Penny and me

I knelt on the bathroom floor of a Chili's in suburban Detroit praying. "Please God, help me to be kind and loving.  Help me to forgive her.  Please remove my resentment and anger towards her.  Give me the strength to make my amends."  It was a prayer loop, the same few phrases over and over.   Shortly, I would be at the hospital where my mom was receiving her dialysis and where they had recently amputated her leg and I was there to do my 9th step with her.  The 9th step instructs me to make direct amends wherever possible to those we had harmed...to clean up my side of the street and ask for her forgiveness with no thought or expectation of anything in return.  I got off the Chili's ladies room floor and walked out to join my waiting stepfather for the short drive to the hospital.

I was just 2 years sober and I was working my steps.  I had completed my 8th step and made a list of everyone I had harmed; but I was stuck and had been for some time.  I hadn't been able to make any amends to anyone.  It was frustrating to me and I was scared that I would drink.  I loved sobriety and desperately wanted to stay sober, but here I was, floundering at the ninth.  It went on like this for several months and then one night I was given the solution.

I was at my Sunday night meet at the West Hollywood Drug and Alcohol Center.  It was a great meeting, a respected old-timer started the meeting; it was on the top floor of an old building, no air conditioning - cooled only by a ceiling fan which sole function was to evenly disperse the cigarette smoke from the smoking side of the room to the entire room.  The meeting format was a speaker who gave a short pitch and then Q&A after.

 I don't even remember who the speaker was, I remember it was a man.  I raised my hand and asked my question.  "I am stuck on my 9th step and I can't seem to start my amends.  What should I do?"  (I'm sure the question in actuality was much longer and convoluted, but for brevity's sake here, I'm just giving you the gist. We alcoholics tend to be filled with words and questions and can take forever to get to the point!) Regardless, I'll never forget what he said.  "If you are stuck on a step, go back to the step before it.  You're probably not done with that step."  I sat dumbfounded.

I rushed home and pulled out my amends list that I made as directed in the 8th step.  I studied it.  It looked good!  It was complete....what was missing, whom had I forgotten?  I looked again.  And then it struck me.  Could it be possible that my mother was supposed to be on this list?  No, it could not be true.  If anything, she owed me an amends. Penny, whose alcoholism created never-ending drama and chaos in our lives.  Her sadness and rage a blanket over the lives of me and my sisters.  Would she kiss us when she walked in the door or would she slap us?  We never knew. How could it be that I was to make amends to the woman I'd find passed out in the living room, stereo blasting the same damn 8 track now on it's 6th or 7th loop, cigarette still burning in the ashtray - that woman that I had to put to bed more nights than I can remember?  The woman from whom I had to steal lunch money out of her purse for me and my sisters?  The woman who slept with my best friend's father regardless of the consequences? The woman who made my dad give her extra money when he came to pick us up for his bi-monthly visits or we couldn't go?  The woman who abandoned me and my sisters for a year, shipping them off to Michigan to live with her best friend while I stayed in Reston but went to live with an older couple from my church?  It could not be fucking possible that *I* had to make an amends to her.

I was filled with tremendous anger.  I couldn't wrap my head around it. But I knew that this was the roadblock of my 9th step.  After thinking about it for a bit, I still had no solution.  I couldn't imagine what I had done to her that required an amends.  The only time that I ever retaliated against her violence was when I was 17, my senior year in high school.  In a drunken rage she attacked me, and I had had enough.  I took her down - I was younger and stronger and I finally snapped. Police were involved and I was taken away, but after that night, she never struck me again.  There was a part of me at only seventeen years old that took a perverse pleasure in finally seeing the fear in her face.  But even that was not the amends I needed to make.  It was something much bigger.  I thought past my childhood and into my adult years.  And then I saw it....it was crystal clear.

When I left for college, I washed my hands of her.  I left Virginia and went to Texas and never looked back.  My visits with her were limited and mostly strained.  I shut her out of my heart and gave her nothing.  Nothing about me, my life, my fears, my hopes and dreams; this crushed her.  She tried desperately to have a relationship with me and I rebuffed all her attempts.  If Penny called, I'd make an excuse that I was running out the door and/or that I was too busy to talk.  If I needed something from her, I'd give her a little, tiny bit of me to ensure that she would help me.  I held out the promise of a relationship like a carrot on a stick - give me this or do that for me, and I will let you in my life. She would comply and I would cruelly jerk the carrot away.

