Alone Again Naturally
My Mom tried to kill herself. I shouldn’t be putting this out there as if it was just something she tried to do like a new recipe or a sport she wanted to learn. But she told me she wanted a way out, a way to end all of the terror of being a mother to me. And what could I do? I have no memory of this. But she’s told me how it was when I came into this world with just her and my Dad to make sense of what my being thrust into their lives meant. I wasn’t unwanted but I was surely something to be dealt with.
They didn’t even have the term “Post-Partum Depression” at that point in 1964. I bet so many women who had babies and felt this awful blanket of lead and sleep and disinterest felt awful. My Mom told me she did. Nothing had prepared her for having a baby and then as if struck by some magical twig, a specter’s wand, a baby appears and she simply wanted nothing to do with it. It wasn’t me she didn’t want; it was the overwhelming responsibility of keeping something other than herself alive, an entirely defenseless little ball of need.
It’s nothing short of mind-boggling that we live in a world where so much is made of prenatal care and there isn’t a moment of it dedicated to preparing a woman for the emotional atom bomb that is about to detonate in their life at roughly nine months. Nothing. Not a word. We just figure that any woman is somehow graced with this sort of resilience and knowledge from birth. How hard can it be to have a baby and keep it alive we seem to ask. Well, my mom, at least, wasn’t prepared and it really did a number on her.
I survived. Clearly. I was fed and I guess given some sort of liquid. But she fled and my Dad didn’t understand. He had no training in this either. He was furious at her and he threatened to tell her mom how out of hand her daughter was. That terrified my mom. While they fought, I just laid in a crib alone, maybe dreaming of heroin and pussy and guns. Maybe not. I was just a little thing. I didn’t know about such things yet.
At some point, with no backup from my dad as far as spending time with me, the little Mike languishing in the crib in Towson MD was enough to make my Mom take a bottle of Valium and just try and find a way out. Who can blame her? She’s told me this with scant details but enough to know and I love her all the more for it. I know the feeling. I’ve kissed the thought of pulling the plug and leaving all of you behind. She tried. I never did…yet. But somehow, she survived, and it all lifted and my memories of her are of an incredibly loving and devoted mom. A best friend.
***
I called her like I’d done so many times before and told her, through tears and choking breaths that I’d been using and was strung out and needed help. I really had no one else to call. My Dad was gone, and my Mom was all I had. Sure, I had friends but when that moment comes and there’s nothing left but to let someone know you’ve fucked up again and were strung to the gills, well, I called my Mom. I’d hear the sadness and disappointment in her voice. She was never surprised. She always suspected it. I sound different when I’m loaded. My voice is lower and more frantic. I speak like I’m trying to sell an idea to some angel investor. I’m on fire and yet I’m dying. She always knew.
And so, I’d wind up in another rehab with more of the money my Dad had, inexplicably, left us. Christ, how much money has been spent on my rehab habit? I burned through tens and maybe a hundred thousand dollars on drugs. Imagine what that feels like. It feels like you’re a monster. Just taking everything and putting it in your right arm and burning it away on some bonfire of the soul. A diseased soul engulfing everything your father worked for to set you up and you just blew it. You trade it in for comfort. You trade it in for oblivion.
And I’d call my mom and ask her to come over so I could tell her face to face. It’s happened again. I’ve returned to type. She’d get angry and then relent. She never wavered and I’d wind up in another place full of meds and beige walls and people whom I fell in love with and never spoke to again
***
My Mom is 87 years old. It scares me to death. I can’t imagine a world in which she’s not in it. And, that day will come, and it terrifies me. One day, I’ll be alone. And what’s to keep me alive? I guess it’s my dogs. My mom has been my anchor in this life of wayward floating through the seas of drugs and laziness and slight depression. Just a hint of anhedonia. But it’s enough. She’s all that keeps me from getting high sometimes, imagining having to tell her. It’s too much and it works, and I haven’t got high, I mean, actually high for years. Psychedelics and wine and such come and go but the real thing, the heroin, has been kept at bay in some locker of the past. And it’s my Mom’s tears that keep it there. Will I simply self-destruct when she goes? I hope not. It’s certainly not my plan but I haven’t built up a whole lot of faith in myself over this crazy life.
