This is a post I wrote and shared in a live-streaming event sponsored by The Partnership at Drugfree.org and Listen to Your Mother in an effort to end Teen Medicine Abuse. You can watch my reading here (Part 2) of the show, and the other readers (who were amazing) here  (Part 1) and here (Part 3, Ms. Rosas). If you prefer to read the posts, here are links to the other writers:

Brandi Jeter – http://mamaknowsitall.com
Sherri Kuhn – http://oldtweener.com
Heather King – http://www.extraordinary-ordinary.net
Lyz Lenz – http://www.lyzlenz.com/
Judy Miller – http://judymmiller.com 
Lisa Page Rosenberg – http://www.smacksy.com
Alexandra Rosas – http://www.gooddayregularpeople.com
Ellie Schoenberger – http://www.onecraftymother.com
Zakary Watson – http://www.raisingcolorado.com
Melisa Wells – http://suburbanscrawl.com

I am honored to have been a part of this event. Telling my story somehow, trying to help even one other person, makes the damage I caused myself and my family worth something. It gives those years meaning.

I hope you share the work of these amazing women with your teenagers.

With love,

Janelle

************

I could tell you that I started just like you, like every other partying kid in high school, with marijuana and Peppermint Schnapps and good times.

I could tell you how I was a smart, capable “high-potential” kid but a daily drinker by age 18 and how I went to a good university anyway and was in honors programs and studied abroad in Spain.

I could tell you how I had a husband and kid by the time I was 22 and no idea how I got there, because I was drunk, pretty much all the time. It was the only time I felt alive. It was the only time I felt okay.

I could tell you how I tried to control my drinking and discovered I could not, and how I spent years trying to decipher what exactly was wrong with me, why I drank every night even though every morning I swore to myself I would not, and I could tell you how sometimes when I would drink I would buy cocaine and then I would get hooked on cocaine.

And cocaine takes you down fast.

I could tell you how I went to psychiatrists and psychologists to get better, to quit drinking, to clean up my act, to be the wife and mother and woman I wanted to be, but could not. I could tell you how I had a second child to try to clean up, but could not. And I could tell you how my mom came one Saturday morning and said she was taking my kids to the park, and how I knew she was lying because it was February and 7am and raining. And I could tell you how I let them go because I wanted to go back to bed.

I could tell you that they were 16 months and 5 years old, and I lost them and my job and my husband, and how I spent the next two years in and out of rehabs trying desperately to get sober, and how one day I woke up alone in the ER on a respirator with a bracelet on my wrist that said “Jane Doe, female, age unknown” and I thought to myself “But I have two babies, a husband, and parents.”

I had been erased.

I could tell you how the doctor thought I was attempting suicide because there were so many substances in my body and how I looked him in the eyes and explained quite honestly “Oh no, doctor, I’m not trying to die. I do this every day.”

I could tell you how I was sure that experience would fix me, how I went to rehab for 30 days, again, got out, went home and was drunk 7 days later, again.

I could tell you I was that woman, that mother, the one who missed kindergarten graduation – the dirtbag drug-addicted trash whose daughter kept a wooden box by her bed with pictures and notes and cards from the very woman who abandoned her. I could tell you my daughter still has that box, and in it still sit the letters I wrote her from wherever I was, asking how she was doing, drawing her pictures of flowers and houses and the beautiful things I wanted for her but could not provide.

I could tell you I never meant to be that woman, how I was more than that – I was always going to be more than that, but by the time I realized I couldn’t stop I had a brain as obsessed and addicted as my body and I could no longer tell the true from the false. My life seemed the only option, and it was only in the dark gray haze of those mornings, when I would lie shaking and sweating coming off whatever binge I had been on, as my mind cleared for the first time in days and the truth of my existence crept in like a cold evening fog…I was a drunk. A failure. I would have given anything in those moments to change my life, to be free, to stand with my children as a real mother and among the people like a real human – to be a daughter and a friend and an employee, just a person capable of living a real life on this earth.

