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.

Twenty Years Sober - Day One

Twenty years ago, I walked into my first twelve step meeting.  It was July 15, 1991.  I had just turned 30 and my life was a tremendous disaster.  Some people get sober because they are either faced with or have lost everything and others, like me, never actually had anything to lose.  Except my life.  Which I jeopardized on a regular basis.  Not to mention the deleterious health issues that were rearing their ugly heads; I am fairly certain that drinking vodka in the shower before work was not a good thing and certainly not a magical elixir - nothing in my life was turning into gold.  It was shit, all of it. I couldn't stop drinking and I couldn't bear to drink anymore. I was living dead.  And it was all coming to an end one way or another.

Alcohol was always in my life.  I come from a long line of alcoholics, most dead now, a few sober ones still living.  When I was little, I would take the first sip from a can of Schlitz when I got my dad a beer from the fridge; I still remember grabbing the pull tab and pulling it off - that little hiss and pop that came from the can - the coldness of that first foamy sip as it slid down my throat.  At Thanksgiving and Christmas, I was given my very own small glass of wine filled with a few sips at the table.  There were always both alcohol and drunks around me growing up and the inherent violence and ugliness that came with them.  But as a child, it seemed like an elixir - magical - beautiful grownups laughing and chatting; loud music, smiles, intimacy.  I used to peer over the balcony into the living room through the blue haze of cigarette smoke and watch transfixed.  All those happy people made me long to be grown up and sitting amongst them, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other.  I'd describe it as elegant but it was the late 60s/early 70s, the era of loud polyester, gold chains and bell bottom jeans...be that as it may, I was still hooked.  The allure was too great for my child's mind.

And so, when at the end of ninth grade, I was presented with an opportunity to skip school with my one of my best friends and go hang out with some older boys that had a car, I took it.  It was the first time I made the decision to drink for myself and I promptly got so drunk that I remember lying on the ground, throwing up and everything spinning - and that is how I drank for the next 16 years.  I drank only to get drunk.  It didn't matter what it was, if it got me drunk, I drank it.  Not from that first drink on did I ever have any semblance of control over my drinking and as would follow, my life.  But it took away all the pain and confusion and all the separation I felt from everyone in my life.  Alcohol made me believe that I fit in and it made me not care that my family was so fucked up that I spent most of my days desperately pretending that everything was "ok" here - and that is how I lived for the next 16 years.

 The day it all ended, I stumbled home from an all nighter - which is a misnomer as every night seemed to be an all nighter at that point.  I had already called in sick to work, and I was sick - just not with the flu but a horrible hangover that would require me getting into bed with a glass of the hair of the dog that bit me.  It was hot in LA and my apartment had no air conditioning.  Walking into the bathroom I caught my reflection in the mirror and I was stopped dead in my tracks. There I stood looking into my own eyes and for the first time in such a long, long time, I really saw myself.  The physical effects of my alcoholism were written all over my body - I was bloated, sick.  My eyes were swollen and the whites were not really white anymore; they were flecked with yellow.  My kidneys ached.  My gums bled.  But mostly, it was the eyes -  my eyes were dead.  They were devoid of feeling - no joy, no spark, no life - not even a flash of sadness or sorrow.  It was an incredibly powerful moment of clarity and it destroyed me and frightened me more than anything else ever had.  I suddenly understood one thing, that I was going to die.  And if that was what I wanted, I could keep on my path of destruction - drinking each day and night and not knowing where it would take me.  It was evident that in short order, I was probably going to end up in a very bad and dangerous place and this time there would be no reprieve.

It seems like I stood in front of that mirror forever; it was a magic mirror and my future was revealed - this path or that path - make a choice: life or death, no turning back. Suddenly with absolutely no hesitation, I found myself running to my neighbor's house - a lesbian with 17 days sober and she took me to a meeting that night - it was a closed gay men's meeting, which means that only gay, sober men could attend, but they took a vote and let the shaky, sick newcomer and the lesbian stay.  There we sat - the straight girl, the lesbian and about 15 gay men practicing the 12th step and it's actually funny and sweet in retrospect.  They talked about needles and AIDS and death and I did not relate but I didn't drink that night and for an hour I felt safe; those amazing men also gave me a meeting directory and circled meetings they thought I might like and sent me home with phone numbers and hugs. Those gay men gave me love and I felt it, I believed it and it was fucking amazing. I belonged...with them - I wasn't alone any more.  It didn't matter that they were men or gay or that many of them were drug addicts, when they talked I heard their loneliness and fear and not knowing how to get through life before they got sober and they were me; we had absolutely nothing in common except our feelings but, here's the kicker, that was everything and it was day one.

It was the first full day I had gone without a drink as far back as I could remember.  It seemed impossible that I had achieved an entire day but I had and so you understand the miracle of that one day, it is in many ways more important than the milestone of the 20 year anniversary I recently celebrated; that one day led to next the 7,304 days that followed.  Without that day, nothing else that I have achieved or been given in my life would have been possible.  And the girl who could not go a day, a morning, an hour without a drink has, by the grace of God, not had one since.