by Laura June
“Out of sight, out of mind” seemed to be her ruling philosophy.
And once my parents were divorced, these matters became more pressing, of course. With just one adult to ensure the rent was paid and with less income than we’d formerly had, hidden bills did quickly blossom into occasionally picking up the landline to silence: no dial tone; the phone has been shut off. Then we’d go to my mother, she’d pay the bill, and they’d turn service back on. If she’d had the money all along, I wondered, why the aversion to paying the bills in the first place?
I learned later that this is very common behavior for alcoholics, that they avoid doing things that cost almost nothing, like renewing their driver’s license, out of a simple inability to deal with everyday things.
After my parents divorced we moved in with my mother; my father had decided to live in the same house we’d grown up in, the one that had burned down. It had taken months to repair and rebuild it, but he had persisted in doing so. He loved that house and wasn’t ready to leave it. He stayed there until well after I was married, and eventually, the old bad memories were indeed replaced with new ones. In fact, the rebuilding, the repainting, all that effort made it so that very quickly after the fire, as soon as he’d moved back in, I was able to walk through the house almost as if it hadn’t happened. When I’d heard he was going to live there, I’d felt conflicted: so many bad things had happened there in that last year. Would I feel horrible any time I was inside? But I found that it soothed me to be inside of it. To go into the room that had been my bedroom, my sanctuary as a child, and see its walls, now painted white and clean, still standing.
In order to stay living there, of course, my father had paid my mother for half the house in their separation. I don’t know how much money it was, but it was a lump sum of cash, and whatever that amount was, at the time it had seemed vast. It was enough that my mother could have made a fresh, independent financial start for herself. My grandparents, her parents, were very good with money and were easy in their retirement. I remember that they offered to help her manage her newly acquired money. She didn’t refuse them, but she also never took them up on the offer.
In less than a year, my mother simply spent through the money and ended up with nothing to show for it. She bought clothing and jewelry and gifts for us, paid cash for things, and began racking up a lot of credit card debt. I watched as a bystander as this happened and had her cosign credit applications for myself.
I’d taken a personal finance class in high school, so I knew that she was proceeding unwisely. She could have bought a house, but she rented. She could have invested a part of her lump of cash, but she kept it in her checking account. She didn’t even get interest on what was not a tiny amount of money. But only in hindsight did I understand how terrifically she mismanaged her money.
By the time I moved from her apartment, the money was mostly gone. Her job, which paid very little, was not enough to offset her debts, and she was on shaky ground, like previous jobs, with them anyway. I left fearing for how she would manage but had to strike out on my own. I felt exhausted before I’d even begun, but a sense of great relief replaced my worries very quickly as my daily life vastly improved once removed from my mother, even though I was only a mile away. I worried about her but pushed it back further and further into my mind as I realized that my life and her life were actually distinct lives, not one jumbled messy one.
I was determined to learn from her mistakes but bumped along the way myself. I made my rules then: since I had to pay for everything on my own, for school and life, I wouldn’t drink. I couldn’t fuck up school again; I couldn’t afford to. I never wanted to go back to my mother, who would soon be shuttling through jobs and boyfriends quickly.
I saw my mother only on holidays, and even that was like stabbing myself in the face with a butter knife. After two years away from her, I allowed that she seemed to have set her own path. By then, my brother John had also moved back in with my father to finish high school and have a chance at something resembling a normal ending to his childhood. In order to graduate from high school, every single one of us had to leave our mother for our father, even if only temporarily.
She was mean and meek at the same time. Her defense mechanism seemed to increasingly be retreating into childlike simplicity and defeat. She was who she was, she said. “I’m a drunk,” she said to me on the phone once. “Are you happy?”
I wasn’t, not exactly. In fact, though I cooked and cleaned and had the beginnings of a normal, domestic life on top of being a somewhat normal college student, happiness was hard to come by.
I dedicated myself to doing well in school, to learning, not really for a job but just to have something pure and clean to apply myself to. I learned, even in my job waiting tables, that work was the thing that could wash away my feelings of anxiety and fear and sadness. I couldn’t get rid of those feelings, not while my mother was alive and drinking fifteen minutes away from my own apartment, but I could sidestep the feelings temporarily. I could work.
I worked. I worked so much. I went to school full time, part time in the summers, trying to make up for those first two horrific semesters. I worked after school every day and usually full days on the weekends, volunteering to wash dishes and bus tables on days when I wasn’t scheduled to wait tables. I found that, by having little spare time to think, I could in fact move on in a way. I couldn’t escape; I didn’t want to escape. But I could move forward myself.
