Some Dirty Laundry

In all honesty, it took me all of last week to write this blog. I started and stopped, edited and re-edited. I couldn't decide if I wanted to post it at all, and I've spent the last few days trying to decide if I had the guts to do it. But I think you all need to read it because it may give a little perspective on what is going on in my life. What my life was like before my mom died and what it's like with her gone.



I've spent a week working on ONE blog, and finally I've decided I'll take a big risk and put it out there for all of cyber-space to see.



Here goes . . .






I guess I can start airing some of it . . . my 'dirty laundry', that is. There is A LOT of it. A lot of stuff I feel I can talk about now . . a lot of stuff that has never been shared here because my mom read my blog on occasion, and I never knew when or how often. I now can begin to fill in some holes you might have found in my stories, really let you in on why some of the things I've dealt with in the past couple of years were so very hard for me.







Most of this 'dirty laundry' deals with my mom. But before I start, I don't want you to think I'm about to spend the next few paragraphs bashing a person that has died. I won't do that. Though my mom and I did not have a great mother/daughter relationship, I'm still not going to bash her. And I really am annoyed with anyone else that has bad stuff to say about my mom, now that she's gone. She had a lot of faults, everyone knew about them, and she and I did not get along very well for most of my adult life, but -- for Pete's sake -- she's gone. I get so annoyed hearing, "She was crazy, but . . ." or "She had a funny way of doing that . . ." I can say what I want, but nobody else is allowed to give me their opinions about my dead mother -- unless it's something NICE that is remembered about her.




Anyway, back to the dirty laundry . . .



You've guessed it -- or maybe you always knew -- but here it is: my mother did have a lot of problems. She caused a lot of problems. Problems seemed to follow her around like my kids follow me around when I'm holding a box of cookies. Her life was happy at times . . . but when it was bad, it was so, so bad. Problems. Problems. Problems.



Not all of it was truly my mother's fault (as I've learned through my time in therapy, which I've been in for about 10 months now . . . a secret I've kept from my parents). My mom was not mentally healthy, and she had been that way for the entire 35 years that my parents were married. She had bipolar disorder -- though she always thought she was fine and would never see a psychiatrist or any doctor to officially diagnose her. Or medicate her. THAT, in itself, is part of her disease. Denial, refusing to be rational, lack of conscience for things she'd done. To make a loooooooong story short, my mother was very, very sick. And once she was old enough to self medicate with alcohol, it just got worse.



My mom was an alcoholic for most of my life. Really, I guess I could say all of my life. On top of her bipolar disorder -- which is very common from what I've learned. She never put me in danger, she never hurt me (physically), but she definitely embarrassed the hell out of me on more occasions that I'd like to recall. My mother was a real, true alcoholic . . . which is nothing at all like something you've seen on TV or in some stupid movie. She wasn't a stumbling drunk that broke things and caused fights. She wasn't anything like you'd think a 'drunk' is . . . but she most certainly was an alcoholic. The only portrayal that ever came close to what is really like was that movie with Andy Garcia and Meg Ryan -- "When a Man Loves a Woman" -- except Meg Ryan's character got help for herself in the end. To her credit, my mom had really backed off her drinking in the last few years . . . but she was never really cured from her addiction. She did not get help for herself.

My mom and dad fought a LOT when I was growing up. Most of the fighting was also related to my mom's condition. When my mom was in her manic stages, she'd say and do the most awful things to anyone . . . especially me and my dad, the people she loved the most. Things you seriously can't imagine and I don't care to repeat. And the alcohol would make it worse . . . I learned at age 14 that you could not try and be rational with my mom when she was drinking. My parents' fights were often outrageous and monumental -- but again, never ever physical. Just lots and lots of yelling, screaming, throwing, breaking, door slamming. I dealt with it my entire life.

I became an escape for my dad once I'd grown up and created a home of my own. When Mom would get unbearable to be around, my dad would retreat to my house. He finally had somewhere to go to get a break from the fighting . . . and after all those years, I was glad to offer that to him. Of course, that would make things worse for a while, during the thick of the arguing . . . my mother hated that my dad would come to my house as a refuge. She'd call us at all hours of the night, saying horrible things to me because I let him stay there. It would go on for usually about two days. And then Mom would 'flip' (as we called it), she'd come back around and be so very apologetic . . . crying, begging . . . and then my dad would go home. Her manic stages had a cycle, clear as anything. My dad and I had learned to deal with them.

There were many times that my dad would call and say he was on his way to my house to escape my mother . . . and I'd have to drop what I was doing to address the situation. It hardly ever was convenient, naturally. I'd have to cancel plans, leave events, rearrange our schedule. I've probably done that to some of you out there reading this . . . and I'm sorry. But I'm the only kid, so I did what had to be done. It was an exhausting way to live, always wondering in the back of my mind what might come up. My parents were really, really hard to count on when it came to babysitting or really much of anything that involved pre-planning. We just never knew what my mom might do and what we might have to do as a result. We did not plan much in advance . . . maybe the day before, if we thought Mom could handle it. Again, a hard way to live.

