007

Still 2007, my mom goes to court and is sentenced to three months of no contact with any of us. My dad got her an apartment , a rather spendy one-bedroom. It was our only option. So I spend the rest of that summer telling my friends my parents had gotten a little rental near the beach, and that’s where my mom was when they came over.

My dad spent whatever savings he had on the court costs, the lawyer, and the apartment. We were back at square one. Despite everything, and despite it being in violation of the court order, my dad would drive us there and we would go across the street to KFC, bring it back to the apartment, and have dinner together every couple weeks. One last effort to act like we were ar real family. Grasping for normalcy. A few moments to pretend like we were a cohesive unit, and not continually splintering apart.

I didn’t recognize my mom anymore. She just...floated through everyday life. I spent a couple weekends there, and she would try to connect with me. We’d walk across the street to the Save-A-Lot, rummaging through mismatched assorted canned goods, different levels of battered produce, and look for some nearly-spoiled protein to round out our meager meal. Awkward conversation. I remember that the most — how’s football, how are your friends, are you excited to go back to school? No car, no nearby attractions, it was just her and I in this dated apartment, where she lived out of a couple suitcases. Trying to act like nothing happened. Unable to address the elephant in the room.

She tried to be the best mom she could, and I the best son. But we didn’t know what we were doing; we were putting our feelings through Google Translate, pretending to be something we had never really been. Going off what we assumed “real” moms and sons did. After a couple times, I didn't want to go there anymore. I couldn’t. It was easier to just wait it out. My mom came back to live with us that fall — but some part of her never came back in the car when we left my Uncle’s house on July 4th. She lost something, something she may never get back.

She had to go to AA meetings again after the sentencing, and this time regularity was mandatory. She started making friends there, and I remember all the strange characters that filed through in the year that followed. Most of them were men, who I assumed were just circling around a vulnerable woman, hoping for some regretful sympathy sex born out of mixed emotions and mistakes. I remember one guy, a chain-smoking, “Dane Cook but trashier” look-alike. He and my mom would sometimes go to the beach at night to look at the water, and she’d come home late. Really late. I don’t know if she was cheating on my dad physically, but I know she was using this guy as an emotional outlet. That her marriage was now so distant, so lacking in intimacy, so broken she didn’t know where to start.

So I guess AA was the place where she could feel like a woman again — the attention, the perceived value — a new start, where people only knew what she told them. Because at home she wasn’t that. She was a ghost. An apparition manifested of untold trauma, she didn’t go anywhere or do anything, so she may as well have been one. Trapped in that house where everything happened. Disappearing, reemerging, haunting. “Mom” started losing all meaning. Because mom couldn’t do anything for us — she couldn’t do anything for herself.

Nothing could be relied on — couldn’t drive, couldn’t pay, and often couldn’t help. The most I asked her to do was sign permission slips because dad still wasn’t home from work yet. She had been boiled down to just one line of cursive. One legal designation. The most utilitarian definition of a mother.

My Mom didn’t make it to many things. She was always tired, or sick, or something else. And I didn’t really want her to. Because when she did show up at a swim meet or whatever event, I could hear her voice booming over the cheers of the other parents. It made me so embarrassed. It made me resentful. It was either way too much, or nothing. Zero or one-hundred miles per hour. So every time I got used to zero, she would then fly right past me at one-hundred, thinking she could make up for lost time with another superman routine. But once more, I didn’t want supermom; I didn’t want prefixes. I just wanted my mom. The one who would want to make things right by me, not by the world.

That was the tune of the years that followed. Luckily by my freshman year of high school, my sister could drive, and she graduated just before I got my license, so I didn’t have to cover for her so much. But at times, I still did. “She doesn’t like driving, she was in a few bad car wrecks growing up”. That was the go-to excuse. A lot easier to repeat than “She just got a second DUI nearly a decade ago and lost her license, and is too busy trapped in manic-depressive episodes to set about rectifying the scenario and taking back her life” — and infinitely easier to swallow.

Throughout the recession, my early years of High School, she never gave my dad a break about being unemployed. He was doing everything he could, applying to anything he could find — overqualified, underqualified — didn’t matter. “You need to hit the pavement and get your resumé out there”. “Hit the pavement” — I must have heard that a hundred times in the two-ish years he didn’t have a job.

All this coming from a woman who couldn’t even put forth the effort to sit in an AA meeting once a week. That she would be driven to, and picked up from. Who couldn’t take so much as the first step to get her license reinstated. So maybe she could get a job. So maybe she could help provide. My sister and I both had jobs before she got her license back, paying for our own gas, making our own money, taking care of ourselves. Hit the pavement, hit the pavement. The only pavement she had hit in the past decade was rock bottom — she was really good about that.

My dad is an automotive engineer. The absolute last job you wanted to be looking for from 2008-2010 in Michigan. Even a circus clown could still do a couple birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese for some side cash. But he just had to wait, and hope that the engines of manufacturing would roar to life again before he lost his livelihood.

