by Laura June
She was always outgoing and social, even as an infant, often smiling and, once she learned to wave, waving at strangers. My mother’s alcoholism had forced me to be protective and reserved, suspicious of common, everyday interactions with neighbors and mailmen. I kept secrets and information to myself; often I pulled away from my closest friends, even when I was very young. There were always so many things I couldn’t tell. Zelda’s natural inclination was to be open and to greet everyone. She is, like my mother was (and like her father), a friend-maker: talk comes fast and easy to her.
But more than that, being a mother was isolating in a way in which I did not expect. I didn’t expect to want to talk to other people going through the same thing as me. I’d gone through plenty of serious experiences in my life before. I’d had friends die, I’d dealt with my mother’s alcoholism and her death, and I’d mostly gone through those things with only Josh and my closest family to support me. I didn’t generally reach out to random people. But becoming a mother broke me open: I wanted to talk about the experience of motherhood and about my life as it was now. About how hard the transition was.
But I also just wanted some company in those long days.
“My mother is dead” is a terrible icebreaker, but, in the months after Zelda was born, I was pretty raw most of the time. And when I said it to a new mother I’d just met named Kim, it felt perfectly natural, the words tumbling out of my mouth easily and without tears or doubt. I knew that it would lead to other conversations, that it meant a lot of explanation, a narrative. I knew that it would burden our friendship and possibly tie us together in ways that I often avoided with other people. But it felt, like I said, perfectly natural. I was open and ready to tell the story. And I’d met Kim in an unlikely place: a meet-up of new mothers, with infants all about the same age as Zelda. Driven by something like desperation, I reached out to a random group of people. And I met Kim.
The first meet-up that Zelda and I went to was painful for me: it was in a park, a twenty-minute walk from our house. I walked with her strapped to my chest in a baby carrier, pushing the empty stroller in case she changed her mind about where she was most comfortable. She burped and spit up a little, drool rolling down between my breasts and, disgustingly, into my belly button. I noticed I hadn’t charged my phone before we left the house, so I wouldn’t even have that crutch if the experience was really grim: we were on our own. It was spring, and although it wasn’t too cold anymore, venturing out still felt new and terrifying but, at least, exciting. The point of the meet-up, I see now at least for myself, was simply to motivate me to leave the house.
The group of women I met was about what I expected. They were mostly young, straight, and white. They were artists and writers, and one worked all over the world researching HIV. They were uniformly smart, well educated. Most of them were first-time mothers. We had things in common, to be sure: we were all exhausted, and we were all struggling with sleeping, breast-feeding, the basics, even a few months in. Some struggled more than others: I was well on my way to solving some of my problems, since I was sleep training and supplementing with formula; others seemed racked with guilt at the thought of such things. It was a judgment-free space, but I felt that judgment was on the tips of all our tongues. I wasn’t the only one who was raw, of course.
Still, it was good to see the babies there together on blankets in a park on a nice day. And though it pained me to admit it, I needed this, and I went home that day with a very slight spring in my step and something even more important.
“I think I made a friend today,” I said when Josh came home.
“That’s weird,” he joked.
“I’m not sure yet, really. We’ll see.” I was cautiously optimistic, and only time would tell.
But the next week there was another meet-up, this time in the backroom event space of a local baby store. This time, the babies could really just roll around however; we didn’t need to worry about them banging into bugs or twigs. Well, except that my baby, my Zelda, she didn’t really roll over yet. Some of the babies who were even younger were already rolling, but not my girl. She was seemingly content to stay pretty much wherever I set her down.
Kim was there again, and her daughter, Amy, who was just one day older than Zelda, wasn’t rolling over yet either, though she was closer to doing so than Zelda.
My memory of this day is vital to my life as a mother. It’s not that I’m so socially awkward that I can’t make friends. But wanting a friend who was specifically a “mom” at what seemed to me like the most vulnerable time in my life felt, well, a little undignified. But that raw vulnerability—surely a liability in many situations—also made me open to talking, and to listening, to someone completely new.
We had a lot in common. In fact, every time that we talked—and we were soon trading text messages and meeting almost daily for little jaunts around the neighborhood with our strollers—we found that we had more to say. We’d both had C-sections; we were both sleep training. We came from similar family backgrounds. We were both musicians in a previous iteration. And we both admitted, at least to each other, that sometimes being a mother seemed like too much.
“I wonder if I made a huge mistake,” I said to her one time.
“I think I’m good with the one,” she said to me another. I had found a kindred spirit. And I knew it.
In the hours we spent together, I told Kim pretty much everything I had to tell. I hadn’t written in months, and I craved a connection not just about the baby but about my whole life. I hadn’t felt alone in quite this way in so long—usually, being alone was a positive thing for me; left with my thoughts I felt quite at home. But now was different.
It was simple for me, in some ways, to tell Kim about my mother. The rawness of my birth experience backed me up, cut me open, but it also made everything that had happened before seem pale and incapable of hurting me. I saw, as I told Kim what I had to tell her, that in a lot of ways, I couldn’t be hurt by it anymore.
