TRANSCRIPT
I would like to briefly share about three profoundly important days in my life. They happened when I was 22 years old. That’s, well, nearly 30 years ago for me now because I’m in my late 40s.
It happened in relationship to my mother, who was an alcoholic. She was called, I think, what would be called an episodic binge drinker, hardcore drinker of mostly vodka. It would happen at random times. Sometimes it would happen a few days in a row; sometimes it wouldn’t happen for a month. She would just get totally drunk. This happened through my childhood, definitely most loudly in my teen years, late teen years especially. I became most aware of it in my early 20s, also just like seeing and living through horrible things, seeing very ugly things in my mother, hearing her lie about it, manipulate consistently, betray me with her behavior and her promises not to drink anymore.
I learned a lot about profound denial. I learned a lot about how abandoned I felt when she behaved that way and she would lie about it and break her promises. I saw her do terrible things to me, say terrible things, have terrible boundaries, be perverse, behave in a very confusing way. Basically, make me lose my trust in her as a person, make me, in a way, lose my trust in authority figures. My role model of who is the most ethical person in my life, my mother, can sometimes behave in the exact opposite way. It was incredibly painful. It made me very sad, very depressed, terrified sometimes because I remember one time she started threatening to commit suicide. Although it was only one time she did it, it had a profound effect on me. It made me just not feel like I had my feet on the ground. I didn’t know what she would do. I became terrified. I had dreams about it for a long time that she would kill herself, that I’d come home and find her dead. It was horrifying.
And just one time she said that. I think about people who that happens a lot more with their parents. Well, the profound three days came when I had been away for a little while and I came home one random day to visit my mom in New York City. I was an adult already. I was out of college, and I walked in. Actually, I rang her buzzer because I didn’t have a key at that point, and I didn’t know if she’d answered the door because sometimes in years past I had come and rung the buzzer and she’d been too drunk to answer. I never quite knew what to expect. It was always like my heart would beat a little bit. I’d be excited to see her, hope she’s sober, hope we can connect, but maybe she’ll be the opposite. So in a way, my expectations got lowered.
Well, I came in and I walked in the apartment. I could see she was sober, and yet what I saw, she had an odd look on her face. It was a look that I wasn’t familiar with. It was a look of innocence but embarrassment. I wasn’t used to seeing my mother embarrassed, maybe even a little bit of shame on her face, but also excitement. And yet a look in her eyes, like the look of a child, like the little girl she wasn’t in the pictures that I’d seen from way back in the 1940s when she was just a beautiful, innocent little child.
And she sat down, and she had me sit down, and she told me, she said, “Daniel, I’m an alcoholic.” And it caught me off guard because although she had admitted it in years past, it had only come as a result of me prodding her and forcing her to admit it. And then the next day she’d deny it and go back to her old behavior. She’d never spontaneously come to me and admitted it. And then she told me, she said, “Daniel, I went to Alcoholics Anonymous last night, and I haven’t drunk in two days, and I’m an alcoholic, Daniel.” And that was day one of three of the most profound days of my life.
Because what happened in those three days was my mom and I talked a lot, and she was honest. And she kept for three days that look in her eyes of innocence and honesty and truth. And she just opened her mouth, and all these things that I’d wondered about for two decades of my life were suddenly just pouring out of her. Truth. It was like she lost her sensor. She lost her usual manipulative, strategic self that hid everything behind different veils, where everything that she said was intended to provoke a certain reaction in me, always trying to manipulate my feelings and confuse the reality to make her look a certain way in my eyes. Suddenly that was all gone.
She was just talking about how much she had drunk throughout my childhood and how she’d hid her bottles and how she’d lied to me consistently. All things that I intuitively knew, but suddenly it was like to hear it from the person who had caused that was like, it was like I was a thirsty man in the desert, dying of thirst, and suddenly being given a glass of cold water, and then another glass of cold water, and then another one. And it was like, it was like watching the best movie I’d ever seen in my life. And she just talked and talked and told the truth.
I also saw my mother, who was in her early 50s at this point and was getting older and was not looking so pretty anymore and was looking miserable and had this bitter look in her eyes. And suddenly she was like beautiful and looked young, and like something changed in her face, really. Her face became youthful. And I just, even if the volume had been turned off and I hadn’t understood what she was saying, it was just beautiful to look at her, to realize this is the person who underneath that I had always loved so much and always hoped to see again and who I had lost.
And she told me about how perverse she’d been with me. She admitted things. She said she was sorry. She cried. I cried. I wasn’t used to seeing my mother crying, especially crying in this way where it was like the tears were melting all this facade in her life. And she talked about having been a horrible mother to me and having betrayed my father. She talked about cheating on my father when I was a little baby. I’d never heard this, but I’m like, “You cheated on him?” My father had cheated on her, and she had always been bitter about that and talked about suddenly she’s like, “You know, I wasn’t so lily white myself, Daniel. I cheated before he ever did. I cheated when you were a baby.” And I was like, “Oh, is my father my father?” She said, “He is.” And I later realized it was true. My real biological father was my father, but I was like, this was like, okay, and something pieces were being lined up. A lot of the confusion of my childhood was making more sense.
