Caroline’s mother died a year ago, at fifty-eight. An accomplished office manager, she had been the breadwinner of her family and a devoted mother. She worked hard, and made good money. However, when her own parents died, she fell into a depression and was reluctant to see a doctor. She began to drink heavily, and sneakily, just as her own father had. At first it was wine, but as the years progressed she turned to spirits, drinking mostly in secret. Socially, she would stick to the script. At home? She would drink anything she could, hiding bottles around the house.
Caroline remembers being a child at relatives’ homes and having her father insist: “We have to go now!” She would protest: “Why? We’re having so much fun!” “Now,” he would say. “We have to leave now.” Home they would go, and Caroline’s mother would begin her second shift of drinking, beyond the eyes of extended family. “My father preserved her dignity, and our dignity as a family,” says Caroline. “It was important to him.”
When she headed off to university her mother’s drinking got worse. On top of the alcoholism came anorexia: Caroline’s mother shrank from two hundred pounds down to ninety. Skeletally thin, she still had a drinker’s belly. Food disgusted her. She spent her free time watching celebrity shows, and avoiding eating. Meanwhile, she began to fall a lot, once down an entire flight of stairs.
Then came what Caroline calls the “tipping point”: her mother lost her job of twenty-three years. “I’m sure she was drinking on the job.” She became a cruise ship consultant—but her salary was small compared with what she had earned before. She felt like she was “nothing.” “She began to feel guilty about her drinking,” says Caroline, “and the only way to get rid of the feeling was to have another glass.”
When Caroline returned home for Christmas in 2006—from England, where she was doing her master’s—her parents came to meet her at the airport, but her mother couldn’t stay upright. “That Christmas was very difficult,” says Caroline. “My mom had dementia. She threw food across the room.”
On another occasion, her mother fell and had a seizure in Caroline’s arms. Caroline and her father called 911. By the time the paramedics arrived, her mother was lucid. “I’m fine,” she said. She was coherent. “The paramedics wouldn’t take her,” says Caroline. “My father and I were both weeping, begging them to take her. They would not. We discussed getting a court order to force her into rehab—but my mom could be remarkably coherent. It never happened. We were terrified.”
Things grew worse—but still Caroline’s mother would not get help. She became more difficult. “There were extreme, scary times,” says Caroline. “Alcohol totally transforms people. She isolated herself completely, pushing all her friends away. She just self-destructed.”
“When people ask, ‘What did your mother die from?’ I have trouble saying, ‘She was an alcoholic,’” says Caroline. “I don’t want to say, ‘She was anorexic, she had liver cirrhosis and extreme dementia. She drank herself to death.’” Caroline can say none of this without weeping. Much of her life is spent dealing with her grief. “It’s like a tattoo: it never goes away. I think about her every day. I want to stamp my foot and say, ‘This is not the way life is supposed to be.’”
Says Ackerman, “One of the top five things that adult daughters of female alcoholics feel is anger that they were not provided with a role model. ‘You never showed me! Do you want to explain to me how to be a mother—I’ve never seen it done.’ Parenting is a big issue, and the biggest issue is relationships.”
Caroline is no exception. “My mom didn’t teach me a way to be a woman. I have to look to other people—and it’s a huge struggle to teach yourself things that you should have learned at home.” Like? “Self-care.”
This answer pierces me to the core: I live this truth. Self-care is a learned behavior, when you have an alcoholic mother. Kate, a vibrant owner of a small Manhattan investment firm, knows this truth as well. She works out with a trainer two times a week, travels regularly, makes time for friends. She plays squash, tennis, golf. “I refuse to be like my mom—crippled, a depressive,” says Kate.
The eldest daughter of two lawyers, Kate has two younger brothers, both of whom she tried to protect from the reality of a stay-at-home drinking mom. “My dad would say, in retrospect, she drank from the beginning of their marriage.” To keep the peace, Kate became a classic “perfect daughter”: “I was doing a lot of chores from an early age, and I would find vodka and gin bottles in the closet.” She also became a good cook. “It was either that or starve.”
