The day my dad moved out
when I was eight, my heart shattered into a million icicles, slicing my insides,
leaving my body and soul cold, painful, and frozen. My mom did her best to heal
my grief by taking my sister, Lisa, and me to rodeos, circuses, and away on
vacations—to Washington, DC; New York; and all around Florida to Disney World,
SeaWorld, and Busch Gardens. Mom worked at Sears in customer service for
minimum wage and spent all her extra money on Lisa and me, and I found out
years later she borrowed from our home’s equity to take us on trips. My dad, a
social worker, sent us $150 a month in child support, which Mom told us was
always late. Mom said the reason they separated and later divorced was that
“your father’s an alcoholic.”
As a teenager my sister
became interested in fashion and entered a modeling contest. Mom watched while
Lisa paraded on stage in a bright orange flowered dress—it was the 1970s and
she wore high platform shoes that were all the rage. Lisa tried to calm her
nerves as she pranced around the stage, twirling and posing, and when the show
finished, she wobbled over to meet Mom, her eyes wide with hope.
“You walked like a truck
driver,” Mom said.
Mom always said what was
on her mind and never concerned herself with what anyone thought of her. Lisa’s
friend won the contest.
Mom also wanted to support
my dream of surfing—I so wanted to be a little surfer girl like the Beach Boys
sang about. I put Sun-In into my hair, turning it blonde; tanned my skin; and
wore puka beads around my neck. When I was 16, Mom took me to the surf haven of
Sebastian Inlet up the coast of Florida. An ex-boyfriend lent me his surfboard
and I tried to paddle out, but waves pummeled my nonathletic body, and though I
gulped mouthfuls of seawater, I did not catch even one wave. I tugged the board
behind me, my arms like noodles, and met Mom on the beach where she was lying
in the sun—only her face, chest, and arms browned, leaving her legs skim-milk
white.
“What was that?” she said,
scrunching up her nose. “All I saw you do was plop around on your belly.”
Later, we leaned the
surfboard against the window of our motel room. In the morning, we woke to find
that the window had shattered when the board fell over during the night. Mom
hid the board in the bathtub and pulled the shower curtain closed, and soon
after, we heard a knock on the door. It was the owner of the motel.
“What happened to the
window?” he asked.
“Window?” Mom said. “What
window?”
“This window.” He pointed
at the broken glass.
“I don’t know.” Mom shook
her head. “It must have been the wind.”
For the rest of the week,
Mom turned to me and said, “It must have been the wind,” throwing us both into
hysterics.
* * *
One day when Lisa and I
were in high school, Mom heard the band Queen singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” on
the radio.
“What’s that?” Mom said,
pointing to the coffin-sized stereo against the wall in our living room.
“The band Queen,” I said.
“That’s barbershop,” she
said, waving her hands into the air. “Hear the harmonizing? Oh, my God, they’re
terrific.”
Mom sang with The Sweet
Adelines, a female chorus that sang barbershop style. From that moment on, Mom
became a huge Queen fan and bought both of their albums, and when she heard
they were coming to our area for a concert, she bought tickets and took Lisa
and me. We sat in plastic seats high above the stage as thousands of kids waved
lit lighters in the air around the big bubble of a stadium; the smell of
marijuana permeated the air. When Queen ended a song, the entire crowd screamed
and applauded.
“Can’t we get any closer?”
Mom asked.
“Let’s see if we can get
down in front,” I said.
So Lisa, Mom, and I
elbowed our way to the middle of the floor for a full view of the band. Mom did
not stop smiling. During Bohemian Rhapsody, a kid next to us in a dark T-shirt
and with long, shaggy hair passed us a joint. I looked at Lisa and then at Mom,
and Mom shrugged her shoulders, took the joint, and brought it to her
lipstick-stained mouth. She inhaled and began coughing—laughing and choking at
the same time. She handed the joint back and everyone around us cracked up. Mom
loved Freddie Mercury with his tight red pants—running around the stage like a
wild animal with its feet on fire. Mom was the happiest I’d ever seen her. I
don’t think she got stoned off one hit of pot—she was high from the music.
When I was 15, Mom took me
to New Orleans for 4 days—she had to be there for a singing competition, and
she told me I could go if I paid for my own airline ticket. I worked as a
telephone operator after school and on weekends. Our second night there, we sat
at a table in our hotel bar listening to a Dixieland band, and a waitress came
over.
“I’ll have a Mickey Finn,”
Mom said and tipped her head toward me. “And she’ll have a grasshopper.”
The waitress walked away
without asking for my ID. Mom was a social drinker and loved cold beer along
with her dinner. I never saw her intoxicated.
“What’s a grasshopper?” I
asked.
“It tastes really sweet.”
Mom nodded her head. “I think you’ll like it.”
The waitress came back and
put my drink down in front of me. It was mint green, with a little paper umbrella
sticking up next to a red straw. I guess she brought it to me, even though I
wasn’t 18, because I was with Mom. I brought the little straw to my lips and
took a sip. It tasted like a peppermint patty.
“Mom, this is so good.” I
licked my lips. The coolness of the mint turned from cold to warm as it floated
down my throat—my first drink in a real bar.
“I knew you’d like it.”
Mom put her lipstick-coated mouth around her straw.
On the stage, trumpets
exploded with music.
* * *
My love affair with alcohol
began. I discovered that it eased my chronic anxiety and insecurities, and made
my movements smoother—like oil in a car. My shyness melted like ice in hot
water. The summer before college, I drank every night, and four years later
graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a chemistry degree, an acceptance into medical
school, and full-blown alcoholism.
* * *
When I went home for
Christmas during my second year of medical school, Mom spotted a bottle of gin
in my luggage.