She talked about having had an illness from shooting needle drugs in her arm and how she’d gotten a nasty transmitted disease, and I had to go out and get tested to find out if I had it too. And she admitted this. Well, my whole childhood I knew she had this disease. Not my, it didn’t, we didn’t figure it out until I was like 10 or 12, but she lied about, you know, how she’d gotten it. She was a nurse. She said she’d gotten it through a needle stick injury, but it wasn’t that. It was through shooting drugs, and she admitted it. And it was like, wow, all these things. And it was like I forgave her because I could see she had changed. She was changing. She was growing.
And she admitted so many things about so many relationships. She talked about her relationship with her parents and how abused she’d been, having been raped when she was younger, how her parents never defended her or supported her. In fact, they supported the rapist. And my mother talked about how she had never defended me when my dad had hit me and abused me and verbally violently abused me and how she’d never stood up and fought for me and how terrible she felt about that.
It was like, it was, it hurt to hear this. And it eventually took me years to start working through this information. But it was the information that I craved because it was the truth of my life and of my history that she was talking about. Something that many people I know never get. That, and it was like these were pieces that I was hungry for.
Later, I realized many people don’t want to know this stuff. It’s too painful. They don’t want to look inside themselves. But I was primed for her telling me this because I had already spent a few years internally exploring myself, my own bad behavior, my own confusions about romance, and how crappy of a boyfriend I was. And how I would reject women all over the place, and I didn’t know why. It was because I didn’t trust anyone, because she had taught me not to trust people.
And here she was doing things now in these three days that were so profoundly trustworthy and honest. I loved my mother so much in those three days. I really loved her so much. I forgave her for the terrible things she did to me that profoundly screwed me up. But it was a discreet three-day period in my life when she behaved this way.
As it happened, I needed to go somewhere again. I had an airplane ticket. I believe it was to California after that. And I left, and I didn’t see her again for six months. And we talked on the phone a couple of times. This is before the days of cell phones. You had to actually pay a lot of money to make a telephone call. And I was living in a lot of places where I didn’t even have a phone.
And then six months later, I came back and I saw her. And I walked in the door, and she was still sober. That was clear. But her face was different. She wasn’t so honest anymore. She looked like older again. It was like before there was an open faucet of just truth coming out of her. Now the faucet was more closed. And as time went on, it became more and more closed. And suddenly she wasn’t telling me so much about her past. And when I brought it up, I could see that she was embarrassed that she’d said it. And I could see that she regretted it. And sometimes she even denied some of the things that she said.
And then she went back to her old behavior of forgetting that she’d even said it and literally forgetting that she told me certain things. So when I brought it up, “Oh no, that didn’t happen,” or then she’d make excuses for herself. In those first three days, she wasn’t making excuses. No excuses. Suddenly, “Oh, I only did that because I was drinking, because your father did this to me, because my life was so hard, because XYZ, that’s why I did this. And you can’t hold me responsible.” Because also part of it later was I started feeling like, wait a second, I started realizing how much she actually screwed me up. And I started feeling my feelings about it: sadness and betrayal and anger. Not just love for her, but also the other range of feelings that I’d never been allowed to feel.
And she didn’t continue on that path of opening up the faucet of truth because I believe it was just too painful for her. Yes, she stayed sober. She’s been sober now for more than 25 years. But as we say, she took it back. She didn’t go back to drinking or drugs, at least as far as I know. I don’t think she has. But she started using other drugs called fakeness, grandiosity, being a big shot, religion, misuse of religion, misuse of, and being important, being a sponsor in AA, being the one who knew better, becoming an expert on this AA program such that she became invulnerable to studying herself. And her old behavior patterns started to slip back in: lying more, being more manipulative again, being dishonest, faking it, putting on a false self.
And what I realized happened to her is being honest was too difficult. And it is difficult to be honest. I’ve realized that in my own life. To tell the truth has consequences. It can really profoundly disrupt relationships, mostly for the better, for what I’ve seen. But not always. Sometimes people become really nasty when you’re too honest with them. What is that old statement? Everybody loves honesty until you’re too honest with them, and then they think you’re an [ __ ]. Well, that’s happened to me. I’ve seen it with other people too. When they’re too honest, they go back into their dishonest life, and they’re honest, and people don’t always react well.
Well, what I saw in my mom’s life is she reacted negatively to her own honesty. And her parents, they didn’t like honesty. They didn’t like her calling them out on how horrible they behaved and still were behaving. And other people in her life, they didn’t like it. People liked her better when she was putting on a false show and “I’m together and everything is well.” Now, and then, so what happened is I ended up losing my mom again. But I didn’t lose the memory of those three days. And for me, even though it was only three days of profound honesty from my mother, I am so grateful for them. Because I have the memory of three days of having a role model of a mother who behaved in a mature fashion. And for me, that was a wonderful gift that she gave me, even if she couldn’t sustain it in any meaningful way and actually betrayed that gift like she betrayed most that she gave me.
But she did give me that gift, and I learned many things about who I really was and what really happened to me in my history. And it really helped explain me to me and gave me a stronger foundation in moving forward in my own life. A life of becoming more true, where I could give myself and the people around me a more true and sustained me that lasted for longer than three days.