Kate is aware that her mother had a nervous breakdown in her teens and was given shock treatment “in a pretty brutal way. She had already had a bad run-in with mental health when she married. She was a depressant, and she was self-medicating. I would come home from school and she would be in her bed, asleep. The more she drank, the harder my father worked. There were constant battles, although he stuck by her. He loved her, unconditionally.
“Christmas was a nightmare: once she tried to cook a frozen turkey. Ultimately, she had a car accident and they took away her driving privileges. In the end, she started drinking vanilla. My brothers would say, ‘You’d think we were in the bakery business.’”
To this day, Kate is troubled by the fact that she has never married. “I suspect that all this history is why I am alone,” she says wistfully. More than once in our interview, she returns to this subject. Clearly, this haunts her. It haunts Caroline. There is a feeling of being cursed that comes from having an alcoholic mother: a curse that one can never quite shake off. It’s as if someone forgot to give you the essential manual to life. This feeling is common, and it never fades.
Have a parent who drinks, and you are more than four times as likely to be concerned about your own drinking or drug-taking, says Ackerman. This fact is well known to Dr. Vera Tarman. As medical director for Renascent treatment center in Toronto, Tarman is well schooled in others’ stories of alcohol and addiction. But my interest, on a cold January Sunday, is in her own story. I arrive in her cozy book-lined study to find an intellectual woman in her fifties, small dog at her side; she is ready to share her entire story.
As she sees it, Tarman’s relationship with alcohol began when she was seven or eight. She remembers her mother, a psychiatric nurse, falling, getting groggy, acting strangely. Early on, her mother was fired when she was caught stealing pills on the job. This began a series of new jobs, more firings. By the time Tarman was ten, her mother was in bed much of the time, drinking daily, smelling of alcohol. “She was not a functioning alcoholic,” says Tarman. “The progression was very quick.”
When her parents separated—“my father had had enough”—Tarman’s mother had an affair with another woman. Although Tarman was “aghast,” this relationship had one major benefit: the woman introduced the young girl to books. But soon, as with Tarman’s father, the woman had had enough: she too left. This prompted her mother to make the first of many suicide attempts—“very distressing to live with,” says Tarman. Financially destitute, the two then moved back with Tarman’s father, an arrangement that pleased no one. “It was my job to deal with her alcoholism,” says Tarman, “and lots happened. Many visits from ambulances, firemen, neighbors. She would scream when she was drunk, there were visits to psychiatric hospitals. All the time, I would be worried: ‘Where is she? Am I safe? Has she started a fire, smoking in bed?’ If I didn’t find my mother’s bottles, my father blamed me. Her drink was Five Star whiskey, and I collected the labels, like badges—symbols of my mother. I could not throw them away.”
When Tarman was fifteen, her mother’s suicide attempts increased. Finally, she was successful, escaping from a psychiatric hospital and drowning herself in a pond, her bottles nearby. “I was horrified because I was still very close to my mother,” says Tarman. “She was constantly apologizing to me: ‘I will stop tomorrow.’ I did not hate her. And when she died, I lost my closest human contact. There was part of me that said, ‘Don’t leave me behind! I want to come
with you.’ But when she died, I was also greatly relieved because it was the end of a long hell.
“People often say that when a person goes through a hard time, they only need one other person—and that person was Inge, a friend of my mother’s. She was my savior. ‘You can be anything you want,’ she would say.” She gave Tarman hope.
Tarman blamed her father for her mother’s death—he had had an affair, also drank heavily, and was frequently charged with drunk driving. When she was seventeen, she had had enough: she moved into subsidized housing and began to experiment with drugs. At eighteen she went into treatment for nine months, emerged to finish high school, and headed to university, where her drinking escalated. She also developed severe bulimia. On graduation, she traveled in India and Europe, where she became “very depressed and suicidal. Sylvia Plath was my hero, and I knew that drinking was getting me there. It was very seductive.”
