As I tried unsuccessfully to shift my weight to get a better view out the window, I suddenly thought, “I’d really love to have dinner with my father.” I hadn’t spoken the words; I corrected myself as if I had. “But only if he wasn’t my father.”
We’d meet at a dinner party. He’d tell me about his time in Zimbabwe, and I’d tell him about mine. He’d be impressed by me. Not only with my interest in the world but with what I’d managed to achieve since he’d died. I still believed I’d only accomplished what I had because his death granted me the space to try hard and occasionally to fail. So we couldn’t be related. If we were, I wouldn’t be whoever I was slowly becoming. We’d have to be strangers, some sort of equals.
After returning from Africa and going to Burning Man and being seduced by its freedom and its all-is-good-ness, I moved to Los Angeles in 2003. I wanted to escape my mother and to pursue writing. I settled in Venice Beach and into a life where I could walk to the beach in my bikini even though I lived nine blocks away, make a ton of money cocktailing so I could write during the day, and wear crop tops and flip-flops.
Within three months, I went from being a hard-core East Coast skeptic who couldn’t watch a game of hacky sack, to someone who believed that the reason I wasn’t motivated or talented enough was because there were holes in my aura. It seemed like a miracle that I could pay someone—usually the person who’d pointed out the holes—to sew those things up. In California, I learned there were chakras to clear, past lives to investigate, mantras to chant, and evil entities to be removed. I was sure that a combination of these things would finally provide the solution to the problem of myself.
I was sick of the therapists I’d seen on and off since childhood. I knew myself and my story way too well. Mean dad, dead dad, drunk mom. It was boring, and when I had to recite it to someone new, I heard my mother’s voice instead of my own. I didn’t want to be like her, waving my narratives in people’s faces. When I reduced myself to those plot points and antagonists, I was doing what she did: asking for sympathy and making excuses. I didn’t want to talk about my childhood anymore. I’d done it so many times, and my feelings and behavior hadn’t changed. I still believed that what was wrong with me was my innate me-ness, which was beyond my control. I doubted that I could be cured, but if it was possible, I thought it would be at the hand of someone who had superpowers.
I wasn’t just looking to fix myself. I was looking for comfort. The people I paid to help me felt like surrogate parents during the hour I spent with them. My mother wasn’t a mother who could be called during an emergency, or who would ever call to see how I was doing; that person was my sister. And even though I was an adult and was, in some ways, more responsible than many of my friends because I’d been emotionally and financially independent for a while, I really needed, and wanted, to be told that I would be okay. That I was okay. I wandered from Reiki master to monk to meditation circle, searching for reassurance, direction, and antidotes.
I befriended a massage therapist who also did energy work, and we meditated together weekly. I talked to her about my father and my writing, and told her how I was convinced that I was a failure who would only keep failing because I was put on the earth to fail. One day, she asked who had decided this was how it would be. Was it God?
I told her I didn’t believe in God, but that yeah, whatever was out there had put me on the planet knowing that I’d never be able to succeed, no matter how hard I tried.
She told me that whatever was out there—the universe, the divine—didn’t loathe me the way I felt my father had. The universe wasn’t my dad, and it wasn’t an asshole. She was smiling so beautifully as she spoke, lit from within as well as from above. I suddenly felt what she called “divine love” in the room and in my body, a disorienting flood of acceptance and lack of judgment. I started crying and asked if she’d put something in my water when I wasn’t looking. She laughed and said nope, this is all you, and told me that whenever I felt alone, fruitlessly fighting against my fate, to remember how I was feeling at this moment.
As I walked home under the shadows of palm trees, I thought about how I could dismantle the power my father still had over me. What if I was the person who decided my value, not him? Was such a seismic shift in perspective possible? He’d been dead for more than a decade, but his voice was tightly intertwined with my own; my loud self-criticism was an echo of his. Taking him on meant taking on myself as well.
While I was trying to project myself to other dimensions, Alexandra got married and moved to Boston with her husband, Raj, and lived with our mother while they looked for a house of their own. Alex hoped their presence might help my mom, but it seemed to make things even worse. Alex and Raj would often have to step around her pale, naked body as they left for work because she’d passed out in the hallway on the way to the bathroom. When they went by her bedroom at night, or checked on her, they’d often find her in the dark, mumbling to herself. As she had with Dave, my mother seemed to think that Alex living with her meant she could drink as much as she wanted because someone was there to rescue her.
“I thought being there might be good for her,” Alex told me when they moved out a year later. “If she saw people getting up, going to work, and eating real meals, maybe she’d want to do the same. I don’t know what I was thinking.” Even after my sister moved out, our mom, and her friends, treated Alex like a nurse. That continued even after Alex had her own children, Toshi and Naveen.
Neighbors called her when they hadn’t seen our mother for a while or when they found her wandering home from the liquor store looking more haggard than usual. I received dispatches from Alex about having to clean up my mother’s shit, finding her on the floor and checking her pulse. She’d tell me about my mom’s crazed antics, how she’d recently visited an old professor friend at Tufts and gotten so drunk and wild that he’d had to call the campus police to get rid of her. To get back at him, she stripped naked so the police would “really have something to see.”