This is the essence of true friendship. I lived as a friend to Emily for a very long time before I could utter the words “my mother is a drunk” to her. She must have known for years, and yet I couldn’t say them aloud. But Kim would never know my mother. I could divulge the unvarnished truth about her, and Kim could judge my mother however she did, and nothing would come of it. Being an adult means no longer having your identity partly or even mostly determined by your background. My mother being an alcoholic didn’t mean that there was something wrong with me.
I had known this fact for a pretty long time by the spring of 2014, when I met Kim, when we rolled our strollers double-wide up and down the many sidewalks of Greenpoint. It made saying the words easier but no less powerful. I folded the truth of my upbringing into my identity in a way that said, “Here, this is who I am. I’m okay.” Kim was the first person I’d really become fully, socially friends with in the years since my mother died. It mattered that she was “my” friend, not “our” friend: she had never met Josh. I told her whatever I wanted to tell her. We complained about our spouses as spouses, as fathers, at a time when venting was crucial. We vented and, for me at least, I gained strength in representing myself in a way that was both honest and on my terms.
“My mother isn’t alive anymore,” I said, one bright afternoon. It was a beginning.
And what I revealed there, in those first few months of motherhood, what I came to terms with, was the fact that motherhood was not going to be as easy for me as I had imagined. I was already aware of this just a few days after my daughter was born. Already, I suspected that my dreams of writing at my computer with a baby on the blanket in my office beside me might have been a little optimistic. I wasn’t sure what the future held, and, for the first time in my life, for the first time since childhood, I felt open to the possibilities of female friendship as a way to help me figure it out.
But my first friend was Emily. After spending much o
f my young life surrounded primarily by my brothers, I met Emily the first day of second grade. That summer we had moved an hour away to a suburb of Pittsburgh that was quite different from where we had been before. More than the small-town, very middle-class, Polish Catholic environment where family was literally on the same street on which I lived, our move to McMurray changed everything for us.
This was also when I realized that my mother had a problem, or when it became impossible for her to hide it from me. I think my mother started drinking at home during the day sometimes when we were all at school. I think she must have had some kind of pre–empty-nest syndrome; I’m not sure if there’s a name for it. Her children were still a huge responsibility, a massive amount of day-to-day work and care, but she also suddenly, once my youngest brother went to kindergarten the year after we moved, had a massive block of hours at home alone. Time she had never had in her life because, of course, my mother had gone straight from living in a dorm room with friends to being married with children. She’d never been left to herself for hours on end. Unlike me, she may not have known what to do with all that time. My mother made friends easily, and our neighborhood was filled with other families with kids about our ages, so she wasn’t isolated, but I sensed eventually that she wasn’t at ease in the same way she had been in our old house, in our old neighborhood. Our grandparents were suddenly farther away, and though her children were a lot older than Zelda is now, I see how this must have felt for her: a lot like what it felt like for Josh and me in Brooklyn at first, with not much family around and no other parent friends.
But I didn’t sense right away that the move, which meant for me a blossoming circle of friends, meant for my mother a new isolation where she was surrounded by more upper-middle-class women who gardened and got their nails done. For me, the move meant a new house that was larger. For the first time in my life I got to have my own bedroom away from my increasingly annoying brothers. I got to go to a new school that I loved. I got to go to dance classes with my friends. Sometimes my mother was a darker version of herself, but mostly she was still the mother I knew and loved. And I met Emily.
Emily had moved from Ohio the same summer, so we were both new to our second-grade class in a room of kids who had mostly been together for a few years of school. We lived just a mile apart from each other.
Emily and I latched onto each other, and it was a relationship that stuck through the rest of our school days together. We shared many things in common, but, in the early days, we mostly liked to play with Emily’s vast Barbie doll collection and listen to Madonna.
Emily and I soon became the kind of friends who shared everything. But kids keep secrets, and I kept to myself my growing sense was that something was wrong with my mother. She seemed suddenly less happy and less present. I don’t know when Emily figured out that my mother was an alcoholic, because we didn’t talk about it until I was a teenager. I hid this from her reflexively: it was something we shouldn’t and didn’t talk about. I didn’t make a conscious choice to not talk about this with her; it simply didn’t really occur to me.
Emily was, at eight years old, a lot different than me. She was funny, like her mother, but she was also more assertive and seemed to always know what she wanted from life. She was probably less burdened inside than me. She certainly had better school attendance She was more active, where I was more reserved and unsure, quiet and, well, if not laid-back, certainly “retiring.” I far preferred reading to playing outside.
And even though I wanted to spend all my time outside of school with Emily, already I sometimes craved isolation. By third grade I was keeping a secret diary. I’d love to be able to say that I started my writing career honestly, but I didn’t. I had an eye to a future reader, one to whom being honest about my worries, and my beloved mother, was inconceivable. I even lied to my diary.
In fact, I’m cringing now as I write about this. It isn’t easy to explain that someone you love so desperately is so complicated. I’m almost forty. It easily took me until I was thirty to be fully proud of my mother, blemishes and all. This is hard for any person to master, to accept and love people as they are rather than how we wish they could be, but for me, I can’t help but blame the alcoholism in particular. I was defensive of her above all else.
