Mostly, her abandoning me when I was six, on Christmas, of all freakin days. But what I do remember I have a vague vision of her one time being a mother I needed her to be, but I'm unsure if it's a true memory or something I made up to ease our history.
The truth is, I never knew who my mother was as a person. Our relationship while I was growing up was empty, and she was mostly an empty shell. I remember few happy memories, but six memories of her I do have of her, is when her addiction was most prevalent.
One - she had certain traits I could never forget. She threw up a lot, and when she was finished, she'd take a swing straight out of Pepto-Bismol bottle. I can still hear the way she would sob and the shrill of her yelling at my dad, her voice usually coming from her bed because she rarely felt well. Opioids were her temporary fix — they became her bible practically.
She would come out of her room for doctor appointments made by my dad though. Even her therapy sessions. I remember the nights my dad and her would have a quiet argument, and often, it would result in my mom sobbing fanatically in dad's arms. I knew this because I would often sneak in the hallway to peer through their door. I remember the broken look on my dad's face — how much he loved my mom, and how much it pained him to see her falling apart. My mom said she was trying, that she wanted to get better for her and my dad and be there for us, but they were just empty promises dad could see straight through, but he loved her so much, he still agreed to it. He caved in because he didn't want to let go of her. They were married for over twenty years, high school throbs through and through. It hurt dad to see her like this.
She was always going to the doctor, riddled with health ailments. That was her claim for getting opioids: she swore she was in unbearable pain. Since experiencing my own battle with depression, even now, I now believe I understood she may have been in emotional pain then physical. Back then though, I was a kid that just remembered being happy to see her going to the doctor. It meant that I got to see her outside of her bedroom. I got to have my mom for a time — wearing jeans and smelling heavy of alcohol.
And when she came home, she went straight back to her bedroom. And dad would smile at me and ask me if I wanted to go out for ice cream. I asked, "But what about mommy?" And he would look at me and say, "Mommy needs to rest baby girl." I knew that meant mommy wasn't getting better, but I was a kid that pretended to hope otherwise, so we went out for ice cream on his motorcycle.
