Chapter Two
Then
Many of my childhood memories, especially the good memories, were lost thanks to the toxic swamp of my teenage years.
It seems that the emotional trauma I endured and survived created an odd filter of sorts, one which prevents most everything but bad memories from appearing in my brain when I try to think of “good times” growing up. Maybe because it was so difficult to reconcile the bifurcated nature of my upbringing. We went from what felt like being the Brady family to the Manson family in the space of a year.
Most of the happy, or at least good memories, I can recall now center around my mother, even though I know from photographs in albums that my father was a good dad when I was younger. Many of those few remaining good memories are very benign, unremarkable. Activities such as making brownies, or Mom helping me with my homework.
Going to church with her.
Church increasingly became a refuge for both of us while Dad slept late on Sundays. We would attend church, then have lunch somewhere and go grocery shopping.
By the time we returned home, he was frequently awake and gone.
I learned not to ask where, because I didn’t want to know. The older I got, the more I understood he was out trying to score drugs or getting high.
Or getting laid.
Sometimes, all of the above.
I hate that my last memory of my mother is seeing her in her coffin. The only comfort I have is that the final words she ever heard me say to her were, “I love you.”
And they are the last she ever said to me. I always said them. Before I’d return to college from my visits home, I always hugged her tightly and took pictures with her, which I’d text to her so she’d have copies.
While she grieved my father’s death the year before, at least I was able to make her smile more in the last year of her life than she had in the nine years prior to him ending his with a needle in his arm, finally completing what the accident started.
I personally think it’s more correct to say she grieved the loss of the man he’d been before the car accident that upended our world, instead of his actual death. His death meant her hope of him ever finding recovery and returning to her died, too.
My mother loved my father fiercely, even in his darkest moments. When I am sixteen I sit her down one Friday night, during my father’s latest disappearance of over two weeks at this point, and gently confront her about it.
“Why won’t you divorce him?”
She sadly smiles. “Because we don’t leave those we love when life gets hard, honey.”
“This isn’t ‘hard,’ Mom. He’s a junkie and a drunk.”
“He hasn’t hit rock bottom yet.”
“Maybe he needs to lose us to hit it. Did you ever think about that?”
I’ll never forget her sad sigh. “It’s complicated, sweetheart. I know it doesn’t look like it is, but it is.”
I finally blurt it out. “You know he cheats on you when he gets high, right?” I still can’t erase from my mind the image of seeing him walking into a movie theater the night before, loudly laughing and staggering a little, with his arm draped around a trashy looking woman who could have been a central casting pick forHooker Number 1in any given police procedural TV show.
Needless to say, I do not see the movie. Instead, I tell my friends my mom texted me with a plumbing emergency and needed my help.
They didn’t know my father. Since the age of thirteen, I’d been telling people my father was dead.
The truth was, the man my father had been died not long before my tenth birthday, when the car wreck nearly killed him.
She slowly nods. “I know,” she quietly says. The heartbreak in her tone forever severs any potential future love I could hold in my heart for the man who sired me, even if he did get into recovery. “But he’s sick,” she adds. “The painkillers. They weren’t enough, and he needed more. That’s what led to his addiction.”
“If you’re only staying with him for my sake, can we kick him out and change the locks? I hate him and what he’s doing to you. If he was trying to go to rehab or something, okay, but he’s not.”
“I’m not divorcing him.”
For the first time in my life, I find myself fighting for a loved one. “Mom,” I say, channeling a strength I don’t feel. “I’m changing the locks tonight. I already bought them. And if he shows up tomorrow, I’ll hand him his stuff and tell him not to come home until he’s in recovery.”