But I always seemed to drink again.

I always seemed to drink again.

Until one day, out of ideas and people to blame (they were all gone), I saw the truth of myself: I am the problem. I am an alcoholic. I will die a useless drunk and I’m powerless to change it.

The bottle killed me that morning – not my body, but my self, everything I was or ever imagined myself to be. It ate me away and left me for dead. From that space of utter desperation other alcoholics were able to teach me what alcoholism is, and I finally understood that I have a different mind and body, and can never consume alcohol safely in any form.

I could tell you I am a terrible example of alcoholism, because most of us end up in jails or institutions or dead, but by some miracle I’m sitting here talking to you, and I sit at tee-ball games and back-to-school night like any old mom that ever existed.

I could tell you all this, my friend, I could tell you every gory detail and I could tell you how my past sits like a seething wound in the middle of my gut and how I have memories so dark that when they come I shake my head like a crazy person to make them go. I could tell you all this but you won’t see. You won’t see because you’re young and you think you’re like everybody else and you’re partying and having fun and better and smarter, but nobody knows they’ve got this disease until it’s too late.

I could tell you, but you won’t understand, unless you’re lucky enough to survive and come out on the other side, and look back and try to tell young people not to do what you did, to make a choice while they still have one, to live a little more life, a little more freely.

I could tell you all this, and I have, and you probably won’t see, but my God I must try, because something’s gotta make those years worth living.

This post is sponsored by The Partnership at Drugfree.org as part of a blog tour with listentoyourmothershow.com in an effort to #EndMedicineAbuse.

I could have waited and lied to you, faked it, written something interesting or more amusing like I had my act together and haven’t been struggling, but I have been struggling, and that’s why it’s been a week of no writing.

No inspiration. What’s a girl to do?

There’s a temptation to pretend, you know, force myself to do something inauthentic. But I can’t seem to do that to you. Or me.

And the truth is there are times in my life when I’m done. Just done. I don’t know why or how it happens, but it seems like I turn some corner and boom.

Pain.

Not quick and sharp or stabbing pain, but more like a low hum in the back of my mind. A burning deep down.

A quiet simmer of vague discontentment, drifting, rudderless. A sneaking suspicion my life is not being lived, though it may appear so on the outside, and I’m alone. There’s a lot of fear though it can’t be nailed down.

I just feel so LOST.

I’m paralyzed by it all. The house, the mess, the stuff. The kids, the work, the years.

I lose interest in all the things. My temper grows short. Nothing feels enlightening or, to tell you the truth, even vaguely interesting. I feel like I’m faking it. All the time. With my smiles.

Joy passes in moments like a car racing by. I hear it, but by the time I look for it it’s gone. The sound resonates in my ears as my eyes turn back to nothing.

When the pain first descends, I start looking outside for the problem. Outside of me.

It must be that I gained that weight back. I’m fat. That’s what’s wrong.

It’s our money problems. I can’t stand being broke anymore.

I need a job. Obviously!

I need to write. My problem is I haven’t written that book.

It’s my town! I hate this shithole town!

It’s my house. This house is so trashed; nobody could live in this maelstrom of crap.

I used to blame my marriage, but that got too exhausting.

I used to blame everything, anything.

But eventually, I stopped looking, because I’ve already gone down those roads. I know they’ve got nothing for me. I used to read a bunch of existential literature. Sartre gets it. Nietzsche knows. What I need is a little Kierkegaard.

I used to drink, take drugs, get all dressed up and go out partying. Get some attention from some boys. That’ll cheer me up.

But I don’t do any of that anymore.

I know there’s only one way to escape from this, and that’s to move right into it.

Makes no sense, but it’s true.

My greatest fear, I guess, is that existence is meaningless, and that my life will be spent in a shithole town doing absolutely nothing of interest, and the words in my soul will be left unspoken, and my kids will grow as I grow and die, the end. Life will pass me by as I’m running on some plastic wheel made in China manufactured for Walmart, working for something that I can’t even see, for people I don’t even know, and when I’m 80 I’ll wonder what the fuck I was doing all that time.

