate HousewivesBree Van de Kamp falls into alcoholism and drinks glasses of white wine”as if it were elegant alcoholism“, points out the comic book author. “But alcoholism is never elegant“, she continues. Camilla Gallapia fights against these misleading representations of alcoholism.
Read also
⋙ Joana Balavoine’s fight against addiction
⋙ Director Angela Ottobah fights against violence against children
⋙ Andréa Bescond rebels against incest