When I made it back from the hospital I had maybe two weeks left before the Christmas break. I was very obviously not okay, but no one really seemed to notice. Or they did but decided to treat me like I was okay. It was kind of like being gaslight by everyone in the world at the same time. My only real parent had died, I had nearly died, I was in the care of a drug addict, and no one thought to ask if maybe that wasn’t the best situation for me to be in.
There’s a line in Eddie Izzard’s stand-up show Glorious where he’s talking about Princess Diana’s death “My Mum died when I was six, my brother was eight, and no one gave a shit!” This line often echoes in my head.
Dad was in and out of rehab since I can remember, first for alcoholism. By age 3, my mom was buying me stuffed animals and telling me they were gifts from my dad because he wasn’t around for weeks at a time. She would tell me he visited while I was sleeping when really he was detoxing in a facility somewhere. We would “go see daddy in the hospital” a lot. Daddy was sick. Daddy was in a place to get better. Sometimes the places we’d visit did look like medical facilities with everyone in sweatpants or hospital gowns, and separate waiting rooms and visiting rooms. Other times we visited him in places that looked like housing communities.
I spent a lot of time in extended stays at various people’s homes. Babysitters, friends of my mother from school, friends of friends with kids my same age, all opening their home to me while my mother dealt with my dad’s spirals and withdrawals. I don’t even remember being told a reason, it was usually just presented as “You’re going to stay with __ for a few days! Fun!” and that was that. I was too young to question it.
The rest of the time I was attached at the hip to my mom. I sat on the floors of department stores while she shopped, ran around empty classrooms while she was in meetings, and sat politely while she met with friends for tea. My mom and I only had each other. We didn’t tell each other everything or completely share interests, but we were both people who cared very deeply about things including each other. As I got older I got more combative with her, as teenagers are wont to do. But much of that was frustration from not being able to help myself or protect her. Or help her and protect myself.
As much as I had known my mom and I only really had each other, I didn’t know how much that was actually the case until she was gone. I was devastated because I loved her and missed her, but also because she was the only person keeping me alive. Who was going to make sure I had food? Who would schedule my doctor’s appointments? What about school. What about the entire rest of my life? I think I still hoped that there was some adult info I just wasn’t privy to, and someone was going to step up and make sure I was okay. But once I was back from nearly dying in the hospital, alone in my house with a drug addict who was stealing from me for drug money, the hopelessness of my situation started to set in and my only defense was avoidance.
I found any way and reason to not be home. I spent a lot of time driving my mom’s Rav4 anywhere I could think to go. I was going to bed at sun-up and spending the night driving around and playing video games. This would probably have been more exciting/dangerous had I lived anywhere more populated than in the woods but it was the most distraction I could find.
Dad had bounced from rehab program to rehab program in attempts to give up drinking until he hurt his back. During my early childhood he had taken random plumbing and construction-type jobs, but nothing was ever for longer than a week or so. I highly doubt he had any training and he most certainly didn’t have a license. And while I’m unsure if the back injury happened “at work” or not, it ended his farcical struggle of trying to work. He was diagnosed with a herniated disc and given Vicodin.
He started wearing a back brace. He needed surgery. Then he got surgery, but the doctor “screwed up”. Malpractice was mentioned. Chiropractors. All with an increasing dose of opioids from any and every doctor. Who needed beer when you had a legal, unchecked flow of highly-potent narcotics?
They used to talk about “gateway drugs” when I was in school to scare kids away from doing things like smoking weed. Meanwhile, doctors were drugging our parents with highly addictive painkillers in scarily increasing numbers, and then drugging the kids when they had emotional reactions to the whole mess.
Good job, everyone.
As I got older, I was clued into what was happening. My mom could no longer hide what was happening with leaving me for days at other people’s homes or taking me along on trips. I often had to come along to my mother’s Al-Anon meetings on Friday nights, sitting alone in a dusty extra room in a church while my mom sat at a table filled with sad, abused women reciting bible quotes and swapping victim stories. This isn’t to shit on support groups, this was just the opinion of an angry kid who did not fully comprehend the trauma surrounding her. I saw someone who was going to support groups but otherwise doing nothing to improve her situation or mine.
At one point, Mom did get particularly bold and tried to cut off Dad’s supply. We drove to a pharmacy a few towns over that was, from my memory, run by the friend of a friend or something similar. Mom brought me along and filled me in on her plan which was to ask one of the employees who didn’t know my mom for a print-out of our family’s prescription records with the story that she needed them for an issue with our health insurance.
Unfortunately, whoever it was who knew us (either the pharmacist or the owner of the pharmacy) was there and when the employee who was asked for the records went back to print things, the person who knew us emerged from the back room and told my mother there was something wrong with the computer or printer and she’d need to come back another day. Everyone there kind of knew what was happening, but everyone just smiled at each other and acted like they all bought each other’s stories. We went back to the car and my mom drove home defeated. She knew not only would she not get the evidence she needed about where my dad’s drugs were coming from, the people who were probably supplying it were now tipped off.
More than likely she had tried other backhanded ways to thwart my dad’s drug acquisitions and just didn’t tell me about it. There had obviously been some lead up to that trip to the pharmacy. I think she tried a lot of things that weren’t leaving him. So a lot of useless things.
The last rehab attempt I remember came when I was about 12 or 13. Dad had a breakdown and was checked in to a facility about 30 miles away. By this time, I was old enough to be rooting for my mother to leave him, and I was having a particularly happy time knowing he wasn’t anywhere nearby. But then the next evening there was a phone call late at night from the center. My dad had busted out and was on his way home. He had no car, and apparently the person on the phone had indicated he was intending to hitchhike.