***
Sometimes, when I was little my mom would meet me in the kitchen on a school morning and ask me if I wanted to stay home and go on a picnic, or maybe fishing or just spend the day with her. These were some of the best days of my life, little kid or not. And so, we’d spend the morning around the house planning an adventure and I was so ecstatic to miss school with my Mom’s blessing. Both of my parents knew the value of letting a kid miss a day of school every now and then. They knew I did well in school and missing a day wasn’t going to derail me. And so, we’d decide to maybe go to the health food store that at that point in time and in our little rural town was a real mystery as to how it even existed. Health Food which mainly meant alfalfa sprouts and whole wheat bread was a very new thing and my mom, always adventurous was an early adopter. This was in the days when McDonald’s Filet-a-fish were considered health food. The health food store was in a little building at an intersection in Hickory. Hickory was basically what became of my town, Bel Air if you drove north into the farmlands. All of a sudden you were in Hickory and there in a little wooden building as if it was an afterthought was the place of sprouts and wheat germ and the novel whole wheat bread. They made these sandwiches which to this day are something I’ve never had since, and I’ve tried so hard to replicate. There really wasn’t anything fancy about them and I can easily walk to Vons and buy all the ingredients but it’s never the same. Whole wheat bread with some sort of mild cheese, tomato, mayo and alfalfa sprouts. Easy enough but Jesus they were good. They were so good because of my mom and the fact that she’d let me stay home from school to get one and take it to some pond, many of which dotted my childhood landscape. We’d sit in the grass and throw bread into the water while eating and watching little mouths pop up and pull the bread under. It was magical. Sometimes I’d bring my little fishing rod and try and smash bread into a ball that could stick on the little fishhook. Sometimes I’d catch a little bluegill. We’d put him back and that was our day. Just my mom and me and some hippy sandwich and sitting on the edge of the water fishing or, more likely, feeding the little fish. My mom went through the wringer when I was born but somehow, she turned into my hero.
***
About a year or so ago, maybe less, and just about after the last New Year, my mom got really sick. Not sick like a cold or even something that required the hospital; she just lost so much of her faculties and had a horrible time walking and talking and thinking. I brought her here to my house to keep an eye on her and to help in any way I could. I felt helpless. But I also knew that there was no way I’d do anything but this. Over the years she’d make comments about what would happen if she ever needed to go to a nursing home or whatever. I always told her that there was no way she’d ever go to someplace like that if I was alive. Absolutely not. And now this felt like that moment had come. For a few weeks, she just laid on the couch and slept and when she was awake, she was like a different person. All jumbled thoughts and silly arrangements of spoken words. I was just terrified. I’d talk to Dan every day and tell him how afraid I was and how I think that she’s here forever. And I didn’t care about that I was just so afraid I’d spoken to the Mom I knew my whole life for the last time, and I didn’t even realize it when it had happened. She just became someone else.
This went on for a few weeks and I felt so helpless but also fully resigned to the idea that this was just where my Mom was going to live for the rest of her live. Every day I’d beg her to move to my bedroom, but she was always afraid she’d trip if she had to get up in the middle of the night. Trip over one of the dogs that are forever lounging in doorways and hallways. They’d be closed in all night if I slept in my bed and kept the door closed. She felt more comfortable with that. At some point, as I was going over her meds that she took daily I asked her where her Lexapro was. She didn’t know. I knew enough to realize you just can’t stop taking an anti-depressant like that just like that. I asked her when she stopped taking it and why? She remembered that it was about 10 days earlier, but I never got a solid reason why. And so, I went to her house and got her Lexapro, and we slowly got her back on it and up to her dosage. It was like a miracle beamed down on us. Within days she was completely back to normal. Christ, the relief I felt. And she felt it as well. It was an episode which had no real reason to exist and yet we went through it together. The point of all of this is that I feel like I know what I’ll do when the day comes when she really can’t acre completely for herself. And I know that I’ll be there for her and everything else can go to hell. I owe her that much. And now I know I can do it.
***
I think my mom has felt tremendous guilt over the way I was left alone for the first two years of my life. I tell her that all I know was that she was the best mom I could imagine having. In an effort to assuage that guilt she became more of a friend than a mom. And as beautiful and close as this can be, I certainly took advantage of it over the years with my addiction. There was the day that I received a big bag of methaqualone powder from South Africa via the dark web. A big baggie of Quaalude powder. By this point, my drug use was fully out in the open and while she certainly didn’t condone it or in any way didn’t want it to stop, she made some sort of weird peace with it. I’d found some Methaqualone test kits on eBay. Instead of hiding all of this from her as she happened to be at my house when the package arrived, I did what I usually do when I want to hide something from someone. I just go the other way and offer it to them and it defuses the shame. “Hey, Mom! You want a Quaalude?” She’d bark “No! You shouldn’t have that stuff!” I’d laugh and ask her if she, the pharmacist, wanted to help me weigh and put the powder in the capsules that I had waiting for this day. She lightened up and while she was utterly opposed to it, the pharmacist in her beamed forth and she kinda got into the whole process of testing the powder, weighing it and portioning it out into so many empty gel caps. Admittedly it's a fairly screwed up mother and son moment but we’d come to this, and you know what? It was fine. We wound up embracing the absurdity of the whole thing. When we were done, I put everything away and we made dinner. I did not take any Quaaludes while she was here.
