Mourning on Mother’s Day
It’s okay to take care of yourself first when you’re the child of an alcoholic
Mother’s day is a made-up holiday as far as I’m concerned. It’s a marketing ploy to get people to spend money on things they don’t need, as most commercialized holidays are. But Mother’s Day, in particular, is difficult for me. It’s one of those days that I can’t bring myself to go on social media. I can’t stomach the sappy posts about how much people love their moms and how awesome they are and how grateful they are for them. Not because I don’t want that for other people, of course, I do. But because I am moving through the murky waters of mourning my own mother right now. Every year I struggle on this day, but this year seems harder.
For a long time, I’ve been so afraid to write about my experiences with her. Afraid that if I unveil them that I am somehow breaking some made-up moral code that all daughters must follow vehemently, regardless of the state of their relationship with them. What I’m facing now is complicated grief. I am mourning a person who still lives and breathes and walks the earth. But how do you do that? Our minds want to cling tightly to versions of people who we once knew. Or maybe these versions never existed at all. Maybe we created them to soften the blows of our experiences with parents who can’t love us in the ways we require.
I’ve also spent many years attempting to be the hero of my mother’s life. To be the voice of reason in a reasonless realm of reality in which she lives. To be a light in her darkness. To be the truth in a vortex of lies. This isn’t my job. This isn’t the job of any child and certainly not an adult who is trying to take care of themselves. But we are wired to believe this. As children of alcoholics, we are wired to believe that there is a world in which we can make things “better.”
At a certain point, it only seems to make sense to write about these things. In order to understand, in order to feel less alone, in order to make peace with them. Boundaries aren’t something I was taught growing up. My mother, someone who never healed from her childhood traumas, took it upon herself to appoint me as her closest confidant at a young age.
After years of grappling with her alcoholism, coming to terms with who I thought she was, who she really was, and who she has become, I am now learning to draw lines in the sand. I am learning to understand that it isn’t inherently wrong or selfish of me to do so, but rather a healthy step towards my freedom from the ties of her emotional bondage.
Recently, I wrote her an email to say the things that I know I’m supposed to say, and that I mostly mean. I overextend myself for fear of sounding harsh or detached. The truth is I am the opposite. I am fragile and deeply concerned. But I write the textbook version of the words I know I must say and that she must hear…
“I am here for you unconditionally when, and only when, you are ready to get help for your drinking. Otherwise, I cannot engage with you. I love you.”
I could only assume that it would elicit a negative response. My mother has never responded well to anything that she doesn’t want to hear, which typically means the truth. Like many addicts, she is defensive and harbors deep resentment and shame. It lives in every cell of her being, poisoning her daily, the tannins from the alcohol only causing her blood vessels to expand and absorb that much more of it.
Dealing with an alcoholic requires a deep ability to surrender. Surrendering isn’t easy. It demands humility from us. In the past when I have been living in the throes of my mother’s illness with her I have been swept up in an emotional current by her hurtful words and cries for help that are always veiled in anger. When I read her reply yesterday, the day after I have drawn the ceremonial line in the sand, the day after I have said the things that I know are the right things to say, I can take a pause and step aside before the tidal wave of hurt crashes down on me.
There is a moment of suspension as I let her words sink in. I am very sober. I don’t need you. Thank God I don’t have cancer. And then a follow-up several minutes later of, How did I raise such a self-centered child? It’s all erratic babble that is born from a place of pain. I can zoom out and use a critical lens to view it this way, but her words still sting. I would be lying if I said they didn’t. Because the truth of the matter is that even when our minds know that the words are coming from a sick and pained person, our heart interprets it differently, leaving logic in the dust. It’s unnatural to hear this from a mother and so our hearts transcribe these painful words on its surface like scars, while our brain scrambles to make sense of the senseless. She is sick, she is sick, she is sick. This is my mantra the morning I receive her emails, desperate not to let her in, not to let her hurt me.
It’s difficult to reconcile who I wish she could be, who I know she could be if she were sober, and the monster she has become. Grieving the person I believe she could be is complicated and painful. It leaves me longing for a version of her that perhaps will never exist. It likely never will.
How do we parse our pain from our fantasies?
I was raised to believe that my role was to protect my mother. Undoing this innate understanding of why I am on this earth has been difficult. And at 30 years old, my boundaries must be put in place to protect myself. Though we have gone long periods with little to no communication, sometimes years, in fact, this time feels different. It’s the first time I have been able to articulate my need to protect myself. And that though my love for her is unconditional, I cannot withstand engaging with her when she is drinking.
I think at some point or another we all realize this with an addict. We all have to reach this point and it often takes being hurt over and over again. We tend to engage in the same cycle of insanity. We get on the ride with them and until we are sick with pain and nauseous with a deep sense of helplessness, we refuse to get off, certain that if we go one more time, it will be different. In the same way that they must reach their bottom, so must we who love them. We must come to grips with the reality that they will not get help until they are ready. If that is, they are ever ready.
As much as I wish I wasn’t so hurt by my mother, I also recognize that I am biologically designed to need her love. To know that this love is something she isn’t capable of giving is devastating. There is no way around this.
The particular kind of sick that my mother is seems to be especially horrifying. For a long time, I could always find a way to recognize a glimmer of the woman she was before her undoing. I could always find a way to convince myself that she was still the mother I once knew. The mother I knew as a child would let me sit on her lap in the movie theatre when the Dolby sound preview would play and I would cover my ears afraid of the deep rattle of the subwoofer. I was as sensitive then as I am now. And it’s for this reason that her disappearance is so painful for me. Not her physical disappearance. She is still here, though rapidly deteriorating, somehow barely alive in her tiny shell of a body that she has been abusing relentlessly for years. Her disappearance is that of her spirit.
The inevitable has arrived and she has vacated her body. It seems as though she is in some strange state of psychosis from her alcoholism. She is delusional and riddled with resentment that has bubbled at the surface of her subconscious for years. It has always seemed to have been threatening to boil over. And now that it has, I am still somehow surprised. Some small shred of me still didn’t want to believe or accept that she could reach this place of no return. And yet there she is, in the distance, completely unrecognizable, a mere mirage of a woman I used to know.
Throughout the years of my mother’s alcoholism I was never able to muster the courage (was it even courage it required? I don’t honestly know) to tell her explicitly that I was drawing a line in the sand. Though we wouldn’t speak, there was never some catalyst conversation in which we decided not to. It would just sort of happen organically. A strange concept considering how unnatural it is for a daughter not to speak to her mother. I always had my reasons. The drinking, the lying, the narcissism. It would eventually become too much to endure so I would silently slink away from her, oftentimes totally unnoticed. It wasn’t that she would call and I would ignore her. Communication is a two-way street after all. Neither of us called the other and it would go on like that for months.
I once asked my therapist why my mother couldn’t seem to get better. Why after so many years she only seemed to continue to devolve into her drinking and her illness. “Some people are just more sick than others,” was her response. Some people get sick and then they get better. Others get sick and then they get sicker.
Slowly, I am learning to take care of myself in the ways in which my mother cannot provide for herself, or me as her daughter. On this particular Mother’s Day, I am grieving and that is ok. I must protect myself and be gentle with my broken parts. We all have to learn to do this for ourselves.
I hope one day that this day isn’t as painful for me. I hope one day I will be able to scroll through Instagram and feel nothing but elation and gratitude for all of my wonderful friends who got to have good moms. But until then, it’s ok if I hurt. Until then, the line in the sand will remain, guarding me against the harsh tides of the ocean.