At medical school, Tarman cut back on her drinking. But once she had graduated, she began to appreciate fine wines and better drinks. Over the years, her drinking escalated, as did her food issues. Eventually, she ballooned to 240 pounds. “I would throw up until my mouth was bleeding,” says Tarman. Over time, she switched into addictions medicine and addressed her eating, adopting a low-fat diet, losing one hundred pounds. But the alcohol remained an issue—even though she was “aware of the hypocrisy of telling patients not to drink and then drinking myself.” Between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.—once her partner had gone to bed—she could let go, drinking several double martinis, her favorite.
Eventually, she eliminated alcohol, too, quitting on her own. That lasted four years but it brought her no happiness. “It worked,” said Tarman, “but it wasn’t a happy place to be. Four years in, I thought: ‘I can’t live like this. I work all day. I can’t have a nice martini or half a cake.’ I turned fifty and got to a very dark place again. I became very reckless. I thought: ‘Fuck it. Is this all there is?’ Before, what had pulled me out was my career: I was very ambitious. But despite the fact I had a successful work life and a happy home life, I could not find my way out of depression. I was in a classic crisis: I had achieved my goals and I expected big fireworks in life. There were no fireworks. I was feeling quite starved of little pleasures. It was just an exercise in frustration—so I decided to go for obliteration. If I died, so what? The romance of this kind of death, like my mother’s, was very seductive.”
Tarman drank for six months. “I was more reckless than I had been in the past. Within six months, I had to make a decision: whether to stop or to throw everything away. A couple of glasses of wine wasn’t enough. The little sweet spot would last only five minutes, and I wanted to be totally wasted. My suicidality got more so. I added drugs.”
Tarman hit the wall, calling her medical support help line. Eventually she found a peer support group. “There I felt melt-in-my-seat safety, even before people began to talk. Nothing cuts it like this group—not therapy, not meditation, not church. I am more needy than what the universe can give, and this group soothes that need. Reality doesn’t bother me as much as it used to. It’s as if I have been waiting for my mother to come back, and she never has. This group is the only place that soothes the ache. This group is my daily bread—and ‘You are no longer alone’ was the first slogan that comforted me.”
I wondered: is she triggered in her work, dealing all day as she does with addicts? “Yes. It is always there when a patient says how drunk they got. I still really miss those first two martinis. I feel a beckoning finger. Although the volume of the voice changes, I am constantly battling with ‘I want to have a blast. Reality just doesn’t cut it!’ But if I had another drink, it would open a door I am not sure I could close again.
“I see myself as a survivor,” says Tarman. “Yes, I have vulnerabilities. But I have strengths. I read people better than most. I respond well in a crisis. I have been with my partner, Cathy, for twenty-five years.
“Still, my mother dominates in so many ways—I am always aware of that legacy. I dedicated my book to her, instead of Cathy, my partner, whom I love and who deserves that recognition. My mother was a geriatric nurse, and I chose medicine. The specter of my mother’s death continues to dominate as a regular living ghost.” Even though she has found contentment through her recovery work, there is an invitation to “come.” Says Tarman, “The familiarity of her death and the fact that she died before I reached adolescence—and was old enough to hate how our life together affected me—make it an open invitation. ‘Come, follow me!’ There’s a wonderful memoir by Julia Child where death is perceived as just getting off the bus. This is definitely a residual daughter thing. I just think: ‘when it is bad enough, I will just get off the bus, come back home.’”
Weeks after our interview, I received an email from Tarman: she is concerned that she had presented her life as too sad. It’s a thoughtful note, and I consider what she is saying. She’s right: it is confoundingly sad to deal with an alcoholic mother when you are young. And I can’t imagine losing a mother to alcoholism, to death, forever, as she has.
How to explain the unshakable sense of bonding with an alcoholic mother? You hear it in her story, and I feel it in mine. My mother and I are twinned: so yoked that I can’t imagine life without her. I remember nursing her on a hot summer weekend, when she had taken Antabuse—the pill-form deterrent to drinking—and then poured herself a rum and Coke, and another. Shaking with nausea, clammy-skinned and gray, grateful for the company and the help, she sat on the couch and thanked me for leaving the rest of the family at the cottage, and driving to be with her. She was too sick for Scrabble. We just talked. Yes, there were those moments—plenty of them.
