Now My Heart Is Full

by Laura June

  My mother and I looked “just like” each other despite the fact that she was tiny and I am slightly above average height; that she was blond-haired and blue-eyed, while I have dirty-brown hair (my stylist once described it as “the color of hair”) and dark brownish, muddy-green eyes. But we did look alike. Our faces carry the genetic material to its most obvious conclusion.

  Zelda’s face is my own face as a child. I see it in every photo of her, in her face when she sleeps. I pull my own childhood photos out of the closet and stare at them, and they look so much like her. Though her brown hair is curly and mine is straight, it is the same color. Her eyes are deeper and darker than mine, but they’re the same eyes. The same little nose sitting there on the same face.

  One morning when Zelda was about eight months old, I went in to her room to wake her from her nap. I’d seen on the baby monitor that she was asleep thirty seconds earlier, when I’d left the kitchen to walk upstairs, but by the time I opened her door, she was already sitting up, looking through the bars of her crib at me.

  I jumped almost physically, then pulled my phone from my back pocket to take a photo, which I immediately texted to my brother John. “OMG who does this look like?” I wrote in the message. “Holy shit, Kath!” he responded immediately.

  That was the first but not last time I saw my mother in my daughter’s face. It was so overwhelming and so distinct and different from what I normally saw when I looked at her, but I see these little hints of others peeking out from her all the time. Josh, Josh’s mother, my brother Daniel all occasionally greet me as I look to her face for an answer to the question: Who are we now?

  Looking so much like your mother is very hard when you don’t always have the greatest things to say about her. I looked in the mirror for years and saw, instead of myself, my mother, with all the requisite things that that title—“mother”—meant to me. I saw her face as I aged from a teenager to a young adult. I saw her hangover face in my hangovers, the way we puffed up and our eyes didn’t get bloodshot but watery. I saw myself growing a line between my eyebrows from my perpetual scowl, the same scowl she carried around with her. I’ve always blamed my scowl on my mother, so who did she blame hers on?

  There is a large blank space where my mother should be from 1996, when I moved out of her house, to 2007, when she died. In that space I saw her maybe twenty or twenty-five times, always for an hour or two, never much longer. In that space, she barely aged, until the last few years, when her face had sort of collapsed and morphed into her father’s face as he had aged. She looked worn-out but not old then, nothing that a few weeks of sobriety and a good moisturizer couldn’t fix.

  If I age the way my mother and her mother aged, I’ll look moderately young until I’m about fifty, and then I’ll slowly begin to morph into an indeterminate age. In March of 2015, when Zelda was barely able to walk yet, just past her first birthday, my grandma Peg died at the age of ninety-one. I hadn’t seen her in about two years; we’d grown far, far apart in the time since my mother had died. She was increasingly bitter and mean, and going to visit her was never easy without the weird but kind buffer my grandfather and mother had created. Left to visit her alone, I barely did. But she was happy at our wedding, and she was always kind on the surface. Only when we were alone did she bring up everything bad that had ever happened to her, and so much of that was, in her view, my mother’s doing. I took Zelda, who had never met her, with me to her funeral, and there in her casket, my grandmother didn’t look any older to me than she had when I was a little girl.

  Only when I was about thirty-five did I think of upgrading my skin routine from Noxzema and Oil of Olay to something more aggressive, something more antiaging, and even now I am barely able to muster much energy beyond soap and water most nights before bed. I am resigned to the ravages of time; I accept them.

  Now, when I look at myself, I see Zelda, not my mother.

  I hope that when she looks in the mirror, she doesn’t see me.

  Zelda is a singular child, all her own, so I resist the urge sometimes to draw too many parallels between us. I want her to have her own identity, and so when just this morning, at a birthday party full of three-year-olds, two mothers walked up and introduced themselves, following with, “She is a picture of you!” I laughed this off as best as I could. We look alike. I looked like my own mother, I heard this all the time. Eventually, as I grew, I wanted for this not to be so for whatever reason.

  She is her father, too. In that way, she is not like me: she is outgoing whereas I have too often lived inside my own head. I used to dream all day long simply of going to bed so that I could be alone with my thoughts. But I had three brothers, a full house; I never got to pick the shows on TV. Zelda has the whole space to herself: she is an only child and, at three years old, a determined one. She knows who she is and what she wants. I try simply to foster that, to give her good manners and a decent framework for moving forward.

  My mother, either because she didn’t have time or because the house burned down and took everything away, didn’t leave me very much when she died.

  What my mother did leave me with was her books. Not the actual copies: as I said, she left me almost nothing. I carried around in my mind her love of Jane Eyre. She’d taken her copy from her childhood home. I don’t know what became of it. I sure looked for it there, in her third-floor apartment, after she died, but I couldn’t find it. I collected my own copies, buying them new and old. She preferred Charlotte to Emily, and I doubt that she knew about Anne. When, at the age of twenty, I went to northern England and visited the home where the Brontës had lived and written their books, I sent my mother, who would still be alive for another seven years, a postcard. Before I’d left, my mother had visited me and given me a notebook to write in on my trip. “I’m so happy that you’re going to finally travel. I love you,” she wrote inside. I took the journal; I filled up its pages on my trip. I have that book. It’s out in the garage right now, boxed up with the rest of my notebooks from college. My mother gave me Jane Eyre.

