by Laura June
A full-on encounter with my drunk mother late at night was something I instinctively avoided. As a child, I was not yet a worthy adversary or sounding board for her. In fact, from about the age of eight to thirteen, when my mother drank, I became invisible. I had to graduate to teenager-dom in order to be interesting to her. In some ways, when I think back on it, though my teenage years were more explosive and harder, the childhood ones are so much lonelier, quieter, and sadder. So much more desolate.
Avoiding my drunk mother, staying quiet and in line, hoping not to incur notice or scrutiny: these things molded who I am today. I didn’t argue then, and I didn’t talk very much. But I was nervous and watchful, because, I see now, I didn’t really trust adults. Because the one I was supposed to be able to trust the most, the one who I had once trusted the most, suddenly pulled the rug out from under me.
How had this happened? My mother didn’t start out this way. The first seven years or so of my life seemed completely normal, if self-absorbed and contracted in my memory. But I have hundreds, thousands of glorious childhood memories stacked inside my brain, all weirdness-free.
After she was gone, after she had died, I became an investigator of her life for a few months. To the extent that I could stand it, I asked around: Had she always been this way? Were the signs always there? Was it just that I was too young to see them?
Yes and no.
As I said, my sense is that our move to McMurray hastened my mother’s developing alcoholism. I don’t remember her drinking before that, though I assume that she did sometimes, because that’s what would have been normal. Nobody in my family drank to excess, but there was always beer around at family functions. But at first, all of this was vague and mysterious. I’d always been so close to my mother; I thought of her as a friend, as a person to whom I could tell absolutely anything, and so, when I realized for sure that she had a problem drinking around the time I was eight or so, the first person I shared this information with was her.
I knew that my mother was an alcoholic before I knew the word for it, and I guarded this knowledge as if it were my own secret, not hers. I was, as a sober person, even at the age of eight, better at hiding her alcoholism than she was, anyway. And she was pretty good for a while. This threw off the mother-child dynamic considerably, and I grew up to be a textbook adult child of an alcoholic. But we learned what alcoholism was at school, probably in third grade. This fact, the naming of the problem, worried me because it sounded very serious, but it also simplified my focus. And it was like the last piece in a jigsaw puzzle for me: this made sense. I felt relief as I worked this out, the fact that her personality changed sometimes, that she became less reliable. All of it made sense and helped me to organize my feelings around alcoholism as a disease rather than as simply something to hide and be embarrassed about.
Alcoholism teaches you to compartmentalize your relationships, and even though I was very young, I did this quickly. I didn’t talk to my brothers about it very much. I didn’t ask my father many questions. There were no group discussions. Ironically, the only person I could be fully honest with in this situation was my mother.
I think about those early confrontations with my mother now and I cringe, the idea of a small child coming to her and saying, “Here, I found the answer, I know what is wrong with you, and there is a solution.” I felt, once I’d latched onto the concept of alcoholism, a great relief: here was a plan, with a fix. Just like me later as an adult, I spent a long time paralyzed by inertia and fear and anxiety, and then I latched onto a solution that spurred me to action. The path seemed clear. I only needed to confront my mother carefully and present her with my plan.
What I didn’t know yet was how poorly that would go and how poorly it would always go. For all the lying-by-omission I learned to do for the outside world, my alcoholic mother honed techniques for evasion that I simply was never able to breach. I was at the beginning, not the end, of trying to mobilize and change her. And though I would feel nothing but defeat over and over, I still know today that it was better than to live without trying.
I told her that there was a cure for this! There was help for it; it was simple. “You’re an alcoholic,” I said to her, not yet nine years old, a little kid in pigtails. I didn’t judge. I crawled beside her and hugged her. She assured me that she was fine, she reassured me that I was safe, that she loved me. And she ignored me.
Adult Children of Alcoholics, much like Al-Anon, describes the way that being parented by, or loved by, an alcoholic changes you. Most commonly, and what I found to be most true for myself, was the fact that I lost my own identity. I was always nervous; I dreaded and handled personal criticism very poorly; and more than anything else, I found it easier to focus on other people than to focus on myself. This part, what I think of as “the killer,” is something I struggle with today: I can always find someone else to focus on rather than take care of myself or my own business. I was, in some ways, erased.
But before I became an adult child of an alcoholic, I was first and foremost the child of one. The only daughter of an alcoholic mother of four. I knew with most of my being what was wrong with her from about the third grade and was certain of it by the fifth. By then, I would have walked through a fire for her, and there was occasionally the sense that such a scenario might actually be necessary. This—the child willing to walk through the fire for the parent—is a classic hallmark of kids with alcoholic parents. Flipped roles, confused emotional responses: nearly all my feelings for my mother then and even many of them now can be explained by an entry-level rehab counselor as “part of this shit.”
I think I probably knew that my mother drank too much, too often, even years before my father did, but I wasn’t going to let him know it. I have always believed this because my mother eventually stopped drinking around my father at all; she hid her drinking from him but not from me. She either considered me too stupid to know what I was seeing, or knew that I would never tell on her. This is one of the most upsetting and manipulative parts of a relationship with an alcoholic parent: they use you and turn you, inadvertently, into their protector, a liar. I became secretive and guarded, not just around friends but even around my own immediate family. I could have resisted, I could have raised hell and told my father every time that she drank, but I just wanted peace and hoped that each time was the last.
