drinking again...
Fair warning: my mother is dead and I'm in full on processing mode. It feels better to post this somewhere than to just write it and not show anyone. So, that's what I'm doing. I may be posting more in the coming weeks. To be messy and anal expulsive is a totally fitting tribute, considering who she was.
She's loaded in this picture,
I guess, for several years now I have been going through this thing - a sort of 'revisionist history' in my head where I consider my tumultuous childhood, and instead of being the total victim of circumstance, I am the partial instigator of my own misfortune. I am the brat, the difficult case, and in the case of my mother's supposed alcoholism, I am 'the prude'.
My supposed prudish-ness around my mother's supposed alcoholism stems from this idea that she didn't really drink that much. Maybe she did. Maybe she didn't. At one point she got it down to once a month, and she kept that frequency for quite a while. My mother defended her monthly schedule to me long after the day we sat on the couch after I came back to her from being in my first or second foster home, and she handed me a child's Al-Anon book and cried, promising to be a good mother from there on out. Perhaps that's when she cut things down to monthly. She wanted credit for that.
As an adult I have, at times, attained that same drunk frequency, and have not been the worse for it. I love drinking, in-fact. I pretty much always have a good time. A greater fantasy of mine is to get shit-faced with all of my friends. Which, oddly, never seems to happen. However, I never drank like my mom drank. My mom would be drunk before she finished putting on her make-up to go out and get black out drunk. She'd be out wasted trying to park her huge, white Monte Carlo into our tiny driveway, and all the neighbors would come out and watch; casting me, a 10 year old, nervous and sympathetic looks.
Still, I have downplayed those details. She wasn't out wasted trying to park the car EVERY time. I have been unable to explain her alcoholism or how she was an alcoholic as opposed to merely a drinker. Until this morning...
This morning I thought of this:
I was maybe 9 or 10 years old. My mom had dated this white guy (who, after he had died of cancer many years later, she told me was a cross dresser) who had moved away, but now was coming back to Duluth on a visit. He was supposed to arrive at 7 but didn't show up. Hours passed and my mother got drunker and drunker waiting for him. I was embarrassed for her. I wanted her to sober up before he arrived so I hid her remaining giant bottle of wine in the basement. Of course, this caused a total meltdown on my mother's part. It ended with her attempting to beat me with an iron rod. I remember her chasing me into my room and me jumping under the blankets on my bed and her taking repeated swings at me while I screamed. Somehow she missed, or maybe she was trying to miss. I couldn't tell the difference, and I was horrified of her. Between her yelling and the dodging of her blows, it was truly an ordeal.
I don't remember if the guy came over or not. I think I just laid in a pile after it was over and fell asleep. The next morning my mother was apologetic. I don't remember all of what she said. She was sorry. The only thing I do remember her saying is that she told me not to ever hide her booze again.
And that right there is how my mother was an alcoholic. Rather than give up drinking to keep me safe, she told me never to hide her alcohol again.
I'm 39 and I cannot believe it took me this long to see and accept this simple logic. Other people have proffered to me that I 'divorced' my mom. It's true that my entree into foster care after the age of 8 (8!) was mostly initiated by me, the things I have told myself about that moment are varied. There's a strong thread that says to me that I rejected her love, that I was being vindictive, and that all that I endured afterwards was the consequence of that initial vindictiveness. It can't be easy to be a parent... But, I needed to protect myself from her, that really is the truth.
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