I often feel it is my job to live my mother’s dreams, to travel in her footsteps and then forge ahead where she was restrained, to report back to her from the world beyond.
I love sharing our journeys. And I love holding her soft hand in mine as we cross the rocky shoreline of Georgian Bay each summer, toward the smoother footing of the deeper water. Together, we are survivors. We both know this. The pact is silent and profound. We have been through the wars, together.
PART THREE
Healing
13.
In Which Everything Changes
GETTING SOBER, STAYING SOBER
If you can kill the right thing—the old way of adaptation—and not injure yourself, a new energy-filled era will begin.
—ROBERT A. JOHNSON
Massachusetts, Winter of 2008
The first Friday evening at rehab, the parking lot empties before five. The director has a slightly guilty look as he puts on his coat. Or at least, I imagine he does. The BMWs and the Lexus and the white Jeep Cherokee all pull away, one after another, heading in different directions, back to the bedroom communities and families and weekend plans.
Now, what am I to do? I am forlorn. Two whole days without the rest of the crew, without the good doctor who has just told me I likely have severe post-traumatic stress disorder—PTSD. I feel drop-kicked into oblivion.
“I’m getting out of here,” says Claire, shoving a man’s woolen hat on her head. “These weekend people don’t know anything.” Claire is here because of a DUI. Unlike the rest of us, she’s here on a court-ordered stay.
“Don’t worry,” whispers Jane. “She’ll calm down with a little aromatherapy.” I’m confused. “Smoking. She’s gone for a cigarette.”
“Go fuck yourselves,” says Claire, slamming the door.
Fifteen minutes later, she’s back, brandishing a vodka bottle. “Look what I found by the side of the road,” she says, grinning. “I saw a ding in the guardrail, and I knew this baby couldn’t be too far away!” A half inch of clear liquid is sloshing back and forth in the bottle.
“Put it down, Claire,” says Jane.
“I’m not going to drink it,” says Claire. “And Jane? Go fuck yourself.”
That night, heading to an AA meeting, I squeeze into the back row of the so-called Druggy Buggy, making s
ure I’m as far away from Claire as possible. Marilyn is at the wheel. She has big hair, big makeup, and a knitting bag, with a half-completed baby blanket, pale green and yellow and pink. (I feel sorry for the baby.)
Marilyn is fresh from Las Vegas, where things, apparently, went very poorly. This I know because one of the night staff shared it the previous evening when I couldn’t sleep.
Marilyn whizzes us down the mountain, past the night skiers, past all the little glowing houses. I try not to listen as Jonathan discusses the relative differences of breast implants on Caucasian and Asian women. “They look ridiculous on Asian women. The scars are too obvious.” Jonathan is in his early twenties.
“Shut up, Jonathan,” says Claire. “None of us care.”
Jonathan looks confused. I know his problems were cocaine and vodka. Maybe more. I try to focus, on the stars that most houses have nailed beside their front door. Maybe it’s a New England thing. It looks corny, like some grade school teacher went a little berserk.
I try to focus on the meeting ahead, where—I have been warned—an old man will be pacing up and down the aisles, a knife swinging from his belt, talking to himself. “Big swinging dick,” says Claire. I stare out the window. I want to go home. I’m in the wrong place: I am healthier than these people.
By Saturday night, I’ve done yoga, meditated, written my daily gratitude list. I’ve knit half a scarf. Six or seven times I’ve pressed replay on Bach’s “Sleepers, Awake,” the opening cut of the only CD in the common room.
And now I am out to dinner with the rest of the inmates. Every Saturday night, the director lets the “clients” test-drive their new skills in public. No wine lists, just elegant menus. It doesn’t matter. We’re all ordering drinks in our heads. Mine is white wine. “I want a Ketel One martini,” says Jonathan.
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