the set up

There comes a point in every person’s life when they realize that their family is not normal. These epiphanies, if we can call them that, can happen at any age. Whether in the third grade, when your two mommies show up to the PTA meeting and everyone else has just one mom and some man with them, or at the age of 75, on your deathbed when your spouse tells you about that secret other family on the side. I realized my family was not normal in the eighth grade, when I slowly pieced together the puzzle that my mother was an alcoholic. From that moment forward, my life and my family would never be the same again.

For me, this is a story ten years in the making. For my mother, it's a weight she’s carried for much longer. These years have been, in many ways, a roller coaster. Unlike a roller coaster, it hasn't been much fun, but there have been several moments of disbelief and a few feelings of general nausea.

My mother has always been a shining beacon of sunlight to me. Search the world for a bigger momma’s boy and you’ll come back with a lot of pretty sappy, mommy-pleasing boys, but none so much as me. Whether it’s the glossy lens of retrospect or a matter of fact, I have always adored my mother. I know no one else with such selflessness and utter devotion to others as her. This was such a blessing and such a curse. She lived her life for her children and her husband until she had no life for herself. For a while, it seemed like nothing else gave her greater joy. To raise three young boys to become productive, felony-free members of society was her ultimate goal and one that she succeeded in accomplishing. Not one felony between the three of us.

With my eye always on her, I was sure to pick up these traits. The good ones - at least, I'd hoped. As I grew up and began to understand my mother and her relationship to us boys and to my father, I became vastly more appreciative but also increasingly worried. In middle school, when I was teased for everything from my teeth to my sexual orientation (how did they already know I was gay, and I still didn't even know what "gay" really meant?) I noticed my mother became preoccupied with my problems. If I had a bad day, she had a bad day. She did her best to tell me that those people meant nothing and that I had to love myself, but this beautiful message was often lost as I was transfixed with the tears in her eyes as she spoke it.

In 1998, her mother was diagnosed with cancer and a lifetime of concern for other people finally came to a breaking point. My mom seriously kicked it up a notch or 20, straight into Superwoman mode. She'd drive us to Pennsylvania, where my grandmother lived, several times a year. I saw my grandmother more in two years than in my entire life, I think. In the midst of all this, we were moving across the country, to Las Vegas, for my father’s new job.

This selfless preoccupation with others soon transformed to guilt. She wasn’t able to spend enough time with her mom, she wasn’t around enough for her husband, and her kids had to see all of this and she couldn’t protect them from it. I realize that most of my mother’s guilt was self-inflicted and had little to do with other people making her feel bad. She blamed herself for everything. Did you know that my failing math in tenth grade was her fault? Some kid is in China right now falling off his bicycle and it’s all my mom’s fault. She actually started the war in Iraq.

When my grandmother’s battle ended in April 1999, months before we were to move to Las Vegas, my mother started abusing alcohol. It wasn’t until we were settled in Vegas a few months later that I began to notice beer cans in cabinets. When I got accepted to a performing arts high school and began acting in plays, there were several occasions when she would pick me up from late rehearsals drunk. On one instance, she drove through someone’s front yard and did a U-Turn in the middle of traffic. Once we got home safely, I called my father and began the battle to win back my mother.

Little did I know at the time, alcoholism isn’t a disease that can be cured by heartfelt talks in the kitchen. It isn’t cured when you sob and scream so hard at your mother that you literally can’t speak the next day. It doesn’t get better when she blacks out upstairs while you’re having a party with your friends and their parents want to speak with a parent, and no matter how hard you try, she won’t wake up. My green mind thought for the longest time that talking would get through to her, that my emotional distress would somehow shake her out of this despair.

Over the next few years, we tried to get her to heal. The drinking would fluctuate. She would have good days and bad days, good months, bad months. She began to see a psychiatrist. As we all learned more about addiction, we all discovered that it wasn’t over when the drinking was under control, it wasn’t even over when the drinking had stopped – recovery is a lifetime process. Which makes recovery really scary to a lot of people, my mom included.

Finally, my father and I decided to use one of our old standby’s in trying to help my mother out of her addiction: a long conversation in the kitchen… only this conversation would be different. All of our family would be there, and we would explain to her that we hold no blame towards her for anything in her life and that tomorrow begins a new day. Though it could be a scene from a Tori Spelling Lifetime movie, it was effective. My mom is now sober, and still in recovery. She will be for the rest of her life, but it's not as scary as she once thought because she takes everything one day at a time.

My mom always dreaded roller coasters, so it’s interesting that her life has turned out to be such a metaphor for one. Somehow, like me, she just seems drawn to them. That’s the thing about roller coasters – they’re scary and you don’t always know if you’ll make it out with all your limbs still intact, but something about it draws you to it, and you haven’t really lived until you’ve faced those high peaks and loops. In the end, you feel a sense of victory having conquered it. I know that one day, my mom will get off this ride, and though maybe without a hand or foot, she’ll still be able to walk or perhaps wheel herself to another roller coaster. Or maybe she’ll just leave the amusement park altogether, make her way to the coast, and spend some time enjoying herself lying in the sun on the beach.