Answer Addiction

Tag: alcoholic mother

  • Losing Nanny: The Collateral Damage of Addiction

    Losing Nanny: The Collateral Damage of Addiction

    I can’t help but wonder what could’ve been if my mom’s addiction didn’t suck up and spit out every relationship and person it touched. 

    The few pictures I have of my nanny are stowed away in a cardboard box buried in the back of my bedroom closet. And while I don’t want to throw them away, I feel no urge to dig them out and display them in a faux-wood frame from Target that has the word family written in cursive ribbons around the edges. Although my nanny wasn’t the alcoholic, at least in my life, my relationship with her was just as fraught as the one I had with my mom, the alcoholic. And sadly, it was because of my mom’s addiction that my relationship with my nanny became what it did, and ultimately what it didn’t. 

    Nanny was born Katherine, but the adults called her Kitty. She was thin and never without a cigarette in hand. Her hair was charcoal black and full of thick bulbous curls. She lived on Indian Queen Lane in East Falls, Philadelphia on the first floor of a house she rented and shared with my pop-pop. I don’t know if they were ever legally married, but they had five children: my uncles Tim, Mike, and Larry, and my mom. Dot, the oldest, had a different father, which may be why she never became a drug addict or alcoholic like the rest of them. 

    Nanny and Pop-pop Drank Heavily and Fought Frequently

    According to my mother, when Nanny and Pop-pop were young, they drank heavily and fought frequently, and their public displays of destruction eventually caught the attention of social services. In one fell swoop, my uncles, my mom, and aunt Dot became orphans and were parceled out to stable families. But Nanny fought and got her kids back, which I assume is when she put down the drink for good. Pop-pop, although he retired his fists, died an alcoholic, his tattooed body hijacked by cancer. 

    After my parents divorced when I was four, my mom and I moved back to East Falls. Initially, Mom planned to move in with Nanny until she could afford to rent an apartment for us, but my pop-pop objected because he didn’t want us, “those two bitches,” eating all of his food. Instead, we moved in with my uncle Mike, who lived in an apartment under the Roosevelt Expressway on Ridge Avenue, an eight-minute walk from Nanny’s. I recall my mom and I having to sleep on the floor because Uncle Mike didn’t have furniture. Instead, he had a refrigerator full of Budweiser.

    Eventually, my mom found work waiting tables and Nanny took care of me during the day, walking me to Mifflin Preschool in the morning and picking me up in the afternoon. For lunch, she made ham, orange cheese, and potato chip sandwiches on white bread with mustard. And dessert was a handful of Oreo cookies from the frog-shaped cookie jar she kept on the kitchen table along with a cold, tall glass of full-fat milk. Apparently, Pop-pop was okay with me eating processed cheese and ham; as long as I didn’t dare go near his fried steak and potatoes.

    By the time my mom pulled together the money to rent an apartment, my nanny had assumed the role of default caretaker. My mom’s schedule became an endless stream of barely making it to work during the day, getting plastered at the bar at night, and hanging out with my alcoholic soon-to-be stepfather. Instead of my mom picking me up after lunch, I stayed with Nanny and watched her favorite soap opera, General Hospital, while she sucked backed cigarettes and ironed Pop-pop’s work pants. I sat at the kitchen table at night while she prepared dinner and then examined her every move as she scrubbed and dried each pot and plate. After my bath, I’d sit with her on the edge of the bed and watch M*A*S*H, a show about an American medical unit during the Korean War. 

    Damn It, Why Do I Have to Take Care of You?

    One night she brought in a bowl of black licorice balls and insisted I try one. Never a kid to turn down candy, I popped a ball in my mouth and quickly discovered how much I hated the taste of black licorice. 

    “How’s it?” Nanny asked without taking her eyes off the T.V.

    As saliva filled my mouth, the taste of licorice coated my tongue and slipped between every tooth, reaching the flesh of my cheeks and the back of my lips. Afraid of what would happen if I opened my mouth, I nodded my head yes and walked down the hall to the bathroom. In there, I leaned over the trashcan next to the toilet and spat the ball out. In an attempt to hide what I’d done, I grabbed a wad of toilet paper from the roll and threw it in over the black goo in the can. I don’t know why I did it, but when I got back to Nanny’s room, I sat on her bed, reached into the bowl, and popped another licorice ball in my mouth. I waited a minute, went back to the bathroom, and spit the ball out, just as I did with the first, covering it with toilet paper. I did that at least twice more before Nanny noticed and screamed, “Are you spitting that licorice out?” Terrified, I nodded my head. 

