Dad stole my dinner money and sold our toys to fund his addiction. He ruined my childhood... but that's not all he destroyed
Hiding behind the sofa, I clamped my hands over my ears as a couple of burly bailiffs banged on our front door.
I was just seven years old, but had already become used to the all-consuming anxiety these visits would cause.
In fact, I lost count of the number of times bailiffs and loan sharks turned up on the doorstep of our lovely three-bedroom house in a nice area of Merseyside. Thankfully, they never got in – Dad would turn off the lights, shut the curtains and shout at us not to move a muscle – but the crippling fear of them peering through the letterbox stayed with me for many years. Of course, Dad never learned from those visits. Addicts tend not to. Every time he fell for the same delusion – that he could gamble his way out of the trouble his gambling had landed us in. He just needed money.
And so he’d sell the Christmas presents my two siblings and I had been given just weeks before. One low point was when he sold my older brother’s prized Sega Mega Drive, given to him by my parents in a more hopeful moment.
He’d take the dinner money Mum left out for us on the mantelpiece before she left for work. He’d steal the birthday cash she had scrimped and saved to give us.
Often, we’d sit in the dark because we’d run out of money for the electricity meter, our tummies rumbling because we’d missed our lunch and the cupboards were bare. Our lives were chaotic and precarious, at the mercy of the monster of addiction that had my dad in its grip.
Over the years, Dad gambled away so much money, we lost our home and were forced into council housing when I was ten.
By then Mum had had her fill of it all. It took her leaving him when I was 13 to make him face up to the suffering he’d inflicted on us and get help – though the damage to our childhoods had been done by then.
Over the years, Dad gambled away so much money, we lost our home and were forced into council housing when I was ten, writes STEPHANIE WHITE
Your dad is meant to protect you, love you and meet your needs. The fact he failed miserably on at least two of these counts left me confused and scared. The older I got, the more compassion I had for him, but his weakness still left me furious.
Now 38, I’m determined to speak out about the devastation gambling addictions can cause – not just for the gambler but everyone around them. I want to encourage all those women affected by a gambling addict to get control back in their lives, so this year I co-founded support network Bet On Her to help.
There are a lot of people out there telling their stories of gambling addiction, which is great. But what about all those families who are in debt, their lives on hold for years paying it back, credit scores completely wrecked? What about the wives and children whose self-esteem and confidence have been shredded?
The voices of families are too often missing from the conversations about gambling harm – but we exist, and we matter, too.
In some senses Dad was also a victim, a product of his environment. Both his parents gambled, and he was even named after a race horse.
At first Dad must have thought he could control his betting. This was the 1990s and early 2000s, before you could place a bet online or watch horse racing all day on dedicated TV channels. His addiction meant going to the bookies on the high street.
In a man with an ounce of self-discipline, it might have been an occasional hobby, even a way to socialise, but something in Dad’s DNA meant it could never just be that.
Mum bore the brunt of his addiction. She worked in factories doing two or three jobs at a time – hard physical work, including carrying heavy boxes, that left her exhausted. It meant she missed out on all the lovely parts of being a parent, such as school drop-offs and assemblies.
The only quality time I had with him was going from betting shop to betting shop at weekends
And still, he would take her wages. They’d come through on a Thursday night and Dad would come home with bags of chips for us all, acting like some kind of hero.
He’d load up the electricity meter so we’d have a few days of power, starting a hopeful, clean slate every week – then he’d head off to the bookies and blow the rest of it.
He’d end up spending Mum’s entire wage packet on the horses – and his own, if he was working, though he could never hold down a job for long.
I remember those betting shops well. The only quality time I ever had with him was going from betting shop to betting shop at the weekend, watching people play the slot machines. The worst of it was seeing friends on the high street going shopping with their pocket money, buying new hair bobbles then going to McDonald’s for lunch. Normal childhood things that I never did.
Sometimes he won a bet and would take us to a restaurant or, in a fit of misplaced optimism, book a holiday (he’d always cancel them and get a refund). I think he thought these moments could redeem him in our eyes, like it was all worth it. And perhaps it did, momentarily. Frankly, we’d cling on to any high.
In fact, when he wasn’t gambling, he was fun, a good dad: he cooked and cleaned the house, and played games with us.
But the gambling consumed him, and slowly began to affect every aspect of his personality. If Mum tried to assert some control and said she wouldn’t put up with it any more, he would fly into a rage and scream at her. Once he slashed the sofas in anger. His addiction claimed any semblance of responsibility as a parent or husband, and during these episodes we were terrified of him.
I felt like a carer at times trying to help Mum through Dad’s gambling. I’d try to console her, put her needs before mine, not express my emotions and constantly worry about how she was dealing with things.
