Most children of alcoholics spend a lifetime waiting to become an alcoholic. That is, worrying that day will come despite our best efforts. Each of us knows that alcoholism is a family disease, and many of us believe that we can inherit it with or without doing much drinking at all. At times alcoholism is such a well-hidden disease that some folks handle it without a single side-effect (if appearances were the whole story) such that it would look like he or she was not an alcoholic at all. While it may be easy to hide addiction on the outside, anyone on the inside of an alcoholic family knows that it’s anything but free of side-effects. If you’re like me, you are to some degree always listening for the click of that key.