All I wanted was for it to stop, for her to simply cease being what she was. I didn’t have a full concept of alcoholism as a disease, and with a child’s sad and frightening simplicity, I figured that she simply could stop if she wanted to. She probably could stop for me. Why would someone do something that they knew was bad for them, that made them different than their ideal self? Only a child would oversimplify this, only a child could see reality so clearly, as this is, honestly, the problem every alcoholic must face eventually: the only solution is the simplest, hardest thing in the world. Stop.
I knew this so well and so fast and so completely. And yet I was so powerless. Little did I know how long I would remain powerless and how it would tear me apart, ruining relationships and holidays and life events, overshadowing, degrading. It added nothing, only taking away.
Little did I know that this would be the defining reality of my life: my mother was an alcoholic.
When I think back to these earliest days of recognizing that something about reality was off, that something was really wrong and that it wasn’t about me, I see that I abruptly became aware that the world was full of secrets and full of lies. That adults lied, and that they presented things in different ways depending on the scenario or their moods. This terrified and confused me. Everything before had seemed so simple. What a short time for life to be simple. What a takeaway for a child to take away.
Years later, I look back at my attempts to reach out to my mother and my attempts to make friends, and I see that they were all in the shadows of my growing sense of my mother’s disease. Her disease crippled m
y ability, even into adulthood, to be honest and open enough with people to make true connections. Only occasionally did I allow people into what I thought of as an elite circle of people who knew. With few exceptions, always in times of great personal tragedy, I guarded my mother’s secret and more generally myself, as if I too carried some secret inside of me. Knowing that I did not, that I had no baggage or demons of my own, did me little good. It quickly became a reflex not to trust myself to be true with other people.
But Zelda changed all of that.
I know that I have Zelda to thank for my midlife burst of social activity. She, through sheer force of her existence but also through her sunny and able way, showed me that sometimes it’s best to get to know people. Sometimes, it’s best to reach out and share things. Sometimes, it’s best to simply burst into tears when you’re having a bad day. It’s okay to cry in public. It’s okay to tell someone you’re in pain. I’d spent much of my childhood trying to be an adult. Now, I got to spend a small piece of my adulthood occasionally being exactly like a baby, my emotions sometimes overwhelming me, calling out to strangers and old friends. Helping random people on the street who’d dropped everything out of their purse or who simply looked lost. Zelda changed the way that I interacted with everyone.
CHAPTER 5
◆ ◆ ◆
Back when I was pregnant, way before we found out that the baby was sideways inside of me, and way, way before the preeclampsia, we toured the hospital where Zelda would be born. We, along with maybe ten other couples, took in the available options for the birth plan we would never make. We looked at hospital rooms; we learned about payment options. It seemed like a required waste of time, really. I have never liked being in hospitals. Until Zelda was born, I had never spent a night in one. I’d never had a broken bone or needed my appendix taken out.
For me, like many people, hospitals have almost always been for deaths. My grandparents, great-aunts and -uncles, my mother: they all ended their lives inside cramped hospital rooms. I don’t avoid hospitals, because I know I can’t avoid sickness and death, but I have never enjoyed being inside of them, and anytime I was in one, I wanted out of there; I couldn’t breathe in there.
As we followed the other couples down the long Labor and Delivery hallway, one of the rooms was still covered in bloody bedclothes. An expectant father paced the hallway, texting on his phone. The air in the maternity ward was alive and terrifying. It was different than other hospitals I’d been in: here, life started rather than ended.
As we were leaving after our two-hour tour, waiting for the elevator to take us back to street level, a couple trundled through the hallway: the man was carrying a tiny infant car seat. I now knew what an infant car seat was because I’d just bought one a few weeks earlier. They were leaving the hospital, taking their just-born baby home, giggling all the way out the door.
Josh and I exchanged little glances nervously between ourselves—the couple were in their own universe. “They seemed like they were stealing the baby,” I said with a laugh. And they did: What right did they have to take that tiny little sleeping thing, just a few pounds, out the door? What were their qualifications? Surely I would be more ready than that.
But I wasn’t. The early days were awash in simple concerns: feeding and sleeping. Though I often approached life ready and waiting with an answer for everything, I found myself devoid of knowledge at home with a newborn, unprepared to answer even basic questions. “Is she tired?” Don’t know. “Is that rash normal?” Can’t say. We’d had Monica for a few weeks, and she’d given me some pointers. She’d gotten Zelda to sleep sometimes five hours a night, which everyone assured us was a lot, but for a woman used to logging a solid nine or ten hours of sleep a night, it wasn’t much comfort.
I was epically unprepared, yes, but I was also very committed to putting in the required effort. I don’t like to half-ass things; I’d waited a long time to have a baby. I wanted to do a good job. No, the best job. I wanted to be a superb mother.
But we didn’t really know what to do a lot of the time.
