Discovering the Disease: Mom's First Stint in Rehab

Fourth grade is the first time I remember my mother going to rehab.  I didn't really understand what it meant at that age.  I don't even remember how my family told me that Mommy was going away to live somewhere else for a while, leaving me with her then-current boyfriend (whom I did not get along with).  What I do remember is visiting her several times in rehab.  My mother used to joke that the movie 28 Days was made about her life, even down to breaking her leg and being on crutches because of a drunken escapade.  And while I only visited, I don't remember rehab being quite like this:

As funny and feel-good as this movie turns out to be, it doesn't depict the true experience of an alcoholic in rehab, or at least not most of them.  When my mother went to rehab, it was a grueling time of detoxing and working hard on maintaining sobriety.  Unfortunately, she was never able to stay sober.  She has done several stints in rehab throughout my life and her addiction still consumes her and haunts every corner of her life.  

The thing that I took away from my mother's time in rehab was that all of this chaos and hurt and struggle finally had a name to me: alcoholism.  Up until that point, I didn't understand why things were the way they were.  While I could see major differences in my life compared to that of my friends and classmates, I didn't understand why my life wasn't normal.  I was a child struggling to make sense of it all, not understanding that there was more happening than I could see.  Many children have a hard time grasping the concept of this disease that steals loved ones and destroys families.  Now that I finally had a name for the havoc that wrecked my world, I was determined to learn all I could about this monster that stole my mother.

Chaos: It's All You Know

On some level, I think I always understood that I was different from my friends.  Some of my earliest memories in elementary school were moments in which the harrowing fact that I was unlike them hit me like a knife twisted in my gut.

My classmates did not share the same experiences, the same fears, the confusion or the disenchantment that enveloped my childhood.  Most of them went home to a mom - and maybe a dad, too - and siblings in a quaint little house in the suburbs.  They had parents that would care for them, pack their school lunch, go to their sporting events or recitals, play with them, make them do their chores, but also give them a sense of stability.  I, on the other hand, went home to a chaotic environment where I never knew quite what to expect.  There were few things that I could count on, but my mother was not one of them.

"Home" was rarely just my mother and I.  Sometimes we would live with my grandparents, other times we would live with her various boyfriends.  I couldn't always count on her being there, but I could count on the fact that if she was there, she'd be drunk.

The environment that an alcoholic creates in a home is one of chaos and toxicity.  It's not really a home with an alcoholic, it's more like a battle ground.  My mother's drinking led to massive blow-outs of screaming, fighting, and physical altercations.  She would fight with her parents, her boyfriend, and with me.  There was nothing off-limits, no sacred line drawn.  An alcoholic will do anything to fuel their addiction, regardless of how it hurts other people.

By the nature of the fact that I lived in constant chaos and turmoil at home that my friends didn't seem to understand, I knew I was different.  But at a tender young age, I had no idea what to call it.  I didn't understand how to communicate at all, and I only knew my frustrations and insecurities at being unlike everyone I went to school with.  I was terrified and alone, just longing for someone to help me understand what was happening and how to make it stop.