“What’s this?” she said,
picking up the bottle. “You’re carrying a bottle with you now?”
“I hate the taste of gin,
but someone gave it to me at a party. I put it in my bag to give it away.” That
was the truth.
“I get worried because of
your father.” Mom bit what was left of her nail on her stubby index finger.
I remembered my parents
fighting when I was in grade school.
“Oh!” Mom said, throwing
up her hands while glaring at my father. “Look who comes walking in the door
after three days. Where the hell have you been?”
“None of your damn business,
Marie.” Dad shook his head. “For Christ’s sake, leave me alone!”
“Why, Brian? Do you have
another hangover?” Mom waved her finger in Dad’s face. “Been out drinking all
night with one of your whores?”
Mom married two alcoholics
and had enabled my father for years. She used denial when she realized my dad
had a problem, and used that same defense mechanism with me. She didn’t want to
confront me or she might find out the worse thing she could imagine—that I was
an alcoholic and had no intentions of quitting. That I was just like Dad.
This is how my mom
described life before my dad: “I hated both my mother and my father. My father
hung my used Kotex on the Christmas tree. They beat me. I was an only child and
was never very smart. I barely graduated high school—my nickname was ‘Dizzy.’ I
dated this Catholic guy Johnny for seven years. He worked for the phone
company. He wanted to get married, but I didn’t, and then I met this man who
looked good in a white shirt. I took one look at him, ended it with Johnny, and
married him. I found out he was an alcoholic, and he hit me. I never even
noticed that he drank, although he did spend a lot of time in a bar. I had the
marriage annulled.”
* * *
In my third year of
medical school, I got a call from Mom saying she was sick and couldn’t work, so
I drove to Hollywood, 20 minutes away, to see her. She was lying on her side in
bed in her purple room, and her skin was translucent and pale, her mouth sunken
because her dentures weren’t in—she looked old. She had a knee-length housecoat
on and her legs stuck out like prickly tree trunks.
“How are you feeling,
Mom?” I sat down in a chair next to her bed.
“Terrible.” Her eyes were
empty and stared right through me.
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“I have carpal tunnel in
my hands.” She showed me the insides of her wrists. “From all that box-lifting
I had to do at Sears. The doctor says I have to lose weight.” Mom had always
been obese, never exercised, and ate whatever she wanted, including fried,
fatty food and sweets.
“What about work?” I was
scared but tried to keep my voice steady.
“I don’t know what I’m
going to do.” She shut her eyes. The curtains were closed and the only light
was a streak of sunlight that pierced through the slanted opening. Everything
looked like it was in shadow—dark and gray.
Mom had always said that
Sears was trying to get rid of her so they could hire part-time people and not
give them benefits. She never returned to work, lived on disability payments,
and had to sell the house we shared all those years. Mom spiraled into a deep
sinkhole like depression, which was not helped by medications or even shock
therapy. She had been hospitalized for depression when I was a child, and her
mother suffered from this debilitating disease as well.
Even though my alcoholism
worsened throughout medical school, I managed to graduate. The day of my
graduation, Mom was in the hospital, so Dad took me to see her. She had
developed multiple medical problems due to her obesity, and because of her
depression, could no longer live alone. I wanted her to be proud of me, and I
closed the curtain for some privacy.
“I graduated, Mom,” I
said, nodding my head. “From med school.”
“That’s good,” she said
and glanced at me for a moment, but seemed to look right through me.
Where was the mom I once
knew? I remembered her singing and playing the piano and bringing me home a
marijuana plant from her boyfriend’s son when I was in high school. I pictured
her booing Nixon when he came on TV and pointing at him and saying, “Watergate,
Watergate, Watergate.” She took Lisa and me to Washington, DC and refused to
let me buy a Nixon doll, but then let me buy a box in Puerto Rico that said
“Marijuana” in red letters like on Marlboro cigarette packages and an opium pipe
from Disney World.
* * *
But the day of my
graduation, Mom lay there, lifeless—a shell of her former self. The room was
quiet except for the muffled sounds of people talking in the hall. I felt like
Mom would never know how far I’d come. I felt sad and helpless. I had been
accepted into a psychiatry residency in New York City and did not even know how
to help my own mother.
I moved to New York to do
my psychiatry residency, and my addiction flourished in a city where bars
beckoned from every corner and taxis roamed the streets in yellow ribbons—no
need to drive. I only saw Mom when I flew down to Florida for drinking binges.
She was living in assisted living and seemed to be improving, unlike me—I was
an end-stage alcoholic. In my last year of residency, I was confronted by my
hospital about my drinking and finally got sober. But that summer while I was
traveling, Mom ended up in a psychiatric hospital once again. Her depression
worsened and she had to be placed into higher levels of care, eventually ending
up in a nursing home. Once there, she gave up on everything, did not go to
activities or physical therapy, and lay in bed watching one TV station all day.
She lived in diapers and the only thing that brought her pleasure was eating
junk food, which worsened her medical problems.
When I visited her, I
never told her how I had gotten sober and was helping other addicts. She was no
longer there. She died when my whole family was together in Florida for a
reunion a month before her 80th birthday. Memory is a strange phenomenon—I did
not realize until I wrote my life story down how Mom took her painful, abusive
past and made a happy childhood for me and my broken heart. But my alcoholism
stole time away that I could have spent with her, and by the time I got sober,
it was too late. Sometimes you can’t redo the past no matter how many steps you
work, take, or climb.
At her memorial service, I
told some of my favorite Mom stories, and pictures of her from her singing days
decorated the room. When I saw her in the casket, it was the first time I saw
her at peace in a long time. She visited me in a dream that year—she was in a
place filled with Christmas decorations, music, and laughter—all the things she
loved. And she had a smile on her face like the night of the Queen
concert.