Why didn’t I live when I could, I’ll ask. Who was I meant to be?

A wasted life. I’ve seen it so many times.

Eventually, with a mix of fury and terror I move headlong into my pain. Because at some point, there’s nowhere else to go. And I want to get to the truth.

If my depression were a room I’d walk into the center of it, where all its energy converges into a glowing face of my own agony, and I’d look it square in the eyes and wait.

“What you got, bitch?”

And I see she’s got nothing. Just the same old shit she’s been feeding me since I was a young girl, lying awake at night contemplating infinity, the crushing weight of it all on a tiny girl’s heart, wishing I could believe the stories I heard in church.

If I look hard enough into that fear, if I’m brave enough to really look, I see she’s full of shit.

I see everything I need is already here.

I see fear exists in the past and the future but never right now, in the center, in this spot, where my feet are, safely.

Where I live, NOW.

Now.

And I feel a little compassion for her, that burning ball of desperation, that sad little whiner deep inside, terrified beyond recall, poor little thing is just sure she’s going down.

I tell her “Honey, you’ve already gone down. And you’re still here.”

What are you afraid of?

And I’m grateful, because that pain comes along sometimes to jolt me alive, reminding me that this is really all I’ve got. And I see the ways I’ve been wasting my hours.

On my phone, screwing around when people are talking to me. Absent.

In anger. Surfing the internet. Escaping.

Worrying. Talking shit. Complaining. Putting off until tomorrow. Always.

Fearing. Fighting what is. Asleep.

Snoring.

Until I get so desperate I pack two of my three kids up (one was at a slumber party), and grab my husband and take a whole day off, of everything, and go to the beach, to surrender to my lack of ideas, hear waves and smell salt air and feel it too, the rocks and white cold water and the burn of the sun on my hungry skin – to feel connected to something again, old friend, the ocean.

And when I’m there I see this…

I leave laughing.

It’s still humming, the fear, prattling on in the back of my mind, but I don’t care, she’s just running the same old story.

And frankly, I’m no longer interested. You’d think she’d come up with some new shit after all these years. But she doesn’t.

I smile at her antics and drive home, realize I’ve got too much life to live now, you know. The kids want to listen to “Say Yes” by Langhorne Slim. We do.

There’s no time for anything else.

So I just hang out with her for awhile longer, let her do her thing, ride it out as best I can, until one morning I hear the ocean waves in my boy’s breath as he sleeps next to me, alive in perfect rhythm with the universe I’m terrified of.

And I realize I’m doing the same. And always have been.

Later I sit down and write to you all, telling the truth one more day.

So it happened the other day.

My daughter, she’s eleven. She’ll be twelve in November.

She grew up the other day.

We were going to a town in the wine country, to hear a rock-n-roll band. We were going to have dinner first. It was a lovely evening.

She put on a dress, gloves, boots, a hat – and five years.

She wore them like a loose veil across cheek bones I never noticed, on the poise of squared shoulders, soft over eyes that knew something, something more than me, something adults know, or almost know, if they could remember.

She nearly stopped my heart when I saw her in that get-up, so beautiful she snatched my words away. I looked at her and kept on, harder and harder to see it clearly.

a woman?

The second I saw it it vanished, and there stood again my little one, my first one, who played in the sand and still does.

My Ava.

“Mama, I hate you!”

She yelled and ran off.

I stirred the meat in the pan and heated like the cast iron before me. I thought how dare she speak to me that way. I AM THE MOTHER. I thought about storming down the hall and demanding better treatment. HOW DARE YOU. Who do you think you are?

Well I’m a girl, growing up a little, and it fucking sucks sometimes.

A victim of biology.

Fuck biology.

Fuck hormones. And nature.

For taking my baby from me, even if it’s only in moments still, so young. A victim of a uterus and ovaries a decade or two before she even needs them.

I have no idea how to stand near this child. I have no idea what to say and where to reach as I watch her slip away, only in moments still, of beauty or rage.