I remember standing in the living room that night in pajamas, just the yellow light from the staircase illuminating the look of abject defeat on my mother’s face. It’s one of the few scenes I remember where she looks small to me. She had been shorter than me for years, but rarely did she seem smaller to me in my memories. In this one, she’s so small.
I was upset. I was angry. My rage issues were just finding their footing.
“Can’t you call the cops on him? Drag him back there?”
“No. He can leave if he wants.”
“Tell him not to come back here!”
“How? He’s already on his way.”
“Lock the doors! Don’t let him in!”
She just looked at me, slightly shook her head and said very calmly, “Honey, he’ll just break a window.”
And so we went back to bed. And 4 or so hours later, he showed up and let himself in the front door.
It was a surrender. My mother was surrendering. And I, in my hubris of youth, did not understand surrender. I did not understand staying quiet. I was told to speak up if something was wrong. My mother owned the house. Everything was hers. There would be no question of custody. We could move anywhere. I remember the afternoons of tears spent in her bedroom, begging her. Talking about all the details of our new dream home, if only we could just leave.
Over the years having since dealt with more of my own abuse, I came to understand my mother’s position. It was scary. She was overwhelmed. My father was a nightmare and trying to wake up from that felt like too much to bear. I wanted to learn to forgive her choices. But I think that impulse comes from our strange need to have our love be uncomplicated. To dehumanize in an attempt to preserve. Like how my mother’s body probably looked in her coffin that I refused to be in the same room with. I refused to have a memory of her lifeless corpse, and I refuse to have a memory of her as a saint. My mother was the victim of years of abuse, and she also enabled 17 years of abuse on her daughter and left me in the sole hands of that abuser when she died. None are without sin.
I love you, mom, but damn it.
Without the unknowns of my mother’s health, the odds were in our favor that my dad would be the one to drop dead. His back injury was not the first nor last time he had hurt himself, as he was a) constantly on something and b) always trying to “fix” or “build” things. He was calloused, scarred, and there was a crutch in the closet that got a lot of use.
One afternoon when I was 14, my boyfriend and I were in my house looking at something on the computer when we heard a pained howl in the distance.
We froze and looked at each other.
Another yell.
We got up and made our way to the back of the house, following the noise. I opened the heavy, wooden door to what anyone would have an easy time believing was the first shot in a zombie movie. My dad was staggering out of the woods in the distance, limping and yelling like a scared, wounded animal.
My boyfriend and I rushed out to help him inside. Once we maneuvered him onto the couch, we were able to make out that he was in his tree stand and had fallen the 10 or so feet onto the ground.
I went to call 911 and my dad started yelling again.
“No! I’m fine! Don’t call an ambulance. I’m fine. Call your mother.”
He was dripping blood on the couch.
Perplexed, I attempted to call my mother on the cell phone. This was when mobile phones were making that transition between “car phone” and “cell phone”. My mother would only be reachable if she had her phone on and plugged in in the car. Lucky for me, she was on her way home.
“Mom, Dad fell out of the tree stand and he won’t let me call 911.”
I’m sure that was a fun call for her to get.
My dad started yelling in the background “I’m fine! Just come home! I’m fine! Tell her not to call anyone!”
I don’t know if I remember hearing my mother sigh or if I added that in my own remembering, but it sounds correct. There would have been an exasperated sigh. She was 20 minutes away, so she told us to wait. We waited.
I didn’t yet understand what opioids did exactly. My dad would get this wide-eyed look of awake but not aware that I singularly associated with him until I was older and able to recognize what it was. To me, that was dad’s “crazy” look. And he had it when he came staggering out of the woods that afternoon.
I didn’t get that my dad was so high that he had fallen out of a tree, or that he was so high that he was unable to register just how much pain he should have been in. Nor did I understand that my father was extremely paranoid about having authorities called, because he got so high off illegally purchased narcotics that he fell out of a tree. I just thought he was a unintelligent nutter.
My mother came home to my dad sprawled on the couch, bleeding from the head and assessed that yes, perhaps an ambulance should be called.
Two cops showed up along with the ambulance people, but they just took the “guy fell out of tree” story and went along their way as the paramedics put the neck brace on my dad and maneuvered him out the door. Dad ended up with zero broken bones and a brand new Vicodin prescription.
It should also be noted that at the bottom of that tree stand that my dad had fallen out of, there was a sizable group of rocks half embedded in the ground. My dad managed to land less than a foot from those rocks which most likely would have cracked open his skull. For many days after this, I would curse that fall for not killing him. A few inches would have freed us.
One thing that kept me a little safer than I could have been was how much I grew to dislike (hate) my father. That my dad was just a piece of shit separate from the substance abuse wasn’t something we ever really talked about. Probably because my mother needed to believe that my dad could be “fixed.” But this also meant that I associated doing things like drinking or drugs with shitty people, and so I didn’t touch anything in my formative years. I knew addiction ran in families and the last thing I wanted was to be anything like him.
So I didn’t do drugs and I didn’t drink. I didn’t have a problem if other people did. It wasn’t even for lack of access. In my teenage years I went to punk shows. I was friends with some of the “druggy” kids (they mostly just smoked weed, really) from my school who lived on my bus route. We would hang out, they would do their drugs in a little shed next to one of their houses, and it was fine. No one pressured me, no one got weird or out of line, and while my mom could probably tell I didn’t smell or act like I’d been “doing drugs,” she really did trust me about it.
Once mom died, I don’t think I would have made it to 18 if I had even an inkling to use a substance to self-medicate. I’m sitting here writing this and I still don’t fully understand how I got through it at all. I can’t say being sober through all of this was better or worse than anything else, but it probably helped me stay alive through these very specific circumstances.