    “Why you doing that?” She asked.

    Still terrified to speak, I answered with a timid shoulder shrug.

    “Damn it, Dawn!” She wailed. “If you don’t like the goddamn things then don’t eat them.”

    Oddly, this was the only kind of interaction I recall having with my nanny. I’d do something typical for a little kid such as trip on my shoelaces, cry when I had to get shots, or accidentally pee on the toilet seat, and she’d scream “Damn it, Dawn!” She’d always follow that up with something like “It doesn’t hurt,” or “Stop being so dramatic,” or “What’d you do now?” 

    I’ve always wondered if what she really wanted to say after “Damn it, Dawn!” was “Why do I have to take care of you?” Looking back, I can’t say I’d blame her if she did.

    Nanny didn’t balk when my mom and I moved in with my stepdad or when they eventually married, even though he was glaringly wrong for her. Under my stepdad’s roof, my mom didn’t have to work, which meant she should have had time to look after me. But her love for alcohol and my stepdad’s penchant for violence made that nearly impossible. 

    Chaos, Instability, and Abuse

    The three of us lived together for four long and terrifying years, marked by a level of chaos, instability, and abuse that I’m still working out in therapy. I can only imagine how much more screwed-up I’d be as an adult if I hadn’t distanced myself from my mom at a young age. And although estrangement has been good for my mental and emotional well-being, it didn’t come without a cost. Cutting off contact with my mom meant severing ties with aunts, uncles, and cousins on that side of my family, relatives whose faces and voices I wouldn’t recognize today. That collateral damage included my nanny. 

    I can’t help but wonder what could’ve been if my mom’s addiction didn’t suck up and spit out every relationship and person it touched. 

    Like Pop-pop, Nanny died of cancer a handful of years ago, but because I was estranged from my mom, I never learned what kind of cancer she had or how long she had it before she passed. I didn’t go to her funeral because I knew my mom would be there and likely not sober. Even as an adult, concern for my own safety was stronger than my desire to pay my respects. I don’t regret that decision. 

    Regrets and Puzzle Pieces

    But I do regret the things I’ll never know about my nanny. I regret not knowing her maiden name, or what county in Ireland her parents were from. I’ll never know if she finished high school, if she had any aspirations beyond motherhood or if she resented having to take care of me when my mom couldn’t. Maybe these questions sound trivial, but for someone whose family has been battered and divided by addiction, the answers become the missing pieces to a puzzle you want to finish but can’t. 

    I still have some pieces, though: memories of potato chip sandwiches on white bread, a fat ceramic frog full of Oreo cookies, and a cardboard box of faded pictures buried in the back of my closet that I can’t throw away. 

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • For My Mother, Putting Down the Alcohol Wasn't Enough

    For My Mother, Putting Down the Alcohol Wasn't Enough

    As an adult, I struggled to reconcile how my mother could be bone sober but still function like the manipulative, bewildering, and self-absorbed alcoholic I sat next to in all those corner bars as a kid.

    A fruit fly was floating in a glob of liquor stuck to the bar. Next to it was a plastic, black ashtray holding a mound of white ash and lipstick-ringed cigarette butts. The butts belonged to my mother, who I was sitting next to and whose free hand was wrapped around a bottle of Budweiser. The bartender, a pasty man with a few thin strands of black hair matted to his head, slammed a Shirley Temple down in front of me. The base of the glass landed in the puddle of liquor smashing the already dead fly.

    My mother didn’t notice my barstool nearly tipping over as I swung my legs forward and back to inch my seat closer to the bar. If she were paying attention, she would’ve noticed my arms weren’t long enough to reach my Shirley Temple. Instead, she was focused on a random guy at the opposite end of the bar. They were yelling over each other, which made it impossible to understand their argument. Their words clashed in midair and became one tangled cluster of sound. But by the tense curl of my mother’s upper lip, and from the way she wildly poked and whipped her lit cigarette in the air, I knew she was miles from sober.

