About my mom

When I was a very little girl, I followed my mother around like her shadow.

She was the most beautiful person in the world. She had long brown with an 80s-perfect perm with pink heels that matched her pink lipstick. She was stunningly pretty; she turned heads wherever we went. She was also beautiful on the inside, too.  She was an extraordinarily kind person. When there was an illness or death in our family, our neighborhood or for another family we knew at school or in the community, Mom was quick to offer help. At minimum, we prayed for that family.

She had a soft spot in her big heart for children. When there were missing kids in the news, Mom became distraught, as if she’d known the family personally.

One time, we were at a restaurant and there was a misbehaving little boy in the booth next to us. The boy’s mother grabbed him roughly and shook him. She got close to his face and he knew the belt was coming when they left. The father told the mother to settle down or something like that. My mother couldn’t stomach it.

“You’re hurting him,” my mom said to the mother. I wanted to drop beneath the table.

There was an exchange between those moms, but the father looked upset and embarrassed. I think my mother’s words were jarring for that man. Sometimes, a stranger’s outspokenness can change the course of people’s lives.

Mom has heart for the misfits. When I was in elementary school, Mom was keenly aware of the children who were teased and left out. She’d tell me to be extra kind to them. You never know how much a smile and a compliment – or not engaging or laughing when the bullies are after them – can balance it all out with more good to overpower the bad. She said every person has tremendous power to do that.

She taught my sister and me to look for the good every person and to avoid judging because you never know what a person is going through.

My sister has stories of my mother helping children in the small town. She bought a brand-new winter coat for a girl whose family couldn’t afford one, even when my parents were having a hard time making ends meet themselves.

When we watched movies, she cried for the underdog. I distinctly remember she made me watch the film, The Elephant Man, which is about a disfigured man who other people come to see had a beautiful soul because she wanted me to understand the true essence of a person.

If you met her today, you’d agreed – she is an exceptionally kind person. This is who my mother is.

That is exactly why it is so painful that she has been in the grips of addiction for my whole life. I spoke often about the destructive effects of her addiction and my experience as the child of an alcoholic, but it is important to note that I recognize the true human being she is.

Over the years, Mom’s alcoholism worsened. I held everything together for many years. I was certain that I would fix her and get her stop drinking. I refused to accept the version of the person my mother became when drinking. As it would go with any other affliction, I was to be there with her until cured. The fact that Mom would not accept that she was addicted, and accept treatment, was baffling. That side of my mother was fully veiled – a mystery side of my mother that she kept hidden from the world. My mother doesn’t drink with anyone. She doesn’t drink at parties or at bars. Only alone.  To me, this is worse. She stays in her own hell.

I didn’t understand my mother’s childhood and young adult trauma. I didn’t understand what she felt inside and the weight of what she woke up with every day. I didn’t understand addiction.

Because of this lack of education and knowledge about what was happening in my family, I spent most of my life trying to get Mom to stop drinking. In the process, I hurt my mom. My involvement in her life – and my martyr role of being the responsible adult – well, it prevented from her from being an adult. It removed her dignity. By the time I was a teenager, I felt angry, hurt, confused and resentful. I couldn’t distinguish the person she became when drinking from the beautiful person I followed around in my early years. I yelled at her. I hung up on her. I stormed out of the rooms. I once looked at her hungover face and smashed a peanut butter sandwich against the kitchen wall. I was the opposite of supportive. A few times, we even got into physical fights. I told her that I hated her.

The reality was that I hated addiction and the destructive effects on all of us, and I was grieving what I believed to be loss of the mother I’d known as a little girl. When I got educated about addiction and learned that my mother’s decades of alcoholic addiction is a brain disease, I was appalled with myself.

Imagine behaving like this way with any other disease. I didn’t treat my mother well for a long time, and meanwhile, I was ill myself. This is what makes addiction so incredibly painful for everyone.

I wish I could take this addiction from my mother and face it myself so that she could be free from it and get the healing help she needs from everything she experienced in life.

Fortunately, today, since I got educated and started on my own healing journey, everything has changed. Today, I allow my thoughts about my mother to be focused on the person I saw as a little girl – beautiful inside and out.

My mother gave my sister and me many good qualities – particularly compassion. In many ways, my experience as an adult child of an alcoholic has given me opportunity to help people.

My mother is a very good human being.