So goddamn young.

But always moving away, or so it seems, until she tells me that she wants to hear my voice to feel better, and I want to cling to today for dear life. I want to hold it like a drowning man clings to a raft. I want to weave her back into my skin and hold her there like it was and it’s always been.

except that it isn’t. not anymore.

and I cannot.

“I HATE YOU!” the words sting my core because they’re true, for a moment, and maybe I hate her too. because how can I do anything different with this pain taunting me, dangling in my face. i know it’s coming. it’s right there.

losing her.

No, I don’t hate her, not really, even for a second.

They say she’ll come back, after the teenage years. That she’ll just seem gone.

They say it’s so wonderful again, after those years.

They say supportive things.

But what I see is that my daughter is growing up, and it’s all exactly as it should be, except that this is not a change a human can stomach. how can I take it? how can i accept it?

TELL ME YOU FUCKING WORLD, how can I let go? When all I want is one more day and one more after that of our little family and the oldest child still a child and she’s going.

She’s going anyway.

I can only let go, and yet I cannot.

Once again, here I am. A mother. The Mother.

With nothing.

I stir the meat a little longer and remember eleven and twelve and sixteen and how I couldn’t see myself in myself sometimes, and I didn’t know either. “Who do you think you are?”

I have no fucking clue, mom.

so I walk down the hall and open her door. she’s weeping into her pillow. I sit by her and say nothing, look at the trinkets and the papers and stuffed animals. I look at the jewelry and the books and treasures. I touch her arm. I see the clutter, the mess, the thousands of things on the walls. the notes from friends and things from second, third, fourth grade.

the little girl beneath a towering world.

her little haven in an untouchable world begging her to join it.

her place in my home, her home, all I can offer beyond what I am in all my broken form:  a mother, her mother, a new mother I guess, to a new form of child.

I see again it’s all just a series of being reborn. It’s all just a series of recreation, of being tweaked and carved into something new, as I kick and scream and weep for the old.

Just when I was sure it would never end.

Just when I thought I knew what tomorrow will hold.

I looked away for a moment and lost my baby.

In her room, I think I’ll join her.

I used to not cry about things like this.

The big tragedies. The ones that kill and kill and kill.

Columbine. 9-11.

I don’t think I cried about those. Not even a single tear.

Maybe I was just too self-centered. Maybe too young. Maybe I just didn’t get it, couldn’t feel it.

Humanity.

Maybe I hadn’t lived long enough to have that pain mean something, to me, safe and protected hundreds of miles away.

It used to feel unreal.

Like it was sad. “Wow, that’s sad.” But I didn’t cry. Because really. What do I care? It’s not me. I mean I cared because it’s sad, but it didn’t affect my life.

Or maybe I’m just an asshole.

I don’t know, I just didn’t cry.

But I cried today.

I was sitting in a staff meeting and I read an article on my phone. I read the words “8-year-old boy” and I put the phone down and I closed my eyes. And I fucking cried.

I felt so tired. Just so tired, beat.

I don’t know what I was crying about. I don’t know those people. I don’t know that boy. I’ve never been to Boston. But it was like this pain just came from the depths of me, out of nowhere and everywhere, from something that makes me the same as the mother who lost her son today and the people bleeding and the humanity.

I felt crushed under the weight of an idea of a boy gone.

A boy gone.

And when I cried the third time driving home, I realized I was wrong.

I know him. I’ve always known him.

I loved him.

I love him now.

I love him with all my damn heart. Because he’s a boy like mine or nothing like mine, and there’s something I recognize in him, something I know, like I know the people murdered and the youth bullied and the hatred and the war and your grandmother who passed away yesterday. And mine, who died 4 years ago.

A soul. Two eyes, hair, little hands and skin and a voice.

My boy. Yours.

If you let yourself go you’ll feel it too, the knowing. The friendship, the love, fond recognition of faces you’ve never seen. I know you.

And I wish you weren’t gone.