I was, unlike my mother, at the beginning of my life. And she resented me for that. In her worst moments, she resented me, I see now, for having that abortion, for choosing not to have a child, for deciding not to let life simply happen to me. My mother, though she had made her choices and built an incredibly beautiful family despite her addiction, felt, as she veered toward the end of her life, like a victim of circumstances. That made me saddest of all. But I also knew it was generational: most of the women her age I knew, friends’ mothers, had also had similarly limited options despite being raised in relative privilege. Her life could have been different if she’d wanted it to be. She’d only ever begun to express dissatisfaction with how it was recently, and I had trouble seeing what it had to do with my own different choices. In hindsight too, I see that a great part of the reason I waited to have Zelda so long was the fact that I wanted a career, and it took so long to find one, to build it and work on it, that I simply couldn’t find space for a child for a very long time.
Early on, there were times when I still called her and said things like, “You’re still so young! You should go back to school, you should go to rehab, you could do anything that you want! Anything!” I knew that her parents had money and still thought of her as a child in lots of ways. They’d help her; they’d pay anything to see her succeed. But what my mother needed most wasn’t money, and if there was anyone on the planet who could have talked her into rehab, well, that person wasn’t me. It wasn’t any of my brothers. It wasn’t my father.
I don’t hold my mother’s financial failures against her. Unlike me, now learning to live life on my own with no real safety net to buffer me from life’s realities, my mother had never lived on her own. She’d gone straight from the safety of her parents to that of my father, who I think had been austerely committed to financial solvency by nature. Women of her generation were often not expected to worry about money, I reasoned. So, when she found herself divorced and unemployed in a new apartment with three kids, child support, and a lump of money in her early forties, she was completely unprepared for managing on her own. And the fact that people offered to help, I’m sure, made her bristle: in the early days of her sobriety, she took the concept of independence very much to heart. She didn’t want to run to her parents for advice; she was a grown woman, she would say. I understood that: independence is hard to acquire when you’re not used to it, and once you taste it, it’s easy to guard it misguidedly, when asking for a little bit of help would be smarter
.
But she also failed to think of her children the way that I think I myself would. She failed to plan for us, so when my tuition bill for my second semester came due and we didn’t quite have the money to cover it, I had to call my father. And, of course, she’d failed to help me apply for financial aid, aid that I was surely able to qualify for. My mother was never good at planning that way.
So I had to learn all on my own the process of paying my bills and taxes and learning how to get financial aid so that I’d be able to go to school. I knew, in the back of my mind, that if I hit a bad spot, my father would help me in any way that he could, but like my mother, I became stubborn to the concept of asking for help. Unlike her, after a while, I managed pretty well on my own.
I don’t give up on people, and I didn’t consciously give up on my mother. But by the time I was nearing five years out of high school, around the year 2000, I would say, the distance between my mother and I emotionally was widening to a gulf. She was fading, somehow, in my mind. When I visited her, I always found something to be depressed about, to focus on. The fact that she was now so clearly financially unstable, that she couldn’t hold a job, saddened me. My brothers and I had all managed to pull through our childhoods and come out as, to one degree or another, somewhat sane adults. How they did so I can’t say, but, how I did it was largely by pulling away from my mother almost completely.
And I’d pulled away from my father, too. There were times in those years where I simply didn’t talk to anyone in my family, not because I was angry, but because it just didn’t make sense. I was surviving.
I’ve found that in order to survive an alcoholic parent, sometimes it’s best to narrow your interests down to the finest point: yourself. Focusing on me had never been easy. It still isn’t; I excel at worrying about others. But for a solid five years, the ones that mattered very, very much and made me an adult, I aggressively guarded myself. I lost track of old friends and ignored the calls of family.
I’m not proud of myself in those years, when I think back on it now, and I realize that I have described it in the best possible light up to this point. In reality, I didn’t visit my dying grandfather nearly enough, or my healthy but aging grandmothers. These visits became painful reminders of my mother, who I could not help. They constantly asked about her. “She’s good,” I’d say, trying not to laugh or holding back tears. How many times have I lied and told people, “She’s pretty good”? Too many to count. I’d decided, so many times, that I’d never mention her alcoholism again to her. But then, six months or a year would pass, and I’d end up researching rehab facilities and calling her yet again.
It’s important for me to say that in these years, from the time I graduated from high school on, we never—no one ever—managed a true intervention with my mother, of the kind where you meet up in person and confront the person in order to get them to rehab. Though I’ve participated in several of these, they’ve all happened in the years since my mother died. Had I known then what I know now about interventions—that they very often work—I would have pushed harder for one for her, rather than pushing directly at her on my own. Had I known that instead of years of nagging, a simple, emotional, and possibly embarrassing group conversation might have flipped a switch inside her, I would have pulled that together.
But I didn’t know that. I felt scared of taking such a step, and I worried about embarrassing her. I’m sure it’s no accident that one thing an alcoholic doesn’t want—group attacks and the airing of laundry—is often what works, but it’s sad because the people who love that person most also avoid the same types of situations because of years of conditioning. I have avoided confrontations of this kind all my life, for no reason. I don’t fear embarrassment or arguments or even healing of any type. It was simply a habit born of years of anxiety, to avoid anything I would generically label as confrontation. Until Josh came along, I fought against confrontation at all cost.
