How I Learned to Stop Hating My Mother
By Gretchen Voss
My mom returns to this story repeatedly as if it explains everything. If her own mother could not meet her needs, spoken or not, what was the point in acknowledging them, even to herself? Burying who she was and what she wanted, losing herself to whatever role she was asked to play — such as when my father demanded that she quit working to tend house — lit the fuse on her future self-destruction. "Life just didn't meet my expectations," she says with a laugh.
Still, she hadn't always been a drunk. Back when we lived in New Hope, PA, a funky, artsy town where she had real friends and access to like-minded, kooky creative types, she was happy. But then we moved to a competitive suburb in New Jersey. There, she was expected to do the coffee-klatch thing with the local June Cleaver wannabes, as she calls them, to dull her sharp intellect in order to play the dutiful role of stay-at-home wife to a workaholic husband and mother to a bunch of ungrateful kids. "There was nothing for me," she explains. "I thought, What am I doing here, taking up space on this earth? So I said, Okay, I can have a drink, and I can deal with this. Dinners were on the table, the house was kept up, and I met my obligations. Drinking was my little hobby. I don't know how else to put it — drinking was mine."
And so what I was seeing on my nightly recon mission, as she sat gesticulating furiously if silently in her chair, was all that corked-up pressure and pain exploding. At first, she restricted her drinking to the nightly blackout. She even went back to school for a master's degree in social work, thinking that a job would help pull her out of her black hole. But soon her mother died, my brother was in a serious motorcycle accident, and my father was diagnosed with cancer, then worked around the clock to save his company from bankruptcy. She was expected to deal with all of it, and her plans to do something for herself vanished. That's when she started chasing vodka during the day, and when our whole family turned our backs on her.
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