Where to Begin?

THE BACKGROUND.

I have decided to start this blog because I need something. An outlet. A way to take care of myself. Something constructive to do. I am en route to my hometown to visit my mom who is very, very sick. But before I talk about that, I feel like I should give a little back-story.

I had a very normal and happy childhood. I felt safe and protected, loved and special. I had a stay-at-home mom and a dad who worked a lot, but was fun when he was around. He is kind of a diva and would often take me shopping with him to furniture stores, men’s shoe stores (oh hay!), and some stores for me too.

My mom was super-mom growing up. She was well liked and always there. She supported us all of the time (at sports games, plays, picking us up and dropping us off from school, etc). She made the best chocolate chip cookies and helped at the school Book Fairs and auctions. She encouraged us to speak up for ourselves and not follow in line with what was expected (most of the time).

My mom grew up with a mother who wanted her to be “a lady” and all my mom wanted to do was play sports and hang out with her friends. My mom has never liked to shop or wear dresses, which disappointed her mother greatly, and they fought like crazy. My mom was finally sent to boarding school (which she was happy about too) and had the freedom to be who she wanted – wild, athletic, a rebel.

She excelled in sports and experimented with drugs, drinking, and smoking cigarettes. And she was celebrated for all of it. I thought my mom was adventurous and cool growing up. She had a hot temper and was used to getting her way.

My parents were childhood friends and kept in touch throughout college. I got the impression that they dated in junior high, and continued to hook up throughout high school and college when they saw each other, but also saw other people. They must have began to seriously date after college and got married in the 80s. My mom was the cool, pretty girl and my dad was the smart (somewhat nerdy), but funny guy. I think my mom always felt a little superior to my dad – like he was lucky to have her. (*This is all just what I think…having sex with each other and other people wasn’t a topic that came up very often in our house growing up…thankfully).

I don’t remember my parents fighting very much growing up. I also don’t remember seeing them be very affectionate with each other. They went on sporadic vacations, but mostly my mom scolded my dad for spending too much money (on cars, things for the house, wanting to go on vacations), and so my dad spent a lot of time playing golf with his friends.

I think it also didn’t help that my mom can be a homebody (or maybe she just feels uncomfortable going to the types of places my dad wanted to go), but she never attended work parties with him, citing not wanting to wear a dress/get dressed up (her adolescent charm was not longer all that charming).

I remember one Christmas my dad enlisted me to help him find fun Christmas presents for my mom. We got her new clothes (she wore the same stuff from LLBean all the time and never did anything nice for herself – it was either too girly or too much money). I remember picking out new clothes, a watch, and a sexy outfit for Victoria’s Secret, among other things. I think my dad was hopeful that he could buy my mom some happiness and make her feel good and worthy. She did not respond as he would have hoped. I don’t remember her exact reaction to most of the things, but I do remember her response to the VS gift. It was along the lines of “I’m too fat to wear something like that”.

Despite my mom encouraging us to feel good about ourselves, she has always had very low self-esteem. She never felt good in the dresses her mom wanted her to wear. I remember her complaining about being fat and doing Jane Fonda workout tapes before family events. She did the Atkins diet for a while and was very diet ugly most of the time. And she has always rebelled against things and people who make her feel uncomfortable or want her to be someone she didn’t want to be.

I don’t remember exactly when things began to fall apart. My mom had always had beer throughout the day – in fact, she is holding a beer in one hand and one of us in the other in many of our childhood pictures. I didn’t notice this until a few years ago, and I never thought it was strange growing up.

When I was about 13 years old, my mom started to sneak bourbon. I remember watching her do it from under the kitchen table where I was hiding/spying. I have a journal entry about it and my worries that she was an alcholic, but I don’t remember thinking much else. By the time I was 14/15, she was “sneaking” hard liquor all of the time and was officially a drunk. She was drunk all the time. She drove us to school drunk (I have some scary memories of this), came to our sporting events drunk, and stopped being a mother to us.

One night, my dad told my mom he wanted a divorce. I found my mom crying and drunk on the floor in front of the fireplace. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me to go away. I pressed and she told me to “Fuck off. Your father wants a divorce”. It was one of those moments where I heard her, but went into shock. My body stopped and I was very aware of it. I turned around and left to go tell my brother.

My mom continued to drink and was a very angry woman. At first, she tried to repair things with my dad. For example, she began to sleep in his bed again. My dad had surgery that required my mom to sleep downstairs because he essentially had an open wound in his stomach. So my mom, who always diligently took care of my dad (making him dinners, coffee in the morning, warming his car in the winters, etc) had started to sleep on the living room couch. The problem was…she never stopped. She slept on the living room couch for years. It wasn’t until my dad wanted a divorce did she sleep in the same bed again.

It was useless. My dad had been having an affair with his college girlfriend and he wanted to go try being happy with her. We were all so angry at him. Our feelings of abandonment and pain (for our family and for our mom) turned into hating him. It was all his fault, or so we thought.

A year or so after the divorce, my brother told me a story about when he was on the golf course with my dad, and my dad hit a bad shot and had a meltdown. He threw his golf club across the fairway, and began to scream and cry about how much he hated his life and how unhappy he was. The story shocked me. I had no idea that my dad had been so unhappy.

Looking back, I don’t blame him for wanting to leave and find happiness. I would have wanted the same thing if I were him. And he is now happily married with that woman (who is very well-suited for him – she puts on dresses, likes being spoiled, and goes to all of his work parties with him). But I do blame him for leaving us with our mom at that time. She was incapable of being a parent to my brother, my sister and me.

