My Mother the Drunk
I knew she was an alcoholic before I even knew the word
My mother was an alcoholic. I knew this from the time I was about eight years old, without anyone ever telling me. In fact, we avoided talking about it. And one thing my increasingly drunk mother did really early on was stop showing up. At first, I thought she had just forgotten me. Which, on the one hand, she had. But on the other, she was drunk, which I know now means that the forgetting was a symptom, not the reason: She forgot because she was drunk, not because she disliked me.
This dissonance — that my sober mother loved me very much, that she braided my hair and sang to me, bought me little matching jumpers and sock sets, and made sure I was inoculated and had a lunch packed with little love notes in pen on the napkin tucked inside, but then forgot to even bother picking me up occasionally, with barely a nod in my direction in apology after the fact — this dissonance that I began to experience, where suddenly I wasn’t first on her list but now seemed last, was quite confusing. I was too confused to take it personally. I felt nervous, and it was the nervousness that I would also keep for years to come.
Mostly, my mother drank when I was in bed and my father was working late or wasn’t home. So I didn’t actually experience my drunk mother right off the bat too…