After I left home, and went away to college, my view of my mother changed again. We didn’t keep in touch — I didn’t try to, either. I didn’t want to. I had the opportunity to start fresh, without the lies, the hiding. I wanted her to have no part in this liberated, new me. I got my news second or third-hand from my dad and sister about what was going on. Keep in mind, this is still the era when most people had little interaction compared to today. Instagram was just starting to get buzz — mostly pictures of people’s food — Snapchat didn’t exist yet, and I texted people on a shitty LG burner phone with a slide-out keyboard. Not exactly the era of constant contact.

When I came home that summer, in 2013, there wasn’t some great burying of hatchets or catalyst to hold hands around the fire and kumbaya our way to understanding. My mom had finally gotten her license reinstated while I was an upperclassman in High School, but it didn’t change much. If anything, it worsened some things. It gave her a fresh sense of entitlement. Like she deserved praise for finally fucking doing something with her life. She would bounce from one minimum wage job to the next, always complaining about toxic environments with stupid coworkers and incompetent bosses. Wow, welcome back to adulthood, do you want a cookie? She had the opportunity to take back her life again, but once more she cast it aside to instead be buoyed by everyone else. A parasitic lifestyle where she could only exist feeding off our family. No sense of sovereignty.

It’s May 2013, and I just started my three-month sentence in Dante’s Inferno. I kept my dorm fridge in my room, and often had a six-pack or two in there, in case I wanted to spend a weekend night catching up with my online friends at the virtual bar that was my desk. Around 1 or 2 AM, three hours before I had to get up for work, I was awoken by the sound of tinkling glass, and the sight of my mom, elbow deep in the fridge pulling out bottles.

“What the fuck are you doing?”, Like a deer in headlights, hoof in the cookie jar, she had no response. I got up from my bed,noticing that what had been twelve beers just days earlier were now reduced to the two in her hands. I smelled the alcohol and stale cigarette smoke on her; her eyes floating around me, unable to focus on my face. “Wow. You took all of them. Out of my fridge. In my room. What did you think would happen? I wouldn’t notice?”

“You’re under 21, with alcohol, in my house. I can call the police they’ll come and arrest you right now.” Funny how she only seems to interact with police when she’s drunk. That after all her run-ins with the law, she thought she could call on them, that they’d show us. She would be exonerated. Remember that time you tried to kill dad?

She knew I had them, I wasn’t hiding alcohol in my room like a sixteen-year old, squirreling away half a pint of Burnett's in my underwear drawer. She had no issue with it, when she was sober. But now she needed a drink, and I had left twelve targets for her. She couldn’t help herself. We never kept alcohol in the house growing up. We couldn’t. Because eventually, she’d drink it. Whiskey, wine, beer, tequila — didn't matter. When she couldn’t drive, she’d save up from what my dad gave her to buy new clothes or get her hair done, and pay to have “groceries” (a few bottles of wine) delivered by the town’s one-man-with-a-van “taxi service”.

I reached to wrestle the bottles of Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale out of her hands. She wouldn’t let go. She had drank the Stella Artois first — she didn’t like beer, so the more palatable option went before she got to skimming the bottom of the hoppy barrel. Surprisingly strong for a five-foot-tall woman, I eventually commandeered the beers, went to the kitchen, and poured them down the drain as she berated me.

“This is my house, you’re under 21, you’ll go to jail. Just you watch, I’ll do it.”

“You’re fucking drunk. That’s what you are. What you always have been.” That was my retort. She shoved me,

“Well then hit me, big man. If I’m such a fucking drunk, then hit me.” She slapped my face.

I walked to the garage, searching for contraband in her habitual hoard. I found only empty bottles. She was standing against the far wall as I rummaged among the old file cabinet, cans of WD-40, and insect repellent.

“Look at you, just like your father — fucking stupid.”

I still had one empty bottle in my hand. I turned and threw it, missing her head by maybe a foot. What she had said was the last straw. I don’t know if I intended to hit her or not. I think part of me did, the six-year old whose head she filled with lies. The twelve-year old who then started lying for her. The sixteen-year old who got a license before she did. The nineteen-year old who spent his whole life under the tyranny of alcoholism.

But I know part of me just wanted to scare her. I’ve never thrown a punch in my life — that was the solitary violent act in all my twenty-four years on this planet. I didn’t want to hurt her; I just wanted to fight back. I wanted to take my life back.

Either way, after that night, when I got up and drove to that fucking foundry after sweeping up the broken glass, as my mom slept off the last of it — as I sat in the oppressive heat, the rhythmic clanging of heavy machinery behind me, teeth clenched — I didn’t care if she lived or died anymore.

My mother died. Right there in that garage. The place where she snuck out to drink. The place she’d reenter the house from, a waft of smoke behind her, as she assaulted our family and destroyed our lives.

Sweeping up the broken bottle, the symbol of my broken life, broken family, broken mother. Part of me never came back inside that night. The last ounces of care — of love — soaked into the concrete just like the dregs of that shattered Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale. My mother was still alive, but in my heart she had died.