    For me, at six years old, this was how I understood my mother. I didn’t know who she was or how her mind worked without alcohol. But I believed if she put the bottle down, she would become the stable and sane woman I wanted her to be.

    Unfortunately, it took my mother roughly 30 years to become sober. And during that time, we were estranged. Over those decades, with little to no contact, I had no idea how paralyzing my mother’s habit had become. I didn’t know she’d swapped out beer for hard liquor and was downing a bottle or two a day. I didn’t realize she’d reached a point in her addiction where she was so consistently drunk, she had to crap in an adult diaper. Her live-in artist boyfriend kept her shelves stocked with liquor and changed her as needed.

    At some point in her early 50s, my mother walked into her first AA meeting. In those rooms, she discovered sobriety. Eventually, she found a sponsor, broke up with her caretaker boyfriend and replaced her stockpile of booze with tins of Maxwell House coffee. My mother went on disability, found a primary doctor, and saved money to fix up her home.

    On the outside, she appeared to have reached sobriety nirvana. And when, in my early 30s, I was told by a relative that my mother, then in her 60s, had been clean for a decade, I couldn’t fathom it. My mind couldn’t hold an image of her without a mouthful of beer and a cigarette twisted between her fingers. I struggled to believe it: if she was certifiably sober I needed to experience it for myself. It took me a few days, but after some digging I found her phone number and called.

    “Hi Mom, it’s me… Dawn,” I told her.

    “What? My daughter?” she said. “You can’t be. My daughter’s dead.”

    “No… Mom. What?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or hang up. “I swear it’s me,” I repeated. “I’m not dead.”

    “No, no, no,” she said. “My daughter’s dead. You stole her identity.”

    Given how bizarre our exchange was, perhaps I should’ve proceeded with more caution, but when I discovered the rumors of her sobriety were true, I decided to reach out again. After all, if my six-year-old self was right, all my mother needed to do was put down the bottle.

    Over the next year, through measured contact, I discovered the holes in my mother’s recovery revealed an intricate system of emotional IEDs. Each one, when detonated, caused a familiar flinching in my gut and appeared to be constructed from the same materials she so deftly used when I was a kid. As an adult, I struggled to reconcile how my mother could be bone sober but still function like the manipulative, bewildering, and self-absorbed alcoholic I sat next to in all those shitty corner bars as a kid. Luckily, I had enough therapy to know I was under no obligation to fix my mother or to stay in contact with her.

    During our last phone call, I let my mother know I’d reached my limit with our relationship. And in response, at every point where there was the slightest pause in the conversation, she repeated, “I get it, I get it,” which pushed the exchange far beyond confusing. Days before, my mother had erupted when I missed her phone call, but when I told her I was walking away from whatever our relationship was, she appeared oddly understanding and supportive.

    Before we hung up, my mother said she loved me, that she was proud of the woman I’d become, and that she was sorry for being an alcoholic instead of the mother I needed her to be. Unlike in previous exchanges, there wasn’t a trace of sarcasm in her voice, which made me wonder if I’d misunderstood my mother’s behavior. Were my instincts leading me in the wrong direction? Was the guilt I felt actually punishment for potentially hurting my mother? Was I too defensive? At that time, no matter how hard I obsessed over the questions, I couldn’t lock down the answers.

    But eventually, my mother showed me everything I needed to know.

    Several years passed, and during that time my mother and I remained estranged. While I enjoyed the overall emotional freedom the distance created, I occasionally got snagged by lingering doubt and guilt. To cope, I began writing about my experience, and soon I landed a gig with a popular, national magazine. They commissioned me to write about estrangement and the challenges I faced growing up with an alcoholic mother. Not only was this my chance to validate my experience, but I also hoped the finished product would provide comfort to other women emotionally scarred by their mother’s addiction.

    For months I worked on the draft, and during that time I relived many of the disturbing events that destroyed my relationship with my mother: the nights my pajamas reeked of cigarette smoke from the bar, the incident when she flipped into a drunken rage and attempted to throw me out of a third-story window, and the times, when I was a kid, that she chased me around the house, swinging a serrated steak knife at my back, threatening to kill me.

