It's Not Your Fault

Things your head knows but your heart might not

In 2019 I sent my mother an email. I was angry, but I did not send the angry version of the email to her. I let myself write it, I even addressed it to myself so I wouldn’t accidentally send it to her, and saved it to my drafts. But in that first draft, I let my rage fly, I let the expletives fly.

It wasn’t the first time I’d sent my mother an email like that. When I look back on it, I would unleash my fury (read: heartache, disappointment, confusion) once a decade or so. It’s a long story - so long, in fact, I’m writing a memoir about it - but the source of my rage was my mother’s drinking. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say the source of my rage was my mother’s rage, which she directed at me when she was drinking. Which was a lot.

This began when I was about eight. My mother and stepdad opened a restaurant, a fancy French restaurant, the year they got married. My mother was there all the time, my stepdad would join in the evenings after his regular job at IBM. I would take a radio-call cab from school on the UWS in Manhattan to East 52nd and 2nd Avenue. I’d do my homework at the bar, my legs dangling off a barstool while the bartender cut limes and lemons for the night. Then when the customers would start arriving for dinner, I’d hop up on my little stool and check coats. Everyone thought it was adorable. My tip jar over-floweth-d. But as the night would wear on, people at the bar -directly across from the coat-check - would start to sway. They’d get louder. Sometimes people would yell to be heard over the piano. One night, a very tall man told me I had a mean-streak because I wouldn’t give him a hug. When it was finally time to go, my mother would often need me to help her walk to our cab. Her voice would sound funny. She’d need help getting out the right amount of money when it was time to pay the cab driver. She’d need help getting into our building. I didn’t know why she needed this kind of help some times but not others. I didn’t know why she would get so furious with me some nights, her face, her beautiful face, twisting into something frightening and wild. But it scared the hell out of me.

This went on for years, so I’m going to have to give you the abridged version. I don’t know how old I was when I realized my mother’s transformation from someone I longed for to someone who terrified me was happening because of the alcohol. I think I was possibly twelve or thirteen, but by then, I had long assumed it was because of me. I thought I was enraging her to the point of terror because I was bad, so I spent most of my time trying to figure out how to be good, and somewhere along the way, good was not even the goal anymore. I tried to be perfect.

She did not generally turn her rage on my stepdad. If he tried to intervene, all bets were off and he would become a target, but if he stayed out of her way it was always for me. Not my brother, who was born when I was eleven, never her friends…her rage belonged to me. Try as I did, I could not figure it out. I excelled at school, I danced en pointe until my toes bled at ballet, I starved myself, I babysat for my brother almost every night, but no matter what I did, I could never get it right.

When she was happy with me, it was like the sun shining down. I loved her with such ferocity and longing. Her approval was the greatest of all the great gifts. I worked my ass off for it. Everyone loved my mother. Her friends called her The Queen because she had an air about her. She commanded a room. She was funny and smart and glamorous.

When I was sixteen, I’d had it. I knew it was the Chardonnay that changed her every night. She’d start drinking at 5pm and she wouldn’t stop until she went to bed. Some nights it wouldn’t get ugly, but more nights than not, it would and I was always the focus of her rage. I was grateful she didn’t turn it on my brother, but I was tired of taking the brunt and furious that she didn’t love me. I knew there must be something broken and unlovable about me at my very core if my own mother couldn’t love me, but my god I was sick of trying and failing. And I was almost as tall as her. So one night, instead of cowering and backing toward the wall, protecting my head with my arms I stood up straight and yelled back at her. I told her to go ahead and hit me if that’s what she wanted to do. I told her I knew she didn’t love me and I didn’t know why but I was done trying to earn it. I said I didn’t care anymore, even as the words flew out of my mouth and the tears flooded all over the place. I told her she was an alcoholic and she needed help and enough was enough, and then I stormed out of the house, my whole body shaking from the effort of finally letting it out.

No one criticized my mother. No one talked about the drinking. No one stood up for me. I was going to have to do it on my own.

I’m going to cut way ahead here, to 2019. My mother came to my wedding. It was a wedding I never expected to have. I’d been divorced and doing the single mom thing for 8 years when I met my now-husband. I never thought I’d say I do again, but I did. My mother could not share in my joy. She came to the wedding but she drank all weekend. She was late to many events. She called a few hours before the ceremony and asked me to arrange her car to come later because she wasn’t going to be ready. I told her if she wasn’t ready, she’d miss the ceremony, and also, I was getting ready for my wedding and couldn’t stop to call the limo company. She made it on time, but it wasn’t a good showing. She hated my short hair. She couldn’t say anything nice about how I looked on my wedding day. I didn’t even notice. It was my best friends who asked if I was okay. I loved my mother. I knew she loved me. But we struggled. I’ve skipped over all the parts about boundaries, that’s for another day. All the ways I’d figured out how to have her in my life and still keep myself safe. All the ways for my kids to have a loving relationship with their grandma, because she was an amazing grandmother, without letting them see the drinking. It wasn’t perfect, they saw things as they got older, but it wasn’t bad.

Anyway, a few months later she texted me one day. It was a sunny Saturday. We’d just sent a huge arrangement of flowers to my mom and stepdad for their 40th wedding anniversary, just two days prior. And out of nowhere, with no provocation, she sent me some awful texts. I knew immediately she’d been drinking. She’d had brunch with some family friends who’d also been at our wedding and she hadn’t seen them since. So naturally the wedding came up and as she started to describe the conversation they’d had, I began to feel sick to my stomach. I asked her to stop. I said I wasn’t going to respond and I walked away from my phone, but I was furious. It doesn’t matter right now what the texts were about, suffice it to say she just could not be happy for me.

Thus my email. I let myself write the rage version and saved it to drafts. Went back the next day and removed all the expletives and softened some of the angrier language, deleted many lines. Put it back in drafts. Went back the next day, softened more, deleted more, rephrased some things. Saved to drafts. I did this for a week. I ended up with the softest version of the truth I could live with, and sent it to a few very close, very trusted friends, one of them a therapist. Everyone agreed it was truthful but not enraged. Measured.

I hit send.

Three months went by and I did not hear from my mother.

I’ll save the rest for another day.