The Year of Wishful Drinking

 I did not speak to my mom for almost a year.

Now, this was not like me. I didn’t go a week without some kind of conversation with her — me complaining about my depressing life and her telling me to grow up (that’s what moms are for). Basically she got the gist that I was safe and sound in my Florida trailer park, whatever comfort that gave her. She was a bonafide worrier. I wish I could have assured her that my mental health was okay…mom just wanted us to take care of ourselves and be happy. I think all parents want that. You could be in a cult, but if it took care of you and made you chipper, that’s fine.

Anyways, I wasn’t happy, but I was drinking to disguise that. May sister had passed away in May. I started staying with John in July. I thought I knew what I was doing; I was just an inebriated tumbleweed, taking free beers from the neighbors and walking in the rain. I always prayed in Spanish for it to rain harder (as if somehow god understood that language better (who knows?)): “Lluvia, mas Fuerte!” I was a lunatic. John took pity on me and bought me beer, and that’s all I can say (I guess he was my sponsor in a sense).

 I made one phone call to my mother on John’s phone. She was trying to send rent money to my (official) roommate that lived several trailers down. One of the last things I said to her real loud was “why don’t you leave me alone?! Get out of my life! You’re ruining my life!” Yeah, that was real nice. What a daughter I was. 

She was just innocently trying to help and figure out what I was doing. I think she knew I was drinking, but how much she wasn’t sure (my drinking clock needed more hours (that Miley Cyrus song should’ve been my anthem: “cause we can’t stop, and we won’t stop…”). She desperately tried to pry information out of me. I told her something like, I’m staying with the guy up the street to help take care of his cats (a big lie, but to my credit could’ve been true). One time she figured out the bar I was at and called there, I’m not joking. My mom was good, like she could’ve been a detective, she asked all the right questions, and then she dropped the guilt stealthily with I love you…

The truth is, I felt like shit after that phone call. I went into John’s kitchen and tried to eat some brand new rotisserie chicken that he just bought for the cats. I wanted a cold beer but I had to settle for a cola. I hunched over his stove eating chicken like a starving person. John went to get me a Gatorade from the gas station across the street. He asked if he could wash my dress (the one I wore for days while i pissed in random neighbors yards (sorry if I’m being too honest)). I just flung it off. Yeah, I was like that.

But this story is not supposed to be about me: It’s supposed to be about how i didn’t talk to my mother for almost a year, enough to drive a concerned parent out of their mind.

Because, she would call that phone at John’s, the cell phone he rarely used, and I wouldn’t answer. And I told him not to answer. Because what could I say? “Im drunk, and I was drunk yesterday and I’ll be drunk tomorrow,” or “yes, I know Justine is dead, what do you want me to do?!” or “I don’t need your help!” 

Any of that would have been better than ignoring her. It would have been something to hold onto. And John just let the phone ring because he respected me, but i know it bothered him, because he said he thought about answering that phone. And the thing was, I wasn’t taking anybody’s calls. I think I talked to my dad once, around Christmas time. Or before that. So I know my mom called my dad to get information about me. I know she grilled him. 

But I was more comfortable talking to dad, because I knew he could understand the drinking, being himself an alcoholic, even though he didn’t approve and couldn’t justify it. Atleast he knew when to drink and when not to drink, how to mourn family members, and how to pick up a phone. What I did was mean, and I didn’t know just how mean until later on.

Christmas went by (and it sucked) and that phone rang, and the ringing just made me drink more. It drove me crazy. I wanted the effing thing to break. I wanted to die, but I couldn’t do it in John’s house. I had that decency. So after I burned my mouth on a burrito and it got infected, I honestly tried to stay off the booze, by smoking a bunch of pot. My weight worried me. I felt a ghostly pain where I thought my liver was. We had two motherless kittens die in the house (I assumed the mother cat got hit by a car because I hurled my glass marijuana bowl in anger and it scared her (for the record, John put up with a lot of my shit)). I made john wait hours with me at the ER one night to see about this liver pain. He made me go see a real doctor. I got an ultrasound, and there was something there, a thing called a hemangioma, which is like a blood clot.

That scared the shit out of me, so of course, I took up drinking again. And I’m sorry this story is so long.

About March — I’d call it the end of the rodeo — I got the gumption to finally call my mother. It was late and I was wearing one of John’s large sweaters and watching the movie Love Story (because if I wanted to watch a movie, even a sappy one, John let me watch it) while nursing a beer. It was cold (the beer and the weather). I was crying. John had went to the gym on his bicycle like he always did, so I grabbed the black tracphone and dialed my mommy’s number at like one in the morning. She answered. “Mommy? It’s me…”

I am so glad I made that call, but so upset by what I confirmed, that my dad had hinted at. Mom was sick. She had gone to the free clinic and they found a lump. She was calm about it. She talked to me for a good hour that the phone almost died and I had to sit on the wood floor while it charged from the wall. She knew I was drunk. She was a little upset I think. She didn’t sleep well most nights. She was grateful I called, though. I was, too.

By the end of that month I was headed to the local mental ward as part of my sobriety journey. There was a lot of fixing of shit to do. John helped (I’m so grateful for that). I got myself a new phone and called my mother to see how her cancer was going.

I’ll let you make your own assumptions about how and why my mom got sick. Yes, I feel responsible. I’d take it all back if I could. If her death now is somehow my punishment, I could believe that, I could somehow live with that, I could blame the god of my understanding, knowing the consequences of sin is its own punishment, and maybe there is a thing called karma and it’s alive and well (though I like to believe what Dennis Bullock says, it’s all about frequency (look into him if you’d like)). As a wise person would say, you make your bed and you lie in it.

God does not make you do anything you don’t want to do. God did not make me call my mother. God did not take away my mother’s breast cancer; it reignited as brain cancer. My neighbor said her mother always  told her you don’t question God. Is that true? I was hoping all would “be revealed in due time…”

Cancer is a mystery, although alcohol is certifiably “cunning, baffling, and powerful” (according to AA). They are both diseases, perhaps beyond our control. Maybe we shouldn’t feel so guilty, maybe it only empowers the disease. 

Me and my brother just watched Forrest Gump. It’s always been a good movie. Forrest’s mama died on a Tuesday, just like my mama. At the end of the movie he is talking to Jenny at her grave, and he says something like, “I don’t know if mama is right, that we all have a destiny, or we’re just floating around accidental like on a breeze. Maybe it’s both…” 

…and that just stood out to me, made me think, that our fate could be made up of very purposeful accidents, that life is not planned, that the serendipity is meaningful, that we have the terrible beauty of free will— you can go your own way, and you can come home…

It’s just a phone call away. 

(I love you mom, and I am sorry)