    Days before the piece was set to go live, my editor informed me that for legal reasons the magazine needed to acquire my mother’s consent to publish. Given that I hadn’t spoken to her in years, I was torn over how to proceed. I didn’t want to hurt or shame my mother, but at the same time, I felt compelled to tell my story. Ultimately, I embraced the unknown and passed on her number. Nearly a week passed before I heard from my editor.

    “I spoke with your mom today, and the conversation was very positive,” my editor excitedly shared over the phone.

    “Are you serious?” I responded in disbelief.

    “She’s given her consent, admitted to being a long-time alcoholic, and she’s totally supportive of you telling your story,” she told me.

    “So… she didn’t give you a hard time or anything?”

    “No, not at all.”

    Although I had no idea what to expect from my mother, her positive reaction left me dizzy. And while I felt an unparalleled sense of accomplishment knowing my piece and my story would be floating, unencumbered, across the internet, my gut churned with guilt. Admittedly, my mother’s response would’ve been easier to process if she had reacted with the rage I expected her to. But because she gave her consent without a tinge of condemnation, I felt I betrayed her. I felt as if I hadn’t given her sobriety a chance. Perhaps I failed to give her the credit she deserved.

    Again I was obsessed with a nagging question I couldn’t answer: Was my mother finally the sane and sober woman I’d always wanted her to be? But then, a few days later, I received another call.

    “I’ve got bad news,” my editor told me. “Your mom called me today and has changed her mind, saying she disputes everything and denies ever being an alcoholic.”

    “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I sighed.

    “Your mom sounded completely different on the phone… aggressive and unhinged,” my editor explained. “I can’t be sure, but I think she may have been drinking.”

    With one phone call, not only was my piece killed, but I also realized that the confusion and doubt I wrestled with over the depth of my mother’s sobriety were instinctive warnings. On all accounts, my mother was sober: she hadn’t picked up a drink in 10 years. But she wasn’t in recovery. She hadn’t yet faced the issues that convinced her a life of perpetual hangovers and adult diapers was better than living with whatever reality had to offer. My mother no longer slurred her words, but she was as unstable and unreliable as ever.

    Today, I’m convinced my instincts instantly picked up on the disparity between my mother’s sobriety—or abstinence—and her lack of real recovery. Looking back, I realize there were numerous times that I was in contact with her as an adult when I felt like a confused six-year-old kid again, sitting next to her at some shitty corner bar, watching her get loaded. Thankfully, my confusion finally made sense.

    While I can’t speak for every person with alcoholism or addiction, and I prefer not to generalize when it comes to an individual’s sobriety, I know at least for my mother, putting down the bottle—as difficult as that may have been—was only the first step. And now it’s up to her to keep on walking.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Their First Day of School Was My Last Day of Drinking

    Their First Day of School Was My Last Day of Drinking

    That day was the last time I bought into the lies that one drink will somehow not send me on that downward spiral to insanity and destruction of everything I love and care about.

    The kids were still sleeping when I woke up early just to start drinking. The wine was hidden in its usual spot, my closet, and I stood in there at 6 a.m. to choke down whatever I had left. Not because I wanted to, but at that point in my alcoholism my poor body depended on those swigs simply to function normally. I downed enough to stop the shakes, the sick feeling creeping all over my body, the ringing in my ears. Today was the first day of school and a big one at that. My youngest was starting kindergarten.

    Spenser

    He and I had quite a history. I was standing at a nurse’s station in a detox center when I found out I was pregnant with him. I had no idea. And now here we were, my baby with his little backpack, the youngest of four kids, heading to his first day of school. What the hell have I been doing all this time? The grip of addiction was still strangling me and all I could hope was that I’d get better sometime soon. I was so tired.

    The Secret

    I took a quick shower, skipping out on washing my hair. I didn’t have the time or the energy to fix it today. After I got dressed, my husband was already in the kitchen. Coffee was brewing, and silence filled the room. He knew about the closet, knew what I had done. I had looked into those broken eyes countless times, and this morning’s overwhelming feelings of self disgust were the same as all the times before. Graciously he hugged me without saying a word. And we stood there holding each other, like soldiers witnessing a gruesome battle, carrying on a conversation without uttering a single word until I finally let go to wake up the other kids.

    “I’ll start putting your bags in the car,” he said.

    “Okay.”

    And the sad secret being kept from the kids remained intact.

