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.