Family has often been a tough subject for me. I've been missing having contact with my mother a lot this week. So I thought I'd write a little about what happened there (
OK so it's a lot....long post just to warn you).
My family was fine until about 1985. Both of my parents were petroleum
geologists and the oil market took a dump at that point. We ended up having to move from the mountains to a house in Green
Mountain (in Lakewood, CO- suburb of Denver CO). We moved in August of 2006 and by October of 2006 my Mom was packing up to move out of the house. I can remember her packing her things as she was fighting with my Dad. My parents thought I was asleep but who could sleep through that? Anyway that year was tough because I had to start in a new school and all the sudden my life was incredibly different then it had been. I learned much later that my mother had left my father to be with a man that she'd met in her PhD program at Mines. I don't know that I've ever forgiven her walking out on us.
During the rest of 1986 my mother moved to Evergreen to live with this guy and I visited her on weekends. There was no real place for me to sleep so I felt like an incredible
inconvenience to her. In the early part of 1987 she moved to a
townhouse in Lakewood (about 3 miles from my Dad's house). I sort of had my own bedroom there but slept on an air mattress for most of the first year. This is when I first realized that my mother drank a lot. I would continue my weekend visits but had to work hard to wake my mother up to take me home on Sundays. She did a lot of really strange stuff during this time. She made a huge deal about me leaving things at her house and at one point threatened to send me back to Dad's dressed in a
trash bag because she wanted the clothes that she bought for me to stay there. I remember this part of my life with my mom very vividly. Looking back on it now it was only about 2 years of time but it seemed like a lot longer than that.
In 1988 my mother met the man that would eventually become my step father.
Doran Greening. He was mostly a cool guy but did nothing to help discourage my mother from her intense drinking habit. I used to think it was
OK, but the older I got the more I realized that she had a huge problem. In Aug 1988 my mother ended marrying
Doran and I'm told I didn't treat him very well (although I don't remember it).
Meanwhile my father was working through my mother leaving us and he eventually started dating again. He met a lady through a friend at church that he liked and they eventually got married in July of 1989. She had a son and so my family with my Mom and Dad had disintegrated and rebuilt itself in the space of three years. Now I had
allot of new people that I was suddenly supposed to love....of course I had difficulty with this.
In the summer of 1990 my mother challenged the custody arrangement to try and get me to come live with her as she was getting ready to move away to Tuscaloosa Alabama. To my Dad's credit he protected me from a lot of the ugliness but my mom did little to keep up the same illusion. I specifically remember one Saturday morning that she took me to go talk with her lawyer (I have course had no clue what was going on). My dad had do a good job of documenting all the crazy stuff my mom had done and I ended up staying in Denver for most of the year and going to Tuscaloosa every other Thanksgiving, every other Christmas (although I always went there for part of Christmas break), every spring break and every summer.
The custody arrangement was good for my folks I guess but didn't do a whole lot to help me bolster a social life at home. I was gone all the time! My mom did things to try and make the summers fun like put me in summer camp and I actually got to ride horses while I lived with her. This was fun but I ended up having to rebuild friendships that most people would continue over the summer. It also made me feel like my time didn't belong to me and I got resentful. I can remember sitting in the airport one Thanksgiving day because it was my mom's turn to have me....Good grief it was like they were so interested in who's turn it was to have custody, that they didn't care if it punished me to have to travel.
This went on all through the rest of
Elementary school and into Junior High. My mom moved to California when I started High School, but the visitation schedule stayed the same. After I got to be a junior I really didn't want to go anymore. Most kids my age were getting jobs and starting to be more on their own. I didn't have any friends in California so I stayed home all day and played on the computer while my mom was at work. This is a bad situation for anyone! Also that summer my best friend from high school died in a car accident and I really just wanted to be home.
Fortunately the next summer I didn't have to go because my mom moved back to Colorado and I was able to start working at the local Ace Hardware :) I loved my job and I made really good friends there. My mom kept making demands on my time but I finally put my foot down and told her that I needed to be more on my own. This really pissed her off but her drinking habits and general personality made me want to have nothing to do with her. I just dealt with because I knew I was going off to college the next fall.
All through college it seemed as though my mom and I always fought about money. She always felt like she was paying too much and I worked really hard to budget what she had given me so I didn't understand why I was getting so much
grief over it. The same happened after
graduation when Jesse asked me to marry him. She would give me money but then continue to tell me that I was grateful enough or that I was being unreasonable about what I wanted. I didn't know how I was ever going to please her. During all this she bounced from job to job all over the country and I visited when I could but I didn't try hard to go see her because it just caused me heart ache to see how far she'd fallen into her
alcholism.
In the spring of 2007 she moved back to Denver to work for a consulting firm. She bought a
townhouse not to far from where my husband and I were living. I honestly tried to see her and make the relationship work but her drinking was just
ridiculous at this point. After a really bad visit with my grandmother and my mom getting let go from the consulting firm (in August). I finally wrote her a letter and dropped off her keys at her house. I told her I couldn't see her anymore or talk to her again until she got help for her alcoholism.
I haven't spoken to her since.
I guess the whole reason behind this post is that Jesse and I are starting to think about a family of our own. (Which is amazing that I would even want to have kids after everything I went
through!) I miss having contact with her because there are questions I'd like to ask and things I'd like to know from her about what her pregnancy was like, but I can't call. I have a great relationship with my step mom but I just don't think there's any substitute for your own mother. And so I'm sad.
This isn't a very upbeat post but something I've been wanting to write for a while. Hopefully as Jesse and I do have a family I will miss her less....although I doubt it. I pray all the time for her to get her act together with the drinking but I have no control over her. I know that lots of people think that Alcoholism is an illness but I disagree. It's a choice that may be hard to change later but it's still a choice. At this point I'm sad because she continues to choose the alcohol over me.
I miss my Mom!