  Most of what we are given by our parents isn’t physical but a matter of proximity. My mother never sat me down and said, “Here, read these.” I learned by her example. She sat on the couch at night watching TV, sewing, or reading a book, and I followed in her footsteps. She never told me to drink or not drink alcohol: I learned not to drink by watching her drink, and later, I learned to avoid thinking about it when I drank too much also from her example.

  I have taken the best things from my mother that I could. I try not to waste time, as I can only feel that she wasted time. I hope to do better than my own mother did at mothering, which, after all, wasn’t that bad anyway. She left no physical messes behind; I didn’t have to spend weeks purging boxes of junk or donating piles of clothes to Goodwill. I should try to be thankful for that, though I know that I would give a lot to have a box or two from her like the ones I’m accumulating in my own garage. Again, I’m trying to right her wrongs, and so my daughter will have quite a task on her hands when I am gone. When I walk into the garage and see the boxes stacking up, in need of organizing or restacking, this is what I tell myself: Zelda will want these, probably.

  My mother didn’t leave me much, but she also left me everything that she had. What more could I ask for?

  CHAPTER 17

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  When I started doing my family tree around 2005, I asked my grandma Peg about her father, who had died when she was eight years old. I asked her about him because I wanted to know how he died, at the age of thirty-eight. I suspected, of course, that he’d been an alcoholic. Peg never drank much, but as I grew up, I noticed that she herself carried some of the traits of a person who had been raised by an alcoholic. Even though he had died when she was so young, I knew from experience how quickly having a drinker for a parent could affect behavior. She kept secrets and worried so much about appearances. She talked about him with reverence and told me his
appendix had burst, killing him.

  But I did my own digging and found that, in fact, her father had died at thirty-eight because he drank too much. It was right there on his death certificate, which I requested from the Pennsylvania State archives. “Contributory factors: alcohol.” I was in my late twenties by then, and many mysterious pieces of my grandmother’s behavior over the years fell into place.

  It is often comforting to focus your attention on the past for confirmation of what you have yourself experienced. To find that in some ways we are all the sum of our pasts, to find connections from generation to generation. Alcoholism’s genetics are poorly understood, but one thing is certain: the behavior is passed on.

  I would love to say that my mother’s alcoholism ended with her. That I got away clean, that drinking was never a problem for me. I would love to tell you that I was firmly dedicated to sobriety or that I was a fine social drinker who never had any problems of my own when it came to wine, beer, and everything in between. But it’s a lot more complicated than that.

  In hindsight, I guess, I never really met a drink of alcohol that I didn’t love. My first tastes of alcohol—thinking about them—can still sort of make my spine feel funny and my belly get warm. Beer was the first booze I ever encountered, when I was maybe nine or ten, a stolen can shared among four or five friends. It was warm, and that warmth flowed into my body and covered me, softened me on the inside.

  But only in high school did I really begin to actually drink. And we drank a lot. We drank only on the weekends (and Wednesdays), but that was the entire goal of Friday and Saturday, as I remember it. And inside, I think I suspected that I had something in common with my mother. I’d watched her drink and change and react to drinking enough to be sensitive to the signs of problems in others, and I wasn’t blind to them in myself, either. I simply pretended not to see them in me. People often say that alcoholics lie to themselves more than anyone else. For me, that was untrue; I looked in the mirror and I was pretty brutally honest with myself: I knew from way early on that if I continued to drink, I would almost certainly have problems. It wasn’t me I lied to or hid things from. It was everybody else.

  The reason was simple: I needed one single point of escape from my mother and what she had done to me. My mother had made me overly anxious and worrisome. This is really common in children of alcoholics, because we can’t depend on our parents, the one thing that should be crucially stable in life. And if I couldn’t count on my mother to pick me up or be there when I needed her, what was there to not be anxious about? I always expected the rug to be pulled from beneath my feet. I worried over tiny details of schedules and timing and yet often avoided doing the work I needed to do for school or life simply because I was busy worrying, and worrying all the time is an exhausting, full-time job. It is not something you can do while keeping on top of everything else, even in a teenager’s life.

  I started smoking and drinking because everyone else around me did those things; they are, or were, normal at that time for suburban kids to try out. Because it was the ’90s and all cool teenagers smoked and drank. I tried other drugs—I smoked weed and drank too much coffee or cough syrup—but I only really attached myself to booze and cigarettes. They went together very well, and they gave me peace of mind. After a drink or two, my mind slowed down. My heart beat slower. My blood pressure fell. I didn’t feel anxious. And my personality—my real one, not the nervous worrier who took over my body most of the time—even began to make itself known sometimes.

  I want to tell you that my true self is sober. But in some ways, my true me, the one who wasn’t raised by an alcoholic, the one who is laid-back and cool, is the one who emerges after two or three—but not more—beers or glasses of wine. I open up, or flower outward. I am at ease. But knowing that I sometimes have trouble stopping at two or three has often stopped me from taking one drink.

