The Story of the Mother
At age thirteen, she found herself falling into hell. A web began to weave itself around her life, the tendrils of depression and addiction slipping ‘round and ‘round her limbs, pinning her in place as the spider of life descended upon her with open jaws.
Therapy was useless. The sessions consisted of counselor and patient sitting in silence, the potential for healing a mile away.
The visits to the doctor were met with more success. Pills with the duty of inflicting happiness were prescribed under a verbal agreement: “Promise me you won’t use these to end your life.” Medicine, however, is not like alcohol. Swallowing these drugs does not bring on the blissful release of intoxication. It does not wash your worries away with its mind-altering chemicals within an hour, not even within a day. It takes a month for most to take full effect. A full month of the same pain, the same suffering, the same intolerable life. And even then, who knows what it will do to you? Some help, some harm. “Everyone’s different,” they say. “It takes a while to find the ones that will work for you.” They don’t seem to realize she doesn’t have time.
By the age of seventeen, she was ready to kill herself. Long since had she stopped taking the pills that should have fixed her. A month in, and they had finally begun to lessen the darkness in the world around her. Mistaking the signs, thinking she no longer needed their aid, she stopped taking them. The bottom dropped out. It was too much: the weight of a dysfunctional family, always moving from city to city, never able to keep a friend for more than a year, the hopelessness that had settled into her bones knowing the burden she placed on those around her, drinking always to get drunk, living and breathing in the hell life had thrust upon her. Sangria heavy on her breath, her mind surged with a heavy and grim courage. The medicine cabinet was emptied. Only a single, small bottle was left untouched, her promise upheld.
They found her on a beach in Spain, the moon, bright and overpowering drifting in and out of focus in the sky, bearing down on her, the only thing that could break through her induced stupor. The image would forever be burned in her mind.
It would have been nice to say she found herself in the hospital she spent the next portion of her days in. It would have been nice to say that life was looking up now that she had come so close to ending it. It would be nice to say that addicts with depression can come by a happy ending so easily.
She was released under the condition that she would resume taking her antidepressants and that she would not use her renewed freedom to harm herself. It was a while before she could agree to the terms.
Back in the States, she left for college, marijuana now added to alcohol in her daily consumption. At some point she realized addiction had taken hold, but depression is the master of apathy, and she could not have found it in herself to care if she had tried.
She found herself at the AA meeting by accident — she had given a friend a ride and ended up inside, listening to echoes of woes that inhabited the deepest recesses of her mind, told in the voices of strangers. Intrigued, she returned a second time, and then a third. She began the Twelve Step Program and started down her road to recovery.
That road has been littered with rocks, boulders, hills, switchbacks — anything life could and would throw her way. Her depression, ever-lingering. Only in a few brief years after her pregnancy did she find respite from its darkness. When asked, she would say that her depression and addiction are intertwined; they never could and never would be separated. Though it’s been many years since she took her last drink and though it’s been many more since that fateful moon bore down on her, the web that depression and addiction wove around her at age thirteen always has and always will be a part of her life.