“I hate telling people that my mother lives in Boston,” Alex told me. “They always say, ‘Oh how nice that you have help nearby.’ I can’t tell them that I’d never let her babysit, or that I’m always helping her, leaving work in the middle of the day to figure out if she’s dead or needs to go to the hospital.”
I asked Alex again and again if there was anything I could do, if I could help in some way, but she told me no. She could handle it herself. So all I did was call my mother every few weeks and leave messages. When she called back, she made sure she was sober. I’d ask her if she’d been drinking, and she’d say, “No.” I’d recite whatever story Alex had shared with me most recently, and my mom would deny it. I called, and I worried—worried that she’d fall down the stairs, starve, or get hit by a car. The hopelessness she felt found me on the other side of the country. I shrank when I thought of how helpless I was, how miserable she must have been to drink the way she did, of her skill for self-destruction. I wondered if it was contagious.
My mother had periods of sobriety that were usually short, just a month or two, but one lasted as long as a year. Alex and I cheered her on as she went back to teaching and later took a job at a nonprofit. Even though she was working, her income was low because she could only earn a certain amount before she lost the little workers’ compensation she still received from my dad’s employers. She worried about money, and that, or something else, seemed to cause her to start drinking again, which led her to lose her job. After not hearing from her for a while, I called the company I thought she was working for. When I asked for her, the receptionist laughed and said, “She hasn’t worked here for a while.”
My mom decided to visit me in California toward the end of my four years there. The visit was ambitious; our itinerary included going to Big Sur, as well as visiting her sister, Arlene, in San Diego. I spent the week before she arrived snapping at my roommate and coworkers, and worrying that I�
�d have to search her purse and coat for bottles. Two days before she arrived, she called to tell me that she’d hit her head on the corner of our kitchen counter, not because she was hammered but because she was dizzy. She’d been to the doctor and didn’t have a concussion, but she was badly bruised.
I shuddered when I spied her at LAX. Her face was no longer swollen, but it was every color in a rainbow of sea glass—green, yellow, light and dark blue, and a purple that veered toward black. She looked like she’d sprinted into a brick wall.
When I hugged her, she winced. “Don’t worry,” she told me, “it looks worse than it feels. I just hate having these dizzy spells.”
I grabbed her bag and said, “Funny, I get dizzy when I’m plastered, too.”
We drove to Big Sur, and she was silent for most of the six hours we spent winding up the rocky, gray coast. No topic I introduced interested her. When I told her about my writing projects—the reason her magna cum laude daughter was waitressing—she asked if I’d given myself a deadline for “making it.”
“I haven’t,” I said, and sighed, “but I appreciate your encouragement.”
She nodded, and I couldn’t tell if she’d heard the sarcasm and hurt in my voice.
We stopped at a lonely gas station tucked against tall, dark trees. After dropping our provisions on the counter, the cashier asked my mother if she’d had brain surgery. “My own mother just did,” the cashier said. She waved her hand in front of her face and grimaced. “She looks like…that.”
“I had a bad fall,” my mother curtly replied.
When I handed over my credit card, the woman glanced at it. “Anya! What a lovely and unusual name.”
My mother perked up and said, “Thank you, I made it up.”
On the way back to the car, a cool wind was tousling our hair and jackets. I turned to my mother and yelled, “You did not make up my fucking name!”
“Yes, I did,” she said, still walking.
“Give it up. It’s a character in a Chekhov play!”
My mother shot me a withering look as she struggled to light a cigarette. “These people don’t read Chekhov.”
Everywhere we went, people asked my mother if she’d had brain surgery. Some of the people inquiring had had surgery themselves, and they wanted to tell my mother all the details of their recovery in slow, stilted voices. My mother grew so tired of being accosted that she stopped accompanying me into stores and museums, and refused to eat in public.
She was sober the whole time. I told her repeatedly that I was proud of her for not drinking, and that I was worried she’d start up again once she left. “Look what just happened,” I said as we were driving to San Diego. “Next time, you might hurt yourself even worse.” She insisted that she hadn’t been drunk when she fell. “Fine,” I said. “You weren’t drunk. But what if you were?” She nodded and agreed that, occasionally, she drank more than she needed to but said that I didn’t have to worry.
I smacked the steering wheel. “But I do,” I told her. “I worry all the time. I am always scared. And I think that’s the right reaction. I hate what you’re doing to yourself, and I want you to get help.”
“Thank you, sweetie.” She squeezed my arm. “I feel like I was destined to be your mother.”
“Destined to be my mother?” Where had she gotten that absurd phrase? And what did it mean to her? Was she suggesting that we had a good relationship or that she was proud of me? Did she know what a burden she was? What had I done in a previous life to end up with her as my destiny?
After another year with bouts of sobriety, long binges, and multiple accidents, my mother decided to go to the Betty Ford Center for a month. My sister and I didn’t know what had caused her to finally seek long-term treatment, and we didn’t care. We were elated and agreed to attend the clinic’s family week along with Aunt Arlene. My mother flew to San Diego, and I drove down to see her off. We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant and talked about how proud we were of her, how brave she was being, how great the clinic would be, while she dejectedly sipped Coke.
