Parents, Children And Alcohol: Mom

My mother grew up in Pennsylvania, primarily in the Dover and York areas. She was incredibly creative and thoughtful, though her spontaneous nature never allowed her to apply herself to honing those traits. Instead, she would flit from writing to painting, knitting to designing clothing. But, at least from what I know, there was no sadness or stress in her lack of direction--instead she just moved from one thing to the next, perhaps enjoying that movement more than enjoying the actual doing.

She was a self-titled free spirit and liked going to concerts, hanging out with friends, listening to music-- she lived her life laughing and loving. And, in the days of her young womanhood, when there were no wrinkles at the corners of her eyes or on her heart, I believe that she was.

But even freedom is something that we must work for in life, be aware of and have respect for, and always be vigilant to maintain. Without this kind of loving attention, even freedom will grow stagnant, sour, become the reverse of itself. I used "was" in my above description of my mother, because at this point of her life, at the age of 58 and with atleast half of those years spent in active addiction, her spirit is far from free.

At a relatively young age, my mother and father met. I don't know the specifics of the beginnings of their relationship (there are many closed doors inside an alcoholic home) but I do believe that the love they felt for one another, at least at that point, was as vivid, and powerful and wonderfully consuming as the love we all feel when it's real love.

While they may have met relatively young, they married and had me relatively late, my mother being in her mid thirties when I came into the world.

And, sometime after that, sometime when I was very young, the carefree, fun loving attitude that had carried my mother through her life to that point started to fail her.

There were episodes of periodic (though still detestable and unacceptable) abuse directed at my mother by my father prior to my birth, but the majority of these events came afterwards. Some I was too young to remember, and instead found out about years later, others I can still remember vividly. But, seeing as how I'm focusing on my mother as a young mother, I'll only share one story from that time--one that I was told by my mother when I was in my early teens.

I was very young, my exact age neither she or I know--I may've been 4 or 5 or 6, suffice to say, I have no actual memory of this event. My mother was in the backroom of the house with me, a house that, at that time, she still kept clean and decorated with pillows and blankets she'd make from kits or from her own ideas, laying on a sofa with some of the mentioned pillows laying around her. My father came home, saw her laying there and proceeded to scream that she was in bed with three guys--one of them was black, the other spanish. I suppose this distinction means that, while the white guy she was in bed with would just get a thrashing, there was a special hell in store for the black and spanish gentlemen callers.

My mother was the one who received this special hell. As I said, the white, black and spanish guys (yes, even the white one) my mom was having a tryst with were all pillows. Just pillows.

My dad beat my young mother badly, perhaps this was the first time the abuse escalated to this level, and of course he was drunk.

After this point, moving into the realm of time that I can actually remember living in, the time of my own childhood and "tween" years (though I'm thankful I was a "tween" before the word "tween" became part of our cultural lexicon) incidents of abuse were a persistent thing. They would become constant in the years ahead, but at that point, they were something that would come down on my mother--and later myself--from my father only from time to time. But, as these times stacked upon one another, a certainty began to build--an expectant fear. Despite there being weeks and months inbetween the incidents at times, our hope that they wouldn't happen again became a resigned belief that they would.

They would, and did.

It was at that point--where my father's own unresolved issues, his inability to cope with what had happened to him as a child, over the course of his life, as an adult, when his disappointments and his dissatisfaction with life caused his drinking to go from unacceptable to worse--that my mother began drinking more regularly and heavily to cope with the hurt, betrayal, fear and strained love she'd found herself inside of.

That last bit, talking of strained love...I'm sure that will be something that I hit on time and again within this blog. Though I am focusing on my mother right now, allow me to switch the focus to myself for just a moment. After all, love is a mysterious thing, and even if I knew the times and the events and who she was at that time better than I actually do, I still don't think I could speak with any certainty about the love she felt for my father and from him in turn. Love is a powerful, living thing inside of each one of us--and defining it within ourselves is, in my understanding, the closest we can come to realizing what love feels like within another person.

We learn about love as we learn about life, and the love that I learned was always one that came with pain. It was loving a person that hurt you, or loving a person that you hurt--and, most painfully of all perhaps, knowing the contradiction at work there. But not understanding, or feeling, that there can be change--that while love can change and move, and at times hurt, it should not be a painful thing by definition. Sometimes you can love someone truly and dearly and feel a want for them that transcends want into the realm of need, but time and space is required for that love to truly blossom, trust is required, for that love to breathe.