As a matter of fact, the morning that I got the call that she had died, I was in the middle of bathing the kids in sunscreen for an afternoon at the pool. Coweta County 911 called me on my cell phone, telling me that I needed to get to my parent's house in Newnan ASAP because something was wrong with my mom.

"Where is my dad?" I asked, annoyed. This kind of stuff happened all the time. She would do crazy stuff -- like call 911 -- when she was manic but everything else was really fine.

"I'm all the way in Marietta, and I have 2 small kids. I can't drop everything and come there now. What is going on? Where is my dad?" I said to the 911 operator.

My dad clicked in the line, and I took his call. "Get down here, now. Your mother is dead. Mom is dead," was all I remember him saying. I did not really believe it; I thought it was one of her antics again. I thought I'd end up by her bed in the hospital, trying to figure out what the hell she had done this time.

But, between leaving my house and getting on I-75 South, I put some pieces together in my head and figured out that my mom really was, in fact, dead. Those antics of hers were over.

My mom could not ever handle my father's sicknesses. Through all three battles he's fought with cancer, she was not really there for him as a caregiver or as a loving wife. She was just not capable of doing that because of the state of her mental wellness. In her mind, she could never accept his illness . . . I think that she thought that if she didn't accept it, it wasn't really happening. She acted as if she just went away to hide in her house until it was over, then maybe it didn't even happen at all. So she did just that -- she would just not go to the hospital to see my dad, not call, not work with the doctors, no do anything that a 'normal' wife would do. THAT is why I have filled the role as the caregiver for my dad during all of his recent stays in the hospital. THAT is why I take him to his doctor's appointments. My mom hated that I did those things for my dad --- and sometimes they would cause her to go manic --- but she knew she, herself, could not deal with it. So I did.

My mother was self destructive. She did not commit suicide -- that's not what I mean -- but she did not care for herself in any (normal) way. She never wore decent clothing . . . her clothes were tattered and torn, but she did not care at all. She bathed and did those sort of normal self-care things (she was clean), but that was about the extent of her care for herself. Her hair was always too long and messy; she never wore makeup. She was a total mess, honestly. Again . . . more of her illness. She did not give any thought to what she ate or drank . . . and 30+ years of alcoholism can take it's toll on a body. Because she didn't care for herself at all, I knew deep down that her death would be a result of that. And it was, we think. Liver failure, possibly. Maybe one too many Tylenol PMs taken on a liver that just had had enough over the years. We don't know yet. But I'm fairly certain it was her own fault.

As I've been at my parents house, cleaning things out and going through some of her stuff, I've really come to get a hold on how sick my mom was. She took about as much care of her house as she did of herself. Ever seen those people on Oprah who are hoarders? Never throwing things away, filling their houses with junk? My mom did that. It was yet another part of her illness, I'm certain. She would pack up boxes of broken picture frames, old wrapping paper, empty shampoo bottles, and she'd stuff them in my parents closets or their unfinished storage room. Mounds and mounds of TRASH, all over the house. My dad can't even get a hold on it. He keeps accusing me of throwing away 'their important things' because we've filled about 50 big black trash bags with garbage. But then I show him what is in the bags and bags of trash, and he concedes. He's starting to realize that my mom had been so sick for so long . . . and he'd turned a blind eye to some of it. I guess he thought she'd come around one day and clean up her messes (literally and figuratively), but she would never have. Only in her death can we finally start to clean up her life a little bit.

I wrote a beautiful Eulogy for my mom, and I meant every word of what I said . . . though after reading this post, it might seem like I didn't. I did -- she absolutely deserved a lovely tribute to her life. My mom was a smart person, a devoted friend, and quite funny to be around at times. I wanted her eulogy to portray all of the positives about her -- and I didn't want to say, "She was crazy, but . . ." She may have been crazy at times, but was sick. And she was also a person. A person who just did not know how to deal with life, through no real fault of her own.

And I loved her, I did. I know I did. She made it so hard at times . . . but she was still my mom. I think knowing how sick she was makes loving her easier because I know she was not in control of everything that she did to me, to my dad, to our family. It's made it so much easier for me to handle her death, knowing that she is finally happy now. At peace with herself, with the world around her. I know she is OK where she is now.

So, that's my dirty laundry. It's some of our family secrets . . . stuff I don't talk about because it's embarrassing. It's hard to admit. I used to think it was a reflection on ME, but I've come to realize that it really is not. I'm not responsible for my mom or her actions, as much as they might impact me. I just have to go on with our lives now and remember all the good that was in her. Regardless of it all, there was a lot of good in her, I promise.