The Influence: Paying The Price Of My Father's Booze

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by Collins Under the Influence Scott Russell Sanders teaches literature at Indiana University. He is the writer of “Under the influence: Paying the Price of my Father’s Booze.” This story was written in 1989 and was published by HARPER`S. The main purpose of writing this story is to share with people how alcoholism or addiction of any kind destroys families and even the people around the alcoholics. Furthermore, he went ahead by using his experience with his father being an alcoholic as an example. This experience weighed them down in many ways, but made a great decision not to follow his father’s footsteps. As a child, Sanders took on the responsibilities to help his father…show more content…
My childhood experience shaped me into becoming someone who is very interested in education. When I was the age of fifteen, my parents took it as a responsibility to teach me and my brother and sister. My parents started giving me the basic education that I needed to become a responsible individual in life. They urged me to study at night even when I didn’t feel like studying. They didn’t care what it will take them into forcing me to study. They never relented on getting us educated. To be more precise, my mother who is a teacher never allowed us to play around during weekdays. There were no time to play and there wasn’t no being idle. The manipulated our mind with fear and this fear grew in us. For instance, whenever my mom or dad were coming back from work and we are playing or sitting around doing nothing reasonable; once we hear the sound of their car parking in the garage, we pretend to be studying because we knew the consequences of our act. It is either we get manual labor or they ground us from going outside that weekend. This act continued to the extent my class mates noticed it and they started asking questions why we never get to play with them during weekdays after school except on the weekends. At that age we never gave them a better answer for their question because we never knew the good my parents was doing to us. My parents formed it as a habit that they always

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