In a few days it will all be back to normal. The Facebook feed will be all the old meaningless shit and the news will have moved on and nobody will care except the distant passing glance. Of remembrance.

But at least today I cried, for an old friend, for a boy who was born and lived and died, like I have, and will, and you.

Humanity.

My old friends.

I guess I cried for you today.

hope i can recognize you tomorrow

Dear Ava,

You’ve been asking me for two years to write a blog post “that’s appropriate for your kid to read.”

And I haven’t been lying when I answer “Sorry, but I haven’t written it yet.”

It isn’t that I don’t want you to read what I’m thinking, read what I laugh about, read the insights – profound and absurd – I share with this world. It’s that what I’m saying on the blog isn’t quite what I want to say to you, my little girl, 11 years old, standing on the brink of a new time and a new body and life.

Sometimes I can’t believe you’re going to be 12 in November, our first baby, and I think about the way you’re growing up, and how things are changing for you and for me and the way we talk and laugh. How sometimes it’s like it’s always been and sometimes it’s very, very different.

Soon I know it will change a little more and I won’t be the one who’s by your side as much as I am now, and you will be bursting forth into your own, in ways that don’t involve me. Maybe then you won’t be quite so interested in what I have to say to you, in a blog post written for you, my first daughter.

So I’ve written it now, the things I want to say as you head into 6th grade then junior high then high school and oh my. Here are the things I want to say, now, and in five years, and in ten, and twenty.

• I want you to keep dressing up, and playing what you want, long after you’re sure all the other girls have moved on to more “mature” things.
• I want you to know they haven’t.
• I want you to hold on to your wry sense of humor and quick wit. Not everybody will get you, but the people who get you will really, really get you. And it will be worth it.
• I want you to look at the people around you with a seriously questioning eye, figuring if everybody else is doing it, it’s probably a ridiculous thing to be doing.
• I want you to believe you are more smart than beautiful, even if perhaps you are equally so.
• I want you to know people will always fail to meet your expectations, at some point. It’s up to you to decide whether you should keep them around anyway.
• I want you to embrace your inner geek. It’s generally our most interesting feature.
• I want you to stay close to your Greek and Norse myths and books and books and books because they say it before we can and they change our minds.
• I want you to never leave the house without saying “I love you,” no matter how bad the argument.
• I want you to remember your parents are flawed humans. Emphasis on the “flawed.”
• I want you to remember you can never walk so far away you can’t come back.
• I want you to learn to drive a stick shift.
• On a regular basis, I want you to let go of every old idea you’ve ever had.
• I want you to know you will always be required to attend family vacations.
• I want you to see that girls do some seriously stupid things when it comes to boys, and there’s nothing wrong with shaking your head in disbelief and movin’ right along.
• This also applies to you, when you do seriously stupid things.
• I want you to speak your mind even when the other kids are speaking what’s cool.
• I want you to be the kid who talks too much in class, because I know you want to.
•  I want you to understand that brains are half as important as tenacity and a profound work ethic.
• I want you to cuddle with me sometimes, and hold your dad’s hand, and know how the younger kids look at you.
• I want you to visit your grandparents.
• I want you to never question our adoration of the girl you’ve been and the woman in you, who we can’t yet see but love completely anyway, with every flaw and mistake and disaster and temper tantrum she’s got in her.
• I want you to know we’ve done it, though you’ll never believe it.
• I want you to pray.
• I want you to know you are more than your body and mind, that you are crafted of the stuff of the cosmos, and when you came from my womb I knew you were on loan from the universe – a celestial body encapsulated in your body – and I want to know that I always knew I’d have to let you go someday, even as my heart broke and my arms begged you to stay and I couldn’t imagine the parting.

That I know someday you’re going to go, and I’ll have to watch, from here. With only a few things left to say, and a wave.

Nevermind, I can’t do it. You can’t read this yet.

You’ve gotta wait a couple more years.

I want you to know we’ve got a few more years.

And many more things to say.

Love,

Mama