My mother was an alcoholic, but she was also so much more
Photo-Illustration: by the Cut; Photos courtesy of the subject. I had been calling my mother all week, leaving voice messages about the weekend trip my older sister and I were planning to visit our grandmother. She never answered.
I told my grief counselor about the overwhelming guilt I felt at not having been there to comfort my mother during her moment of need. In response, the counselor said, “You sound like a parent grieving a child. Where is the child grieving her mother?” I never saw that counselor again. And yet, her struggle with alcoholism was the defining experience of my youth — sitting in front of the mall entrance, waiting for her to pick up me and my sister. Hours passed until she finally arrived, her speech slow and thick. Her movements, too. She would sit in the living room smoking and drinking instead of making us dinner. A bowl of Cap’n Crunch in front of the television would have to suffice.
I mean, my mother was an alcoholic — but that characterization flattens her and leaves me feeling equally deflated. I want to rise above it, to burn the bitter away. I don’t want to get stuck blaming her for everything. Undeniably, her alcoholism made me a more resilient and capable adult . It’s complicated, I could say. But that sounds cagey and evokes Nancy Meyers’s spectacularly overbuilt kitchens. I envy people who can sum up their relationships with a deceased parent in single, simple sentences: “We were so close,” they say. Well, my mom and I were close, too.
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