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My mother is an alcoholic. People say it’s a disease — alcoholism. I’ve never liked that; I’ve always found it insulting to consider people with cancer, HIV, or Parkinson’s in the same category as people who can’t put down the bottle until it’s empty. But you can treat it as one, and if you think of it as one, it sure makes it easier to sleep at night.

It’s the same consuming urge, feeding off insecurity, pain, trauma, that tells someone they need a drink. Isn’t that better? To pick up a cocktail and turn down the volume on life. To bathe your problems in the all-fixing elixir. Soon they start finding more uses for it — like a good hot sauce, they put that shit on everything. But only so many problems can fit in that bottle. Most of you listening put anxiety, shyness, or introversion into that bottle.

You need a couple drinks to make it through your Uncle’s yearly Thanksgiving rant about how immigrants are ruining this country — ironic, given it’s the day meant to celebrate a fictional gathering of natives and immigrants in solidarity — but it’s just a bit easier to be thankful there’s still beer and pumpkin pie left, and just let it happen.

Have any of you ever done karaoke sober? Probably not. Or danced like no one was watching? Good food, good company, good times — all things that go well with a good drink. Just think about the commercials: loud music, pretty people, the best night of your life, all thanks to Bud Light. All possible if you “drink responsibly”, and don’t instead find yourself holding your roommate’s hair while she sends two slices of 3AM pizza and those last shots of tequila back into the water supply.

Imagine if other drugs were marketed that way — the tourism board of Colombia showing the great applications of responsible cocaine use. You’ll feel like a rockstar! Start a business! Finally clean out and organize that closet! Cocaine at the beach, cocaine in the club — do it in a box, do it with a fox. Bring some on the train, or rail it on a plane!

A bit absurd, I know. But that dynamic — the acceptability of drug use when it’s alcohol, the lack of stigma and the availability add to the insidious nature of alcoholism. We fail to see the signs in others — or when we do, the user has an excuse. “What, I can’t have one drink?”, that was my mom’s, and the rest of us would always tense up when we heard it. Because in many ways you can’t argue with it. That’s an acceptable part of our society; we invite people out for a drink, crack open a cold one to watch the game, or to get through a family gathering.

My mom only ever needed one drink. Her stature was only ever dwarfed by her alcohol tolerance, and she could turn a puddle of wine into an ocean of problems. She wasn’t a daily drinker — instead, a few days a week, she would fly off the handle when the sun went down, unable to control the urges, the delusions, the demons.
Then everything would be fine for a while. Things would seem normal. But she hadn’t hit rock bottom yet, she hadn’t reached the last drops of the bottle. She got her first DUI in the late 90s I think. I’ve never really asked about it, and learning the date wouldn’t exactly be a revelation. Then she got another in 2003. Michigan is pretty strict, two times and your license is suspended. So after all the court costs, our single-income family was now trying to support two preteens, two teenagers from a previous marriage, and a money pit of a house — and my mom couldn’t help with any of those financial burdens. She had had odd jobs while we were in school: coming in to help kids learn to read, working briefly as a lunch lady, but those jobs came and went, and now she was completely stuck at home.

If you get your shit together, your license can be reinstated in a year or less. Go to AA meetings, see a therapist, maybe some outpatient rehab or support group, and you’ll be on your way in no time. It took my mom nine years. That’s a PhD. All wasted, going nowhere and doing nothing. She blamed everyone — the police, my dad, us kids. She could not muster one ounce of responsibility. She would argue with my dad, screaming that he was trying to sabotage her life, because he could only take her to evening meetings since he had to work. She could never keep a steady schedule of attendance, often making three or four and then failing to get to even one meeting for months at a time. As far as her path back to a license, it was as good as nothing.

I remember the fights my parents had, which in reality were mostly just my mother screaming into the void, but making sure every word passed through my father’s ears first. In time, I think she began to relish it. She used to wait until dinner was just coming out of the oven to bring something up, and as soon as anyone met her with resistance, she’d throw the whole meal into the trash. She even began to develop a flair to it — the touchdown celebration of a broken, delusional woman. So much for those starving kids in Africa, who wants Wendy’s?

Like she had to do it. Like we were cheering her on. In the trash, in the trash, in the trash! It was a performance, directing and starring in her one-drunk show. Now on Broadway: “my mom is dying and taking us all with her”.

At one point she was dying. 2005, I think. Maybe 2004? Stage Four cervical cancer. My parents didn’t talk to us much about it; it wasn’t until later that I learned how close to death she had been. A rare type, comprising something like 0.1% of cases, this aggressive and highly-resistant type has a slim survival rate.