    Shelby

    It was her senior year of high school. My first-born baby girl had seen it all, from happy times in sobriety to life with a mom in rehab for the sixth time. Shelby was done with hearing apologies, but old enough by now to know I didn’t want to drink. She knew I tried, but she wanted her mother. I had one more year before she was gone and I felt every tick of the clock counting down as I wasted yet another day stuck in the fear and shame of it all. How many times had I failed her, and what if I did it again? She’d get her own ride to school, she’d hear the news, but would she forgive me one more time?

    Rebecca

    She had woken herself up for her first day of fifth grade, her last year in elementary school. I couldn’t help but think back to preschool days, her bright blonde hair and toothy grin. But like many memories, flashes of alcoholic moments clouded over the good times and I forced myself to think about something else. She was only four years old when she watched me get handcuffed out of the car and led away for my first DUI. I desperately needed to make new memories, not just for her but for me, too. All of my thoughts were killing me.

    Stella

    Since Spenser had snuck into our bed the night before, I only had one child left to wake up. Stella was still sleeping. She’d been waiting for this day — the beginning of third grade — for two weeks, excited to get back and see her friends again. I sat on the edge of her bottom bunk, reaching for her wavy brown hair. She rolled over and stretched, asking if it was morning. I realized this was it. I wouldn’t be back here for a while, wouldn’t be tucking her in tonight. Desperately wishing I could push rewind for the hundredth time, I just stood up and headed downstairs, feeling sad and scared and awful.

    Eventually the backpacks we ready and the lunches packed. I took one last look around my house, swallowing the waves of tears ready to spill out of my eyes and ruin the picture of normalcy I was trying to paint for my kids. We got in the car, my husband driving, and headed to the school a couple blocks away.

    A Long Good-bye

    “Focus on the kids,” is what I kept telling myself. “God, just get me through this without crying.”

    Hallway after hallway, at every turn was a flood of smiling parents with their best-dressed kids. The excitement was bubbling around me like Christmas morning. I, however, was in a private hell. Physically already feeling the effects of my maintenance wine consumption wearing off, I was dizzy, fluctuating between hot and cold. I thought I looked different than every other mom, so I kept my head down with a fake smile plastered on my face. I was an outsider, uncomfortable and out of place. We went room by room, starting at fifth grade, then third, and finally kindergarten. Each time I walked my precious child in and hugged and kissed them, holding back everything I wanted to say but couldn’t. I left parts of my heart, then grabbed my husband’s hand as we forced our way through crowds and out the door so I could breathe again.

    At 3 o’clock, school would get out, but I’d be gone. My kids wouldn’t see me again until weeks later during visitation day at my seventh treatment center for drug and alcohol addiction. My bed had been reserved since the previous Friday. I’d begged both my husband and the rehab facility to let me wait so that I could do what I just described: take my kids to school for their first day of school, walk Spenser to his first day of kindergarten.

    A Grateful Last Day

    That was August 22, 2016 and I haven’t picked up a drink since that morning. There was no hard bottom circumstance like other times I tried to quit, just sick and tired of being sick and tired. I couldn’t do it anymore. I knew what was left for me: death. I’d been carrying it around with me for months like a dark cloud, convinced the impending death wouldn’t be easy enough to be mine. More than likely it would be one of these precious kids because I always found a reason to drive after I drank.

    But that was the last time my body needed alcohol pumping through my bloodstream just to operate normally. It was the last time I needed to sneak away and find my liquid problem solver and stress reliever, my life-buffer that told me I needed a drink to cope. And it was the last time I bought into the lies that one drink will somehow not send me on that downward spiral to insanity and destruction of everything I love and care about.

    First day, last day, same day. Sometimes a thousand failures lead up to that one success, but that one is all you ever needed. True freedom is accepting it happened the way it was supposed to; taking what you have and making a purpose out of it. I was tired of being sick, and sick of being beaten down by this disease. Sick of always having shame take me out, sick of drinking to escape the self-hatred of not being able to stop drinking. 

    In sobriety, our last day is our first. Sometimes we show up in hallways of institutions and sometimes in closed rooms, feeling uncomfortable and out of place. But once we lift our heads and open our minds, hope comes sneaking in. It’s that moment where recovery is possible — for anyone, even a mother like me.

    View the original article at thefix.com