When I was 13, Mum finally kicked him out. At last there was an element of stability in our lives
When I started having sleepovers with friends and spending more time with their families, it became apparent that the way my family operated wasn’t normal or functional. We had no stability or trust.
My friends had food in the cupboards and their electricity didn’t go off most days. Their houses were warm in the winter. They had dads who bought them presents rather than took presents away.
Meanwhile, Dad got further into debt. He’d borrow money from people he knew, run up credit with bookies or loan sharks or max out multiple credit cards. There were times we were ostracised from the extended family because Dad would borrow money and never return it.
Until, finally, the whole thing came tumbling down.
Dad took out all the equity on the lovely house we owned in Merseyside, and eventually we couldn’t afford the mortgage.
So, when I was ten, we moved to council housing.
I didn’t understand what was going on and hated the change. I fell behind in school, too. Every month I’d miss a couple of days, because I’d stay off to console Mum or because of the general chaos at home.
I’ll always remember asking a question in a maths class, for my teacher to respond in front of everyone: ‘If you were in school more, then maybe you wouldn’t be so behind,’ and the way my face flushed with shame.
When I was 13, Mum finally kicked him out. At last there was an element of stability in our lives. Mum had her wages every month, and stuffed the cupboards with lovely food which we could eat whenever we liked. We went on holiday abroad. The tension that for so long had hung over us all disappeared.
When I saw Dad during those years, it was surprisingly – pleasantly – uneventful. He stopped taking us to the betting shops and seemed to understand that he wasn’t allowed back home.
Then two years later – to my initial despair – they got back together. The thing is, Mum really loved Dad. She believed he wanted to beat his addiction and accepted him back on condition that he went to Gamblers Anonymous and stuck with it.
I still hated it. I wrote a letter to her saying I was going to run away because I was petrified of the lying and the chaos returning to our home. He’d manipulated us for so long, I thought we’d end up penniless all over again. Neither did I believe for a minute that he’d stick at Gamblers Anonymous.
And yet he did. He got back into work and, having hit rock bottom, made an honest commitment to changing.
Every bit of money had been gambled away, so there wasn’t any left for other kinds of therapy, but he stuck to those weekly meetings. It’s now been 20 years and he hasn’t relapsed once.
But it isn’t all rosy when people recover. Their needs are put at the centre of the process. Everyone celebrates their success in quitting, while those who have had to live for years with the toxic fall-out are given barely a thought.
The repercussions of the addiction have reverberated throughout my adult life. My siblings and I never feel good enough in our relationships. We never had a strong man in our lives, a role model to show us what a dad should be. In our own relationships, we constantly seek people who we want to fix.
I’ve spent five years as a single mum due to a relationship breakdown. I find it so hard to trust other people to do the right thing by me and I can’t bear the thought of my eight-year-old daughter witnessing any of the things I did when I was growing up.
My relationship with Dad is better these days, but complicated. My parents are now both in their 60s and still together.
I see them every couple of months, but Dad has never really apologised for what he did. Although the past is the past and you can’t change it, I wish he understood the trauma we still feel. We’ve never had the chance to sit down as siblings with him and tell him all the hurt he caused us. We can’t go through life being angry with him, but an acknowledgement of the deprivation we felt as a result of his gambling would help us.
You are left with practical problems after life with a gambling addict, too – literal holes and gaps in your knowledge of the world and ability to live life as an adult. I was never parented or educated around money, so after leaving home at 18, I got myself into more than £25,000 of debt by living beyond my means.
At the age of 23, for example, I went straight to a Mercedes showroom and got a £40,000 car on finance, although I was earning less than £25,000. The maths didn’t add up, but my attitude to money was so warped by my childhood, I went for it anyway.
I lived on credit cards, not even knowing debt was a bad thing.
Then I had something of a lightbulb moment. Working as an employability coach, helping people look and prepare for work, I realised that the crux of keeping people in a job is financial education. I became obsessed with knowing more about money.
I read books on personal finance and did online courses on financial education. I started turning things around, carefully budgeting and getting myself out of debt.
At work, when I told other people how I was brought up and all the mistakes I made as an adult, my story really resonated. I now work in schools, communities and workplaces talking about financial education.
Through Bet On Her, I’m campaigning to let women know there is help for them out there. I want to give others the stability that I never had. Bet On Her will be a safe space and community, online and offline, empowering women affected by gambling harms.
I was left to figure out everything on my own. The journey was painful and my family are still picking up the pieces.
I’m so passionate about breaking the cycle of pain and shame, and not passing on the generational trauma to my daughter.
- Find out more about Bet On Her at betonher.org.uk
- As told to Deborah Cicurel