I can’t imagine having a better mom. I often wonder where I’d be with a different mom. Everything about me is the same but without her to fall back on. I truly, to my core, believe I would have died a long time ago. God knows I’ve done so many things that people routinely die from but somehow, my mom was always there to pull me through that last yard of life instead of floundering at the one-yard line and dying. And maybe I did it myself, the thought of causing her so much pain by living through my death was enough to push through and ask for help or not put just a little more coke in the spoon or not pick up the gun when it was all too much. My mom’s kept me alive on so many occasions and it’s simply because she is the perfect mom. She loves every part of me, even the darkest, dirtiest most diseased parts of me.
When my friend John Albert wrote “Wrecking Crew” which chronicled the baseball team I started I desperately tried to keep it from my parents. There was no way I could allow them to read such an unwavering description of my debauchery and hedonism. The book, which uses all our real names details my drug use, my screwed-up relationships and the occasional treatises with call girls and common hookers, both of whom I look up to. And so here was this book, a real book. A hardcover book that was for sale in the Baseball Hall of Fame bookstore and which Phillip Seymour Hoffman wanted to make into a movie and I had to hide it from them. Eventually, my Dad passed, and the book didn’t seem so important anymore. At some point, my mom and I were talking about things of which neither of us knew about each other. I won’t reveal hers, but I mentioned the book, “Oh yeah, I read that. Mike, you really got into some crazy stuff.” I was flummoxed! How had she found it? “You read it??” “Oh yeah” she said and then just laughed. I’d got her all wrong. I’d not ever given her enough credit for just being able to roll with things that were real. She understood me. She knew what I was like and where I’d been. And she loved me unconditionally. Truly unconditionally. Have your mom read a book about you fucking prostitutes and see how she reacts. I can’t think of a more mortifying experience and yet it happened, and it just brought us closer.
***
When my Dad passed away and we went through the process of dealing with everything that the world throws at you when someone you love dies, my mom decided to move to LA. She’d always liked it here and there was really nothing to keep her there. She’d always had a life that was rich in interests that weren’t tied to my Dad so when he left us, she was ready to move on. It took some time but eventually, she moved into a condo in Pasadena, not five minutes from my house. If she couldn’t or wouldn’t have made that move, I would have to move back to her. The distance and worry as she gets older would have destroyed me. But now she’s just up the road and thank God for it.
On Sundays, she comes over and I cook dinner. Sometimes we’ll skip it but it’s a sacred ritual. I love these Sunday dinners with her and me and often other people whom she loves. People like Piper and Dan. I make some sort of spectacular meal and we sit around watching cooking shows or such while she drinks her wine and I smoke and try to make her laugh. At times I’d drink too but it was always in secret. Sometimes she knew and sometimes I’d hide it. But these Sundays mean everything to me and yet, they can be incredibly painful.
My mom is very active, but her age is definitely apparent in how she talks and remembers things. She still seems more active than me with the constant classes she takes at the senior center, classes like improv and painting and straight-up acting. She does all these things. She still drives and has a tribe of friends who she regularly hangs out with drinking wine and playing cards. She’s quite something for her age. But when we sit and talk and when she forgets things she’s just said or can’t remember how to operate her Apple TV well I get annoyed as I would with anyone half her age. And sometimes I express this annoyance and then I want to slit my throat. Fuck, the pain of betraying her with my petty reflexive impatience is overwhelming. So many memories of her taking care of me flood back and engulf me and a million fingers from this vaporous movie of the past point at me and call me a monster. I try so hard to be more patient and when I fail, I hate myself. I know that the day will come when I’d give everything I have to experience a single moment of talking to her again. That day will come and there will be no buying anything back. She’ll be gone forever, and I’ll be swimming in the regret of every moment of not treating her like my friend and my mom who spent so much of her life just trying to keep me alive. Literally and figuratively. I love you, mom. I love you like the sun loves the moon as they both conspire to keep us all alive.
P.S. This song has been an almost vapid pop song for my entire life. And yet, a couple of years ago while playing World of Warcraft and talking to a friend on Discord he played this song for me and asked me to read the lyrics. Good Lord. The weight and sadness he’s smuggled into this pretty little song is quite something. Maybe the saddest song I never knew existed.