Confrontation comes in many forms: I have a lifelong habit of not liking to or being able to finish things, thanks to my hatred, my phobia of confrontation. I first noticed it with school. I wasn’t bad at school—in fact, I was good at school—but in college I would put off doing papers and work until just hours before their due date, and then have to rush through to make it on time. I knew this was normal college kid stuff, but I felt so much attendant guilt that I began to wonder where it came from and started to note in my diary other ways in which I avoided finishing things and confrontations: they’re twins.
I struggled to finish college and beat out my worst tendencies to not finish things. Even as a college senior, after years of working full time and taking summer classes to make up for lost time, I occasionally just collapsed in on myself and blew a class at the end of the semester, getting an F where I’d been getting an A just weeks earlier, not even bothering to email the professor to try to negotiate for an extension or some special consideration. I was a terrible advocate for myself but was slowly learning not to avoid hard conversations if they were in my interest.
I found that it was okay to admit this flaw to other people, that even employers would sometimes “get it.” “I have a hard time finishing things,” I’d say. I worked on the weekends for years as a caterer, mostly working at weddings. These kinds of jobs suited me because they paid well—it was about the most money I could make without an education—and they were finite: we rolled in with a job to do and rolled back out eight or nine hours later. We put up a tent in a field or a backyard, built a little kitchen out back, served 150 people their dinners and their cake and coffee, cleaned everything up, threw it into a truck, and zapped ourselves back out of it. Hard labor, the kind with a definite end point, didn’t trouble me.
What continued to rankle me, for years, was finishing Middlemarch or the dishes in my kitchen sink. For a decade I watched as I washed every dish in the sink before stopping, nearly but not wholly done, a coffee mug or two left behind. Just yesterday I had to silently chide myself for almost leaving the silverware laying there in the bottom of the otherwise empty sink for literally no reason at all.
I wash the silverware. I finish the book. I make the phone calls I need to make. I renew my driver’s license. I take the dog to the vet.
Becoming a moderately effective adult in spite of my mother, has, I see, been largely a matter of simply completing all the mundane little tasks of life, which she never could do. I shudder any time I think of an unpaid bill, remembering the way that sometimes I’d open a closet door at home and a pile of unopened mail would fall on my head from a high-above shelf. She tinkered on the brink of extinction constantly: the lights were never shut off, but she often couldn’t handle basic tasks, even when she had ready money, paying up only when forced with immediate cancellation. Never impoverished, my mother insisted on pushing the boundaries of her wallet at every turn. Becoming an adult has meant pushing back against that same impulse toward self-destruction.
I persist; I check my credit score. I try to laugh at how silly all of it is and how easily it is, in theory, to not do as she did.
I graduated from college and “took a year off,” by which I mean I worked full time, managing one of the restaurants I had worked at through college and thinking about what I wanted to do next. I started a band with three other women as I eventually began applying to graduate schools. Though I applied to schools outside Pittsburgh and was accepted to two of them, I decided to stay there and to go to Carnegie Mellon for a year to study English literature. I wanted to go to graduate school mostly because I think I would have liked to stay in college longer. I wasn’t ready to be finished. I felt at once both like a kid and an old lady. I was in some ways very mature—I took care of myself and my apartment and my pets and my taxes—but in others I was sort of underdeveloped. Graduate school seemed to me like a way to defer adulthood a little longer.
And the truth is, I still wanted to stay physically near my mother. This shamed me to think
it, that I wanted to be vigilant, somehow, over a person I refused to see most of the time. Only as the years passed, as I learned that physical distance from my mother didn’t matter so much, and as I learned to navigate my own life, did I realize that a near-constant state of panic about even minor woes—financial, emotional, whatever—wasn’t normal.
Josh and I had started our lives together with relatively little in the way of money. Neither of us had savings or 401(k) accounts. But slowly we’d managed to begin saving; we’d bought a house; our credit scores were good. By the time Zelda was born, we had no debt other than my student loans, which, because I’d gone to graduate school and borrowed money for years, were significant. But we’d been slowly paying those down and were comfortable. It would be hard to overstate what that type of solvency—which isn’t exactly wealth but is knowing that, even if a large bill comes up unexpectedly, you’ll figure it out together—has meant to me. Slowly, we learned to be adults together. Slowly, we managed. And not having to worry, as I’d worried first with my mother, and then on my own, ceaselessly about such matters was very important to my overall peace of mind.
To be clear, it wasn’t even so much a question of having enough money to cover things but more a question of how matters of money were confronted. Josh had no background of simply ignoring anything, let alone a pressing financial concern. I’d grown up differently, with a woman who often didn’t confront these things as a matter of personal policy. Learning another way was hard for me but ultimately brought me to a place of greater security.
