You Hit Me and it Felt Like Love

Mom, are you going to wake up now?

This happens about two years after the previous story. I'm sorry if these being out of order is annoying.

"I understand how a parent might hit a child— it's because you can look into their eyes and see a reflection of yourself that you wish you wish you hadn't." — Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper.

We were staying in a trailer park. Mom found her new boyfriend at Narcotics Anonymous, strong in his sobriety but he'd grown up in a different way of life. He was okay with the cigarette burns on his couch, and he was okay with the constant police officers patrolling his park in the bad area of town. I didn't mind him, he was a nice man, but mom jumped too soon into the relationship. I was fifteen, and mom didn't make me go to school ever because she was either drunk or hopped up on some sort of pill, despite her "sobriety" being strong. I spent my days smoking boxes of cigarettes her boyfriend gave me in exchange for doing his dishes, and I spent my nights watching my mom. She'd take something and start stumbling over her words and her speech. I didn't sleep because I had to make sure she didn't burn the trailer down when she became too out of it that she started dropping her cigarettes onto the floor. I had to be there to rip the keys from her hands when she tried to drive off somewhere in the middle of the night for more drugs.

That wasn't what scarred me though. It wasn't searching the trailer or my grandparents house (when she decided to return us home for a few days) for her vodka bottles. It wasn't the ptsd from the endless times she drove me around high and drunk, nearly killing us multiple times. It was the morning I found her overdosed.

She'd stolen her boyfriend's pills. They were prescription, he needed them. She swapped them with her gabapentin thinking that nobody would notice, and they probably wouldn't have had I not found her. I walked into her room because we were supposed to go to the movies that morning for 6 dollar tuesdays. She was only wearing a long t-shirt, huddled beneath the covers. I called out her name and shook her a few times when she didn't answer. Then I saw her lips, blue, her face ghostly pale. I didn't know what to do, I was afraid to call 911– she'd be so angry at me. She always was whenever I tried to get her to go back to rehab, so I called my grandparents, who called 911 for me.

When they got there she had sort of come to, but she wasn't breathing right and didn't remember her own name. They asked me what she took. I didn't know. They put her on a stretcher and took her away, I rode with her to the hospital. When she got there, they were asking me questions like I wasn't a fifteen year old girl, bawling her eyes out because when she found her mother that morning she looked dead— and she almost was. They asked me her insurance information. I didn't know, but she'd been to the hospital so many times that I had her date of birth and social security number memorized, so I gave them those. They asked me when she had taken the pills and how many, what kind of drugs she did, if she was on any medications. They asked me how much she weighed. I didn't know that either, but she was too thin because she had an eating disorder as well, so I told them that.

I sat there and cried, answering their questions through my tears, and the doctor looked at me with such detachment— like he'd seen this a thousand times before and if she died, oh well, another junkie lost. But my mom wasn't the type of junkie you'd be used to seeing. She grew up wealthy, was beautiful and didn't wear her addiction on her skin or in her teeth. She looked functioning, normal, a perfect woman with the perfect rich life. But she was anything but.

They pumped her stomach and let her go. I begged them to 302 her and make her stay and get help, they needed three people so I begged my grandparents to help 302 her, but like every time before they believed her when she said this time was different and that it was an accident. Of course it was an accident. She didn't mean to take too many pills, she just did.

My mom broke my heart that day. She broke my heart everyday that she used but that day was different because I realized something— she didn't love me enough to stop. I could never make her stop. She couldn't stop for me and my younger brother, she had to stop for herself, and the fact of the matter was, she didn't want to.

That was the day that I stopped caring. I'd been through so much in my life, so much hurt, not only done by my mom, but I still cared. When I saw that doctor— when I saw that he didn't care, I realized that he too, at some point, probably did. How many patients died in his care before he detached himself completely just to survive? He taught me that sometimes, in order to survive, we need to shut ourselves off just to get by. I'm 19 now and don't see my mom much. She got sober, found a new boyfriend, and left me in the dust. I don't live with her anymore, she moved in with her boyfriend and there simply isn't room for me there. I don't miss her. I don't see my little brother often, and although I know that I do love him, I don't miss him. My family doesn't feel like family anymore— I don't care what happens to them. I can't connect. I meet people and put on a smile, but I don't really care for them. My smile is fake. I don't care about hurting people because I can't connect to them. I'm never really happy, but I'm never sad, either. I can't make a relationship last longer than a few weeks, if that, because I get bored of pretending I feel something for them. I shut myself off that day and I'm still trying to figure out how to turn myself back on.

Sometimes I think I'm going to cry when I think about it. I get that tingling feeling in your nose and behind your eyes, and right when I'm about to, I stop, because that would be feeling too much and I don't know how to do that anymore.

Things in life change you. It could be something so simple. People compare problems— my problems are so much worse than yours, how can you act like it's so bad? The worst thing somebody has been through may not have been as bad as what you've been through, but it's still the worst thing that's ever happened to them, and you can't change the pain they feel from it. I don't think finding my mom overdosed was the worst thing that's ever happened to me, not really, but it changed me the most. It changed me the most because it was the day I became nothing. What am I without connections, relationships and feelings? Nothing. I have become nothing, and that is what happened the day I found my mother overdosed.