During high school, I became very depressed. I stopped trying and began to spend all day sleeping. I also felt obligated to stay home and watch my mom because she was not only drinking, but she was also starting to act totally insane.

She trespassed on neighbors’ property (at one point, got into the pool with out neighbors’ kids fully clothed and tried to teach them how to swim) and started doing strange things like playing music really loud and hanging a beach towel with a tiger on it over the fence to our house to let “them” know she wasn’t scared, arranging her beer cans in little fortresses all around the house for protection, and disappearing to go on missions. The house was totally trashed -- old pizza boxes discarded (my mom stopped cooking), clothes and garbage everywhere (we started to do our own laundry, but left things all around because my mom, who was never very clean to begin with, really let things go). The house was disgusting and embarrassing, and it was a true reflection of the state my mom (and all of us kids) were in.

My mom would stay up all night, sitting at the kitchen table behind her beer car fortresses. She was “thinking” – she had all of these ideas and worries. Apparently, there was a white van following her. We soon found out that she was in contact with the CIA and that the president needed her help. Or so she thought. They followed her everywhere. Sometimes she would drive around (completely drunk) just to try to “loose them” or show them something she thought they needed to see.

I don’t have clear memories of this time, possibly because I was so depressed myself. I do remember that my neighbors called the police a few times, and eventually members of my family arranged an intervention. My mom refused and they were forced to have her arrested and committed to a facility in our town. This “mental ward” was good in some ways, but it was also bad. It was good because she was forced to detox and she was given a diagnosis and medication. (Another plus: it gave my brother and me a BREAK. My sister had since moved out because she and my sister fought so terribly).

My mom’s diagnosis was Bipolar Disorder I. It explained the odd things that were going on and we all hoped this hospital stay would help her turn back into someone we recognized.

It did not work. She went on “acting crazy” for a few more years and hated everyone that had to do with her hospitalization (the doctors, the neighbors, and especially the family members who “put her in there”).

My relationship with my mother changed drastically. So did my brother’s. We were no longer the children and she was not the parent. She embarrassed us and we hated her for it. We screamed obscenities and fought constantly. We would hide her car keys so that she wouldn’t drive drunk. We would find her passed out under the kitchen table or in the back of the living room. We laughed at these things, but they were really upsetting too.

Even now, I feel bad admitting these things and feel like talking this way about my mom is a huge betrayal. I think a lot of children of alcoholics feel this way. And possibly children with a parent who has a mental illness.

It wasn’t all bad. I had a lot of freedom and got away with things I would not have gotten away with had my mom not been like this (or if my dad had been around). For example, my mom paid close to $2000 for my have laser hair removal all over my body (one of the best things I’ve ever done, by the way). I still don’t feel bad about having her pay for this. I feel like she owed me.

Anyway, eventually I went away to college and my younger brother was left alone with my mom. His relationship changed with her. He began to have outbursts of anger and bossed her around a lot. Most of the time, she deserved it.

My mom was hospitalized one last time during my freshman year of college. My brother, sister, and I spent Christmas alone while my mom was in the hospital. The next time I visited home, my mom’s face was all puffy (weight gain from medication, perhaps) and she was a zombie. I don’t know if she went into a depressive phase or if it was just the meds, but she was no longer the same person.

Mom was three seconds behind everyone else and spent all day and night sleeping on the couch and watching TV (my therapist said that what my mom was doing was “surviving the only way she knew how”). She stopped drinking hard liquor, but continued to drink beer throughout the day (in a strange way: she still sneaks it in the kitchen, but takes “shots” of beer every 15 minutes or so). She was lethargic and lost all of her fire. It was actually a relief. Everyone was so happy she wasn’t acting out and needing to be watched. She went on like this for about 7 years.

It has been a deep depression. She lost interest in everything she had interest in and continues to only get up to drink beer and smoke cigarettes. She won’t shower for months at a time and was just totally destroyed by this depression.

In the summer of 2010, as if things couldn’t get any worse, we noticed that she was having uncontrollable diarrhea, and was not making it to the bathroom. There was diarrhea on the floors and on her clothes. She was also throwing up most of the time when she ate. Worried, I took her to the hospital. It was a traumatic experience, but they told us the diarrhea was probably from the drinking. Her liver was swollen and they gave her 5 years to live.

At this time, she almost went in for treatment, but was given a window out when a family member told her that he wouldn’t judge her for not drinking and deciding to die like this. She leapt right through that window.

When I went to visit her in January 2011, she had lost nearly 40 pounds and was completely emaciated except for her hard, protruding belly. I burst into tears when I saw her. The diarrhea was still an issue and she had stopped eating to try to combat the diarrhea. Her only caloric intake was beer.

A few months later, my mom started sounding brighter on the phone. I was hopeful, but when I received reports from my aunt that my mom looked worse and was still having the uncontrollable diarrhea, I decided to call her social worker that my mom was assigned after her last hospital stay, and who was also the gatekeeper to her medicine. Mom hates her.

Under normal circumstances, a therapist or social worker would not disclose confidential client information, but this was apparently not a normal circumstance. I called and told her about what was happening with my mom and she said that she had been very worried about her. She stopped coming in for her medication six months earlier and she was not returning their phone calls.

So, now my Bipolar mom (or my mom who is Bipolar) is off of her medication and her health is failing. Miserably. She is dying and everyone is relying on me to save her.