I saw my mother as someone who let life happen to her. The cookbooks she loved, the clothes she wore, even mundane decisions like which flowers to plant each spring were all based on popular opinion. She’d rather be boring than risk ridicule. This fear was likely born from her own bad habit of calling out anyone who dared to differentiate. Though I was too young to know it, there’s a strong correlation between judgment and insecurity.
I watched in awe as my mother’s girlfriends broke the mold. I remember Eve stopping over after a court appearance, decked out in a smart suit, telling me about the time she led a band of ladies to a D.C. women’s rally. “Can you believe it was 1972 and women still didn’t have equal protection under the law?” I replied to my hero that, no, I couldn’t believe it. She told me to hold on to my chair because here it was—1982—and fifteen states still hadn’t ratified the Equal Rights Amendment, which was signed in both houses a few months after the rally Eve attended. I understood the legislation as historic, and in my na?veté, Eve played a major role. When I asked my mother if she went to D.C., she warned me to be careful what I wished for. “Equal rights? Sheesh. There’s a lot your father does that I want no part of.” I was disappointed. Women were demanding change, willing to serve in the military if that’s what it took, and yet my mom seemed proud that she voted for whomever my father told her to.
By the time I was twelve her dependence repulsed me. Puberty kicked in. I scoffed when she offered up homemade cookies, saying obnoxious things like, “You do realize you wouldn’t have to be on diets all the time if you stopped eating so many cookies, right?” Where the hell did I find the nerve? (Looking back, I have an idea where. She and my father had started to have a rocky go of it. I’d snicker alongside him as he berated her for letting any tiny household task slide. I mean, really, Janine, he’d say, leaning over the counter into her personal space, what the hell were you doing all day? How his disappointment became my anger is less clear. All I know is I let my aversion be known, and by my thirteenth birthday, my mother was drunk before noon. It was as if she turned into the useless character my father and I cast her as.)
If at first I was just a kid in need of proper discipline, once my mother morphed into a raging alcoholic I became a teenager with a vendetta. We were neglected—forgotten at practices, undersupervised, left to clean up bodily fluids that my mother was unable to contain—but I never examined how it got to that point. I never wondered why my mom self-medicated. We were too busy raising ourselves to question the reason we were raising ourselves.
My persecution was relentless. I took care to point out her flaws in front of an audience, so all would know I hadn’t been infected with her same feeble nature. I poked and poked and poked.
The enormity of how I contributed to her backstory came crashing down on me last November. Brady and I were on a date night and happened into the same Thai restaurant my family went the night of my college graduation. It had been twenty-two years, but the ambiance was oddly preserved. When I spotted the booth we occupied, the scene rushed to my mind: over dinner, my mother declared in her scrambled speech that my next major milestone would be marriage. I looked at her with irreverence. “I don’t need a husband to make milestones, Mom.”
Her eyes widened. I assumed I’d upset her sensibilities, which had been my intent, but that night with Brady all those years later I had more context. I was, by then, a mother myself. Looking back on the scene, I saw her expression for what it was—not shock, but fear. My mother was afraid of me. She shook her head fiercely, swearing she only meant it’d be the next big celebration in my honor. My father, Meg, and I all rolled our eyes. There’s no such thing as going from a drunk to a solid point. “I’m not a prize,” I said, enunciating each word to highlight my mother’s slur. “Women are honored for things besides marriage and children. I know that’s hard for you to understand.” I accentuated you to be sure the insult was clear, but there was no need. She’d been my tomato target for years.
After reliving that graduation memory, I analyzed our relationship in a way I hadn’t thought to when we were both alive, and neglected to after her sudden death when there was a coffin to buy and awkward postfuneral party to host. During this unexpected slump, I dissected every fight we had with maternal goggles on, and came to see my mother wasn’t out to get Meg and me. She just couldn’t handle life. Perspective matured, I grew to view her addiction as almost predictable. She was a small-town girl who married her high-school sweetheart. My father had a strong, demanding personality. He controlled her highs and lows from the age of sixteen. They had no mortgage left on the three-bedroom house they bought in 1968. She didn’t see what more one could want. Not upsetting the applecart, as she often preached, had served her well.
But society turned on her. What was once a woman’s duty suddenly became passé. All her friends got jobs while my mom was busy swapping recipes with the grandmothers in our neighborhood. Imagine how stunned she must’ve been to realize the community no longer held her blind familial devotion in high esteem. Even my father wished he’d attached himself to someone more cosmopolitan, more worldly. And so he did—on the side. I envision my mother growing weak from abandonment and disrespect and finding strength, or at least solace, in Carlo Rossi’s wine jugs, a man whose picture we saw so often Meg called him our grandfather.
So what came first? There’s no doubt she was a shitty mom from twelve on, but did I send her on that course? During the family portion of what proved to be another failed rehab attempt, a doctor in a crisp lab coat explained the science behind the disease of alcoholism. It was all right there: my mother was genetically screwed. There were dozens of triggers—me, my dad, traffic—but only one person in control of the hand lifting that glass to her lips. And yet, the memory of how ungrateful and unpleasant I was gnawed at me. I started questioning my own evening chardonnay, my own loneliness. Brady traveled a lot. Eve got her license. I was free, but I was lost. My mother was long gone, but her memory suddenly had a grip on my present.
Meg and Brady had no patience for it. A drunk is a drunk because they like to get drunk, they said. But I felt guilty. My role in it all haunted me. Brady will be alarmed when he reaches that part of my journal. It’s a relief he’s sticking to an entry a day. I have six more months of documented sanity.
For the first time, I wonder where my mother is. Perhaps Linda had a welcoming committee because the predeceased were excited for her arrival. Would I blame Mom for thinking she deserved death to herself? I can almost hear her encourage my father not to go to any trouble, that sometimes it’s best to leave good enough alone.