When Alex, Aunt Arlene, and I showed up at the Betty Ford Center a few weeks later, we were wary but optimistic. Our thin hopes were crushed when we saw that she was treating the experience like summer camp. She paraded us around and bragged about us, telling other patients, “Alexandra has beautiful sons! Anya went to Oxford!” They responded with heavy nods. The toll of their substance abuse, of being sober, and of the knowledge of the fight that was waiting for them when they left made them somber. The sunshine and the tennis courts were a nice backdrop but couldn’t distract them from the pain of their past and the worry about their future. My mother’s use of that particular group of people as an audience made her charade look scarier than ever and her appear more delusional than ever.
That first afternoon, Alex and I attended a lecture on addiction for the visiting family members. As we left, we encountered a group of patients who seemed just like our mother: smart women in their fifties with short hair who could be on their way to bridge club. They pounced on us and said how annoying everyone found our mother, who was always asking therapists philosophical questions like, “But what does addiction mean on a soul level?” They believed she was trying to show that she was an intellectual, and her act was ridiculous and transparent. After all, the clinic was a place for professionals, women with PhDs, which, they pointed out, our mother didn’t have. And, they added, whenever she spoke and called herself an alcoholic, which was standard practice for everyone in all therapeutic sessions, she rolled her eyes after saying “alcoholic.” They gossiped like high schoolers. “Poor kids,” one of them said. “Your mom just doesn’t get it.” As they walked away, someone else wished us good luck and said we’d need it.
This run-in confirmed our biggest fear. Though she’d gotten herself to the Betty Ford Center, our mother wasn’t committed to working on her sobriety because she still didn’t think that she had a problem or understood that she was on her way to killing herself.
Alex, Arlene, and I were put into separate groups comprised of the family members of other addicts. In my group, there was a quiet twelve-year-old boy whose father was a patient who’d lost his job at a nuclear reactor when he was caught guzzling tequila at his desk. Each day included group-therapy sessions, lectures, and presentations about addiction. We learned about the various codependent roles we might have adopted, such as caretaker, hero, or the lost child who withdraws and becomes self-reliant. I’d been each.
This was the first time I’d encountered the ideas of Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon outside of a brochure. The staff constantly spoke of the three C’s: cause, control, and cure. We didn’t cause our family member’s addiction; we couldn’t control it; and families had to understand that no one could “cure” chemical dependence because it couldn’t be cured, only managed. Addiction, we were informed, was a “no-fault disease.” Addicts didn’t want to become addicts. They’d chosen to abuse substances, but hadn’t chosen the noose of addiction. However, they still needed to take responsibility for their actions.
I spent much of the week in my head, arguing with what I was being taught because I didn’t want to feel sympathy for my mother. I was out of what little I’d ever had. It seemed like she’d spent her entire life waiting for the opportunity to abandon herself to addiction. When my father’s death presented one, she grabbed it and refused to let go. Even if she hadn’t wanted to become who she now was, she’d let herself. She blamed others and the traumas of her life for her situation, and I blamed her for not getting enough help and for not taking the help she’d gotten seriously. I realized I was fixated on blaming her, on making her accountable for what she’d done to herself and our family. And what I was learning worried me. I was told patients would only succeed if they were honest about their problems and committed to doing whatever they needed to do to live sober. If my mother was rolling her eyes when she h
ad to identify as an alcoholic, and was treating the clinic like a vacation, she was still in denial. She wasn’t preparing herself for the hard work she’d face if she actually wanted to stop drinking. Meeting people who’d been sober for decades, such as the therapists and other professionals, showed me that the end was achievable if your desire was strong enough to motivate you through phases of desperation. I didn’t think hers was.
We were encouraged to lovingly detach from our addict and focus on ourselves. I thought I’d detached a bit—I’d moved across the country and cared for myself by going on New Age adventures—but I couldn’t be with my mother for more than five minutes before I slipped into one role or another, or wanted to screech at her like I was thirteen. I didn’t like the idea that I couldn’t help her recovery, that getting better had to be only her responsibility, one undertaken because she truly wanted to stop drinking. But I hoped that attending family week would show her that I believed in her, even though I was no longer sure that I did. I also hoped it would help me own my complicated and contradictory feelings.
As bad as my experience with my mother had been, being in this group showed me I could have been subjected to situations far worse. Other people were speaking about drained banks accounts, STDs, guns held to their heads, bailing someone out of jail who didn’t know why they were there. I kept quiet for the first few days because I worried I’d come off like a whiner, offering only an occasional joke when I felt the mood got too heavy, which got me strange looks instead of laughs. With some prodding, I finally began to talk. I said that it sucked that my mother was an alcoholic. I felt helpless whenever I thought of her. And scared that she didn’t want to get better and would only get worse. I blamed my mother for her state, as well as for not taking care of me the way she should have when I was a child. My body relaxed once I finally began participating.
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