The doctors saved my mom’s life — gave her a second chance — but even that was not enough to scare her into sobriety. Her treatment was brutal: intense radiation therapy, where the hope is that the cancer dies before the rest of the patient. Like poison. Sick to her stomach, her insides being burned out, she fell further and further. Greater trauma she couldn’t dig herself out of. The more she thrashed and struggled, the deeper she sunk into the quicksand of addiction. And the more she lost forever.

She saw a therapist after the DUI. Some hotshot trophy wife who somehow managed to find her way into social work, while being married to a millionaire and driving a Hummer to work. I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer my therapist didn’t drive the same car as all the rappers I saw on MTV Cribs in the early 2000s — a little less Missy Elliot and a little more Missy Empathy.

Being an alcoholic, my mother had massive narcissistic tendencies, so when she went to therapy, she told the story as she saw it. Where she was the besieged protagonist. Where everyone was out to ruin her life and made her drink. Her therapist, seemingly too busy stocking her Cristal fridge, didn’t see anything suspicious in that, and instead filled my mother’s delusional mind with clinical ammunition — that my father loved my sister more than my mom and saw her as his “true wife”, committing “emotional incest” and grooming me to be some sort of covert agent of abuse.

Great job, lady. You really nailed the bullseye on that one. Things kept getting worse. The woman who believed she was without fault got a cosign from a mental health professional, then got cancer. Talk about victim of the decade. She was unreachable, orbiting far outside reality, in the world she continued to build every day at home alone. But again, it wasn’t all the time.

Like an impatient werewolf, she would transform every few days into the monster we had come to know, and then shrink back into a sympathetic, loving mother who wanted to help and teach and nurture. I learned to accept the binary star in the center of the solar system that was my family, never knowing if the next orbital period would bring a warming glow, or a coronal ejection that would destroy the fledgling civilizations trying to populate the planets. Mom just became a complicated word. An idea. Like I was colorblind, having to imagine the greys of my life as the colorful vibrance everyone else knew. Then my mom tried to kill my dad.

July 4th, 2007. There had been a family gathering at my uncle’s place on a small lake in north-central Michigan. After a couple wine coolers too many, my mom was in the front seat on the way home, repeating the same line — that my Grandma had told her she was so proud watching her sons (my dad and two uncles) all lighting fireworks off at the water’s edge and laughing as they ran to safety. Her boys. Her boys. Her boys — my mother’s slurred speech still pierces through my memory, as my sister and I sat in the back seat of our ‘94 GMC Sierra, the dark dirt roads illuminated by our high beams; the cab lit only by the faint glow of the dashboard.

My sister and I woke up the next day to find blood everywhere. On the banister, the steps, pools on the white carpet, the kitchen floor, and down the back of a chair. No mom, no dad. Just blood. We called my dad immediately, he was at work. “Mom’s in jail, I’m getting her at the end of the day. Don’t worry we’ll clean up the mess later.”

Somehow we slept through it all, exhausted from a long, hot day at the lake. When we got home, as my parents were about to sleep, my mother got up, muttering that she was going to kill “that fat fuck” — that’s my dad — and went downstairs, grabbed a kitchen knife, accidentally cut her palm trying to remove it from the knife block, and marched back up the stairs. My dad saw her coming and called the police, who didn’t believe him until he held the phone up to the door so they could hear her screams as she tried to stab through it.

The room that used to be theirs later became mine, a year later. Still has the knife marks on the door. I used to notice them every time I turned the handle, but over time they just were absorbed into all the other misery of that house.

Hearing him on the phone, my mother sprinted downstairs to the other phone and frantically called 911, trying to somehow explain that my dad, not her, was the armed assailant. The swipe of her bloody palm down the wall as she tried to steady herself down the stairs, the red handprint on the old corded phone. The blood on the carpet and the chair where they handcuffed her.

That wasn’t the first time the cops came to my house — we were good for about one a year in those days. My mom would get drunk and barricade herself in a room, calling the cops because my dad or someone was “trying to hurt us”. The squad cars would come, their flashing lights streaming through the windows like a red-and-blue spotlight on our broken family. A lighthouse of dysfunction, shining into the dark street, warning passerbys of the rocks — to steer clear of the dark choppy water that was our property.

Somehow, that night wasn’t her fault either. It was my dad’s. My mom couldn’t let it go — “he could have disarmed me”, “he’s twice my size”, “he didn’t have to call the police”. I learned that what she said on the car ride never happened either. My grandma didn’t even talk to her that night.

I had gone to bed with a drunk mom, and woke up to an attempted murder. Domestic violence, technically, but I see spades as spades.