And so it was that sometimes I pulled away into myself, even from my best friend, even that young. There were many things I couldn’t tell her. We talked until all hours of the night in my bed or hers, about our hopes for the future, about moving to New York to become advertising executives (we watched a lot of soap operas after school), about our mutual fear of our houses burning down. We shared many things, almost everything. But not quite.
Soon after we met, Emily’s parents separated and her father moved out, leaving her mother with their three daughters. That seemed inconceivable to me, my father leaving, and I know that it wasn’t easy for her. And yet, still, I was jealous of her. I knew with all my being that her mother was, for lack of a better word, consistent. She didn’t occasionally morph into a completely different person who didn’t care or hated her. Emily had her secrets, her private griefs; I’m sure of that now as an adult. But what alcoholism does to you when you experience it as a child is that it makes you crave simple normalcy above all else. I didn’t want more money or better clothes or toys or anything else a kid can want. I just spent all my spare time at home looking, like a detective, for signs that things were “okay.”
One thing my increasingly drunk mother did really early on was stop showing up. At first, I thought she had just forgotten me. Which, on the one hand, she had. But on the other, she was drunk, which I know now means that the forgetting was a symptom, not the reason: she forgot because she was drunk, not because she disliked me.
This dissonance—that my sober mother loved me very much, that she braided my hair and sang to me, bought me little matching jumpers and sock sets, and made sure I was inoculated and had a lunch packed with little love notes in pen on the napkin tucked inside but then forgot to even bother picking me up occasionally, with barely a nod in my direction in apology after the fact—that I began to experience, where suddenly I wasn’t first on her list but now seemed last, was quite confusing. Years later, it was still hurtful, and even now as I sit here typing I feel overwhelming sadness for the eight-year-old me, with no front teeth and bad eyesight, waiting at school after a voice lesson or a dance class, all the other kids filing out with their mothers, me just standing there, getting more nervous by the second. But then, I didn’t feel hurt yet. I was too confused to take it personally. I felt nervous, and it was the nervousness that I would also keep for years to come.
But that lack of reliability was the first thing I remember about her drunkenness, beyond the drunkenness.
Mostly, my mother drank when I was in bed and my father was working late or wasn’t home. So I didn’t actually experience my drunk mother right off the bat too much. I would experience the very beginning of it, at the end of the school day when she was just getting rolling, or I would experience the tail end of it, when she seemed groggy or out of sorts the next morning. Those times I woke up and the usual morning routine was absent; no one was making breakfast. Sometimes, I learned, there were no lunches packed for school. That’s how I experienced my mother’s drinking at the start, mostly. There were a few encounters of her actively drinking, but in the beginning it was just that little things were off.
I would get up to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water, and though it seemed very late, instead of the house being quiet, there were the unmistakable sounds of life: creaking floorboards, a closing cupboard. My mother would be down the hall, in the kitchen, on the phone. The phone cord was a mile long, and she paced through the kitchen and living room, into the hallway where most of the bedrooms were. We lived in a one-story ranch house with a vast basement. In that vast basement was my two younger brothers’ bedroom, a family room, a playroom, the laundry room. It was mostly u
nfinished and somehow both scary and attractive to me. That basement is where I began writing, sitting at a little antique school desk, the kind with the arm that swings around from the left side, immovable, for a right-handed person. I sat in and used that desk from the time I was five until I left home at eighteen. Over the holiday last year, I had my father pull it out of storage and bring it to my house, where we plunked it down in Zelda’s playroom. I still fit in it; I can squeeze my body tightly in, and it feels right. Zelda is left-handed, so it’s never going to be her favorite desk, but it’s hers anyway.
The sound of my mother’s drunk voice talking into the telephone will never fade. Hearing one side of a conversation is so odd to begin with; it’s like eavesdropping, but the picture painted seems much more mysterious than if you could hear the other person. It had to be after 10:00, 11:00 at night. Who was she talking to? I knew from my time before going to school that my mother spent hours during the day on the phone with my grandmothers, with neighbors. She was a talkative, outgoing, and friendly person. She smoked, she paced, and she talked. If there wasn’t someone sitting in the kitchen at the table with her, she was usually on the phone. The phone was a big deal in the ’80s.
During the day, she would trample around the kitchen, making dinner or folding clothes, talking on the phone. But at night, she was usually sitting instead of pacing or multitasking. At night, she was always smoking. And the sound of her voice was different. As different as it could be from her day voice. And this is how I learned my one adult strategy for dealing with my mother: no matter what, under no circumstances would I answer the phone after 5:00 p.m. As a teenager newly moved out on my own and later as an adult, any breaking of this rule always resulted in a horrible conversation that I regretted and she forgot. My husband’s father always said, “Nothing good happens after one a.m.” Well, with my mother that was true, except it was 5:00 p.m. You could hear in her voice the moment she started drinking, and in fact, in later years, I sometimes took a call at a safe time—say 4:30 p.m., right when she was leaving work, only to have the call drift into an unsafe, post–5:00 p.m. drinking time. I’d hear the beer can crack open, and within a few minutes her voice thickened and slowed. Within half an hour she was argumentative or, worse, sad.