“Now what?” we asked ourselves.
What a question.
We would spend the next months trying to answer that question every day anew. For now, we had no idea, and that seemed sort of okay. I started to feel better almost immediately after Zelda was born, and often that tided me over: at least I could go back to not worrying about my own body. Focusing on others has always been my wheelhouse. This was a job I could do. Anxiety, stress, crippling indecision? I could handle these from moment to moment. Sometimes, everything didn’t seem okay, of course, like when I became gripped by the fear that my daughter was suffering from extreme jaundice. I should have known that, even if her very mild jaundice didn’t improve on its own, there are easy and effective treatments. Instead, I spent the few spare moments I had to myself in the first week of her life furiously Googling “severe jaundice.” I sometimes expected the worst when we took her for her doctor’s appointments, which were every few days at first because she was born a little early.
It was only there in the warm, well-lit safety of the pediatrician’s office that I felt at ease for the first month of Zelda’s life. Once we got inside, I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to stand over my daughter on the table, naked on a roll of white paper, and hear her doctor pronounce her beautiful and perfect over and over. Because when we got home, I sometimes secretly worried that something might be wrong: oh, she looked perfect to me, but I feared that she wasn’t. I worried about the sound of her loud breathing. I worried that her nose, which was still smushed down from months of being pressed against the inside of my belly, was stuffed with something that shouldn’t be there. I worried that she would die in her sleep even though I hovered over her. I knew my worries were the dumb fears of a novice. I knew that an overwhelming majority of the time, babies were just fine. I knew that she was fine, and yet the doubt and anxiety of the new mother was there, just under the surface. I’d worried through my pregnancy. I didn’t want to worry through this part, too.
But I learned very early that sometimes my seemingly random fears were not entirely wrong: on one visit to the doctor when Zelda was only a few days old, I insisted that her stuffy nose was more than the nothing both the pediatrician and Josh assured me it was. Josh knew I was on edge. I couldn’t blame him for thinking I was overreacting; I overreacted to so much at first. But earlier in the morning, before we’d taken Zelda to the appointment, when I was dressing her on the changing table in her sunny bedroom, I’d caught a glimpse up her nose. Okay, I was looking for something, yes; but I thought I saw something up her left nostril. They were so tiny it was hard to tell. I asked the doctor to look with a flashlight. She did.
“I see nothing. Loud nose breathing is quite normal in infants. They don’t know how to breathe out of their mouths yet,” she assured me. I knew this, I’d Googled. It was the source of some pain to new mothers, as colds and stuffy noses mean obstructed breathing if one doesn’t default to the mouth for air.
But I insisted: “There’s something up there, I know it,” I repeated. I could feel the room overflowing with something like sympathy for me. But the doctor looked again, and I crouched in with her.
“Look!” I said. “Do you see that?”
She nodded and got out tweezers, inserting them into Zelda’s nostril. The baby started to fuss as she pulled out a large, dark green booger.
“This is meconium,” she said, clearly impressed that I had seen it, stuffed so far up Zelda’s nose.
I learned, then and there, that it was okay to default back to my “holy shit, something is wrong!” state, even if I was committed to trying to be a cool mom, a laid-back type. Nothing comes easily to me. Had my mother gone through moments of terrific anxiety when I was little?
I remember the times where I was sick, laying in a dark room with an earache or a sore throat or a flu, with a bowl to throw up in by the bed. My
mother would swoop in silently throughout the night, touch my face, and adjust my blankets. Her hands were her thermometer. I don’t remember her ever using a real one. She seemed to know everything, to be able to heal quietly. I know everyone probably thinks of their mom this way in early childhood, but what struck me as I started my own journey down the path of motherhood was how little of that I felt. My hands weren’t thermometers, so I found myself constantly probing my young daughter’s butt “just to check.” Surely knowledge would come with time and experience, but at first I didn’t feel any confidence. I didn’t know what urges or fears to trust, which ones (most of them) were bogus phantoms creeping up on me to no good purpose.
And most of all, I worried that Zelda wasn’t getting enough to eat.
There are lots of schools of thought on breast-feeding, and I even have one of my own. It goes something like this: it’s great, but also feeding a baby formula is fine, too. When my daughter was two weeks old and had lost weight at two consecutive doctor’s appointments, we called in a lactation specialist. This was a person whose entire purpose, it seemed, was to help me on my quest to never feed my daughter formula. She wandered into our house with a giant medical scale, stripped Zelda down, and weighed her. Then, she had me nurse her while we sat there talking about how often I fed her. To her credit, this lactation specialist was the first person who suggested that a feeding schedule might help some of my woes. I was, up until then, simply jamming my breast into the baby’s mouth as often as it seemed necessary, which was every hour or even less. The specialist suggested that if I put her on a better schedule, I would feel more comfortable knowing that she wasn’t hungry and that Zelda would begin to make sense of her life a little. She’d know when to expect food, and that this could, the lactation specialist said, lead to a better sleeping schedule. All of this made sense to me. I asked about formula as she put Zelda on the scale. She’d gained 2 ounces from the feeding.