Love should not be a suffocating, strangling thing--but this was the love I learned and how I, at times intentionally and at times unintentionally, perceived love for all of my life until now. Like my life, it was something with little room to breathe and little trust in myself or for others--including the ones that I loved.

For my mother, I believe this was the love she learned over the years with my father. That she was either forced to accept or forced herself to accept. A feeling like drowning in a sea of emotions, with that kernel of despoiled love you once had as the only buoy keeping your head up and out of the waves. And with the person you hold that love for being unaware, unaccountable--distant. It's just you, the feelings, the waves and the depths below.

She'd spent her life, laughing and dancing, and in doing this never taking too long to analyze or acknowledge the things she didn't care for. Why should she? When there were other things she enjoyed. Yet now, she had woken up in a situation she felt she couldn't move away from. Though she certainly could have, she was unable or unwilling to make the necessary choices to do so. To reiterate what I said earlier, love should not be a painful thing by definition. This is not to say that the love my mother felt for my father was invalid, or that the love he felt for her was invalid, but love as a life preserver and not as life is no way to live or love.

As the abuse, drinking and emotional devastation continued over the years, every now and again my mother would try to have the band halfheartedly strike up a song, but the music would play very softly, and everyone involved felt the futility at work. Eventually, the band packed up their instruments, and the lights were turned down, and all the chairs put up on tables. The bar was still open, but no one was laughing or singing or holding one another now. And the bar, the bar's always open.

Her dancing days were over.

As I write this, October 23rd 2009, my mother is still an active alcoholic, and in my own periods of both use and sobriety, I've watched her life erode to nothing. She lives with no joy, no hope--only a misery that stems from one source, but one that she is still incapable of recognizing.

I say that with love, sadness and personal understanding: alcoholism is a form of insanity. And, while this isn't even close to universally true when it comes to the expansive world of mental illness, the old saying of "A person who's really crazy doesn't know that they're crazy" does apply.

As I was, she is certainly aware that she's miserable--that her life has become something she drags herself through. She's certainly aware that she's drinking too much, and that her drinking is harming her. She knows that she's an alcoholic.

But there's a failure to make the connection, a failure to actually accept these things. A failure in addressing the problem or believing the problem can be addressed or resolved. Instead, there's only the hopelessness of knowing you are condemned. A life in a prison where the only solace comes from the very thing that's keeping you trapped there. Crying, drunk, behind the bars while the walls rust and the floor rots and life collapses around you.

Choice is an important element to the process of declining into addiction and then (hopefully) resurfacing to life. We choose to begin our addiction, even if that choice is the only one we feel available to us at that time. There is a period where we choose to nurture our addiction--I can say this is a sure thing for myself, because early on there are moments that I can look back on and realize that I had chosen to drink entirely on my own. It was my choice. But as the addiction grows, the choices we can perceive diminish, until there is only one choice--and that is not the choice to drink. There is no longer any choice in our minds to drink, drinking has become a central part of our existence.

The one choice that does exist at the end of that road, the one that's the hardest to make, is the choice to do something. For me it wasn't as simple as choosing to stop drinking, but that became part of it in time. For me, it was the choice to do something--something became anything, and in time that became to stop drinking.

For my mother, as it was for myself and for everyone who ever has or will pick up and then put down, this one choice that holds so many others within it is the one that she would need to make to find her life again. She would need to put aside the defenses, the false ways of living, that she relied on during all of the years of abuse to keep her alive, alive but so very unhappy.

It's a frightening choice, but a necessary one--I emphasize, it is a frightening choice. I know that well, because I struggled for a long time with making it myself.

One way of looking at it that is helpful to me, and perhaps could be to my mother if she allowed it, and may possibly be helpful to anyone reading this is as follows:

You can choose to do something
You can choose not to do something
Or you can choose not to choose

Out of those three, the latter two directly correlate with my own experiences with descending into and then living within alcoholism. I believed, at times raging, at times crying, that I was choosing not to do something--that I was defending what I considered to be my way of life. But that was window show, whistling past the graveyard--when I finally signed myself into rehab, I was long past the point of believing I was choosing to continue drinking, that I was making a choice that I was fine with.

The truth is that I was choosing not to choose.

And, as I said earlier, recovery--initially, more so just the potential for change--came by choosing to do something.

I sincerely hope that one day my mother will choose for herself.