But now, her health and beauty were fading.  She was horribly ill with diabetes and her feet were beginning to suffer the effects of diabetic neuropathy.  The long term effects of the years of alcoholism combined with the diabetes began to manifest. They started taking her toes when she was in her forties. By 50, she was on dialysis. At 52, they took her leg.

So here I was, praying in Chili's.  We arrived at the hospital and I waited anxiously for her to come back to her room from dialysis, hoping I could just manage to be kind.  The door opened and there she lay on the gurney.  A lump under the sheets, with only one leg.  Her hair was so thin, her body so frail.  She was radically diminished; it was hard for me to reconcile this woman with the unstable, crazy woman who was my mother.  She reached her arms out to me, one of them badly scarred from the dialysis needle, and a huge smile lit up her face as she cried out my name - Pammy!

In that moment I knew that my anger, pain and fear were gone.  I gently hugged her, afraid to hurt her and I knew with certainty that this woman could not and would not hurt me. I also knew I would be able to make my amends to her.  The doctors let her check out for the weekend and we took her home.  She was tired, the dialysis does that, and she went right to bed.  The next morning, I woke up and went into her bedroom.  Up close, I could see what a terrible physical state she was in.  I helped her take her morning dose of over 25 pills and then I went to her bathroom and got her makeup bag, her little blue brush and backcomb, and a washcloth.  I washed her face.  I brushed her horribly thin hair and teased it to give her some semblance of a full head of hair.  I made up her face - lipstick, blush, eyeshadow and mascara.  I gave her a mirror so she could see how beautiful she looked.  I was sure it had been a very long time since she had felt beautiful.

She looked in the mirror and put it down.  She smiled at me.  I took her hand and looked at her in all her ruinous glory, and weeping, I said, "Mom, I am sorry that I was not able to be the daughter that you needed and deserved."  That was it, eighteen words that covered the lifetime of our relationship. It was enough.  I felt something heavy fall off my shoulders and I was free of 32 years of resentment and pain. It didn't even matter what she said, or if she even said anything. It was enough. But now she was crying too.  She squeezed my hand and looking into my eyes, she said, "Pammy, I am sorry that I could not be the mother that you needed and deserved."

In that moment everything was stripped away, all that remained was the love.  The truth was, she loved me, of course.  She was just a very sick person and didn't have the ability to seek help.  Her solution was in bottles of booze and pills and in numerous suicide attempts.  But she had done the best she could.  Was it enough? No, of course not and I can say that honestly and with compassion for her, for my sisters, for me.  Have I forgotten my childhood and the constant fear I lived with? Certainly not, it is part of who I am and has formed me.  In AA, we say that resentment is when "I take the poison and wait for you to die." As I began to accept responsibility for my life and my happiness, I was able to transfer the ugly events and relationships that comprised my childhood into a blueprint that showed me how to be a better person, to build a life filled with love and kindness.  Who I am today is a result of what happened to me in the past but I get to define how it shapes me.  I get to choose. In it's simplest form, I turned lemons into lemonade.

That day with my mother changed my life and, I am sure, hers as well.  I was able to give her, in the 14 months that were left to her, some sense of being loved and accepted for exactly who she was with no recriminations, no anger.  I was Penny's daughter and today, I look at the gifts she gave me - my love of books and cooking; my risque sense of humor and intellect, the way I fully laugh out loud if I am amused; my love of the ocean and my love of cards - pinochle, hearts, spades and crazy 8s; games like Uno, Yahtzee and Monopoly; my love for mashed potatoes floating in a bowl of buttermilk; Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners; growing a vegetable garden; the cool simpleness of a living room's decor.  Small, simple things but each of them a part of who I am.  I keep the good and the rest I try to leave behind me.

One day. the spring after Penny died, I was driving my car to work.  It was a beautiful, perfect Southern California morning.  I had the windows open and I was driving down Wilshire Boulevard, singing along with the radio.  Suddenly (and I mean suddenly) my car was filled with the essence of Penny.  Her *smell* - the one unique to each mom, a combination of her perfume, Chloe, and her skin.  It poured over me, swirled around me.  Shocked, I actually looked in the rear view mirror to see if she was riding with me.   I waited for her scent to dissipate but it stayed, so I began to talk to her.  I told her what was happening in my life and that I loved her and missed her. As I drove down Wilshire and then along PCH, she stayed. I drove, encompassed in her Penny-ness almost the entire drive to work.  And then as quickly as she came, she was gone, but Penny will always be with me - I am half her, after all and in forgiving her, I forgave myself.