  Being a teenager is a weird hell for everyone, I’m sure. For me, it was an odd combination of hell and, well, not hell. I had begun to feel on the verge of autonomy: probably because I was actually on the verge of it. I could see the light at the end of this particular parent-driven tunnel. I’d started to see that it was okay to not worry every moment about my mother, that I could not control the situations around me. I’d begun to feel at home in my own body. I felt like myself sometimes, and if I didn’t exactly love who that was, I could live with it.

  But I couldn’t escape my conditioning. Well, unless I drank, I soon realized. I beat myself up over this plenty.

  As I said, I couldn’t lie to myself. I knew what alcohol was, better than most kids my age, and I knew that I was playing with something really dangerous, something that, by design, got out of people’s control all the time. If my mother, a strong adult person, couldn’t change her behavior or control herself or keep it together for her kids, how could I?

  Much to my surprise, though, I soon found out that I could—at least sort of—control myself. I began, right there in high school with my first forays into drinking, a pattern that would carry me all through college and graduate school and then into adulthood. When it mattered, when I needed to not drink, I never, ever drank. Sometimes, that meant abstaining for weeks or months. I could stop whenever I wanted to—ha!—and then bide my time, waiting until it made sense to begin drinking again. I did this over and over. For several years in college I maintained a strict “only on Fridays” rule about drinking. I was paying for college myself and working full time. I didn’t want to blow those things; I was determined not to. So I made rules for myself.

  How much damage can one person do drinking one night a week? Well, in my case, not very much.

  At the beginning, drinking alcohol freed up my mind to think beyond the confines of my family’s house, my family’s problems, my family. I began to envision, truly for the first time since childhood, the possibilities of a life lived however I wanted. Alcohol, really, had something to do with that opening vista, and no matter how much I sort of wish that weren’t the case, it definitely is.

  How many drinkers quit? All of them quit almost every day, I guess. The thing about quitting is that you can quit even for fifteen minutes and really mean it. You can really mean it only until you don’t, and even if you give up after those fifteen minutes, nothing takes that fifteen minutes from you: they’re yours.

  Our culture supports alcoholism in insidious, even well-meaning ways: we assume, by default, that whoever we are drinking with drinks, too. Nondrinkers aren’t shunned, but they’re not exactly fun to be around. I have been the one person not drinking as often as I have been one of the people who is. I am comfortable in both roles.

  I didn’t often drink, but when I did, it felt too good. When I did, I thought always of my mother, scared that I would somehow devolve, unwittingly, to the place where she had ended up, drinking secretly or at night when the kids were asleep. Barely ever even trying to quit, as far as I could tell.

  The few times I suggested, to friends or men that I was dating, that maybe I should stop drinking, I was usually laughed off. Drunks are like . . . Charles Bukowski. My mother. It’s obvious when someone has a problem. Wasn’t it obvious that my mother did? They were right; they had a point. And yet, inside, I still wondered what fire I was playing with when I drank.

  One night in graduate school in 2004, when I was twenty-five, I spent a night out with the other students, most of whom were a little younger than I was. I had a full-time job; I was the only person in my English lit class who did. I had my own, permanent apartment with cats and pots and pans. Pretty much everyone else was an out-of-towner—basically kids. We went out to a few bars, drinking as we went, taking a bus back to the part of town where my car was near midnight. I didn’t want to drive, so a few of us went to a diner and sat there, talking and smoking (you could still smoke in restaurants in Pittsburgh then) for a few hours. By the time I walked out of the diner and back to my car, it was almost 3:00 in the morning.
I was stone sober, at least in my mind.

  And then I got pulled over two minutes later, music blasting from my car stereo, because one of my taillights was out. I was five minutes from home. I laughed off the walking sobriety test. When they asked if they could look in my trunk, I said, “Oh sure. It’s a mess in there; I’m sorry.” And when they asked if there were any needles in my car, I said, “What? What kind of needles?” It was my first police experience. I was far too dumb to even realize that I was already three-quarters of the way to being arrested.

  The cop, who was extremely nice to me, told me that they would like to take me to a police station to have an actual sobriety test: to blow into a machine. “You can refuse,” he said, “but that means we’ll arrest you. If you go with us and willingly take the test, you can go back to your car if you pass. It’s your choice,” he added.

  “This does not sound like much of a choice.” I laughed, grabbing my purse and getting into the back of the police car.

  At the police station, I blew a 0.02. This was nothing by legal standards. Pennsylvania’s limit for alcohol and driving is 0.08. And yet, the officer informed me that Pennsylvania was a “zero tolerance” state, something he had failed to mention earlier: if you were pulled over for any legitimate reason, any alcohol in your blood was subject to penalties.

  And so, at 4:30 in the morning on a Saturday night, I was hauled to Allegheny County Jail. They photographed me—I remember the cop who took my photo telling me that usually people didn’t smile for their mug shots—and I was happy to oblige. I just rattled along, because all of this seemed so silly to me, and I assumed that I would be out in two or three hours; that’s how they’d made it sound.