Learning to Let Go
“There was some really bad stuff, and there was some really good stuff.”
Anyone with a brother or sister likely agrees that this statement could describe their relationship with their siblings, but it rings particularly true for my mom.
My mom was born Lisa Blackaller one December night in 1964, about 18 months after her older sister, Brooke, was born. The two sisters had a somewhat typical relationship for young girls; they would walk home from elementary school together and play with dolls or play make-believe at home.
The girls spent most of their time alone while at home, as their mom, Bonnie, was busy at work: “[She] would get on the bus at 7 AM every morning to take the bus into the city, and she would get home at 6 o’clock at night.” Their dad was never around the house either; he and Bonnie had gotten divorced before my mom was even in kindergarten. He was the archetypal deadbeat dad, often missing both child support payments and significant events in his daughters’ lives.
As Brooke grew older, the lack of parental supervision became more of an issue. She started spending most of her time with Tiffany, her neighbor from across the street. Tiffany’s mother was an alcoholic, so she had even less supervision than Brooke did.
When Tiffany began experimenting with marijuana, Brooke followed suit: “Brooke was always very impressionable, and also very sensible and smart,” my mom said. “And here was this girl across the street, who wanted the companionship to do the things she was doing . . . In those beginning stages, it just felt wrong to me, and I knew in my gut that it was wrong . . . I didn’t see, in the beginning, all the stuff that was going on behind the scenes: the drugs and stuff.” My mom drew her knees close to the chest when she shared this detail with me, and in her eyes, I could see the scared little girl who was just worried about her older sister.
The lack of adult presence in Brooke’s life meant that the responsibility of keeping her safe fell on my mom’s shoulders: “I knew that [Bonnie] wasn’t paying attention, and I knew that somebody needed to be managing Brooke, and there was no parent there to do that.” Yet as resilient and committed to Brooke as my mom was, she was still a helpless young girl who had the reality of drug addiction thrust upon her at a young age: “I was very scared. With drugs. It was really scary and unsettling. I was angry at [my] mom for not putting a lid on it.”
My mom had to be the responsible one, frequently cooking dinner for the family and making lunch for her mom. She was even forced to call her own father and ask him for child support at times, and he rarely responded calmly and rationally. One time she called her dad while he was vacationing in Australia, and he said, “If you ever call me again, I’m going to move to Australia, and I’m never coming back.” My mom seemed somewhat bitter only when describing how she had to help the family on top of helping Brooke because it prevented her from living a more typical life as a teenage girl.
As my mom entered high school, Brooke’s addiction and dangerous habits continued to worsen: “At the beginning of high school, she started to steal things. The [pharmacy’s] medicine cabinet would be filled with shampoo and beauty products, and it turned out that she had been stealing from stores. She started wearing really provocative clothing, and she started hanging out with a lot of boys.”
Despite the increasing severity of the situation, my mom was forced to sit idly by and watch her own sister get taken from her by drugs: “I was angry because I could see that she was getting away with things she shouldn’t have gotten away with. As a kid, it was unsettling to me, because I knew it wasn’t right, but I couldn’t do anything about it.”
But my mom still tried her best. She organized interventions, suggested taking Brooke to serious therapy, or even sending her to a more strict private school, but to no avail. Their mom was completely unprepared for the responsibility of dealing with Brooke’s addiction: “[she] just didn’t take care of things, she would just stick her head in the sand and didn’t want to deal. All she wanted to do was just to go hiking.”
Brooke’s struggle with drugs in high school would be the beginning of her many different addictions for the next number of years. Drug addiction turned to an addiction to a fundamentalist religion, turned to unplanned pregnancy and marriage. Despite her downward spiral, interventions, therapy sessions, and a lifetime of dysfunction did nothing to change Brooke’s behavior.
After almost 56 years of trying, my mom has had to accept that she could not save her sister: “I’m really proud of myself, that I’ve done enough work on myself not to let it, not let her drag me down. So I’m proud of being able to stay intact emotionally while I’m around her, so I’m very proud of that, and that has been very hard to do.”
But I know my mom, and I know how much Brooke’s current condition impacts her. She is always abnormally temperamental or quiet after getting off of long phone calls with Brooke’s therapist; I see how deeply she cares about Brooke. I know that no matter how much my mom practices letting go of her desire to help Brooke, nothing is going to stop her from worrying and caring about her sister.
