slimvictor
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2008
- Messages
- 6,483
For much of my life, I lied about the woman who raised me. Now, it’s time to come clean
LAURA KIESEL
The author, left, with her mother and brother
One evening when I was 8, in the candlelit kitchen of our apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, I sat at the table while my mother stirred a large glass of Kahlua and milk. In the background, Bruce Springsteen sang of gritty streets and the sinister seduction of cocaine. Whenever Springsteen was on the turntable, the mood of our apartment turned morose, and I often felt weighed down by his music as if smothered in heavy blankets.
“I want to talk to you,” my mother said, looking up from her drink as she slid me a glass of chocolate milk. “About drugs.”
I nodded, and she went on. “I’ve done drugs,” she said. My eyes widened as she confirmed what I long suspected but didn’t want to believe. “And now I am done. No more drugs.”
At this time, a one-on-one with my mother was so rare as to be nearly extinct. My stepfather had recently left her, after a fight in which she charged at him with a butcher knife and slit open his palms as he struggled against her. He moved into his own apartment a couple of blocks away, but after a few months, he skipped town altogether and disappeared. The six months after he left and before we moved in with my grandparents were perhaps the loneliest and scariest of my life.
Mornings were unpredictable. They wavered between my mother refusing to get out of bed in the morning — time when I dressed and walked myself to school after tending to my toddler brother — and waking me up with slaps and violent shaking, due to her desperate dope sickness. She once yanked me out of bed so hard by my legs that I slammed down to the floor with a force that knocked the air out of my chest. I would then follow her into the kitchen while she banged the kitchen cabinets.
“I suppose you want breakfast, you little cocksucker,” she’d snap, while I stood still, my hands balled into tiny fists by my sides. At 8, I had no idea what a cocksucker was. I thought it was a reference to roosters.
So I’d give a stiff little nod, and in response she’d grab a plastic bowl from a shelf and hurl it in my general direction. After ducking out of its way, I’d pick up the bowl from the floor and proceed to the refrigerator for milk. My silence enraged her more (though then again, so did my words or tears, so I opted for silence in the hopes of being as inconspicuous as possible). Often, she’d grab me by my hair or neck, pulling me back toward her as I walked past.
“When I was your age, I could scramble eggs, but you can only pour yourself cereal. You’re useless,” she said as she let go of me.
Another of my failures was an inability to properly braid my Lady Godiva-length hair, which my mother would gripe about as she attacked my scalp with the plastic teeth of her comb. On the occasions when I squirmed too much or she was confronted with an especially stubborn knot, she would drag me across the peeling particle-board floor by my mane while she wildly waved a pair of scissors in the other hand, threatening to take away the only part of me I knew to be pretty. When she tired of the burden of my weight, she’d let me go and order me to braid my hair or she’d get rid of it for good. I’d stand there sobbing, my fingers shakily trying to thread three thick strands together while her scissors pointed tauntingly at my head. Eventually she’d give up on the threat and settle for a swift kick to my midsection or some more expletives whose meaning I didn’t know, but whose tone I couldn’t help but understand.
After school, my mother often went away for hours at a time, leaving me to babysit my brother and fix myself more cereal or a bologna and mayonnaise sandwich for dinner. When she returned, she banished Matthew and me to the bedroom or disappeared into the bathroom. Later on, I’d find her slumped in our lounging chair or sprawled out on the rollout couch, her legs and arms brandishing marks that looked like the vampire bites I had seen in the horror movies I was much too young to watch but which she’d allow anyway. My mother’s state veered dramatically between catatonic and so cranked up that, Catholic schoolgirl that I was, I suspected demonic possession. I kept half-expecting her head to start wheeling around on her shoulders like Linda Blair’s in “The Exorcist.”
When she came clean to me that night about her drug abuse, she didn’t apologize or show any sorrow over her vicious mood swings, of which I was the sole witness and scapegoat. Instead, she disavowed the junkie she was as though it were a separate spirit that had taken her over and that she had chased out solely through the brute strength of her own newly discovered willpower. After acknowledging her addiction and redemption in the same breath, she went on to offer a laundry list of reasons why I should never do drugs, which included macabre anecdotes, most of which I would learn much later in my life were merely urban legends.
cont at
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/31/my_mother_the_drug_addict/
LAURA KIESEL
The author, left, with her mother and brother
One evening when I was 8, in the candlelit kitchen of our apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, I sat at the table while my mother stirred a large glass of Kahlua and milk. In the background, Bruce Springsteen sang of gritty streets and the sinister seduction of cocaine. Whenever Springsteen was on the turntable, the mood of our apartment turned morose, and I often felt weighed down by his music as if smothered in heavy blankets.
“I want to talk to you,” my mother said, looking up from her drink as she slid me a glass of chocolate milk. “About drugs.”
I nodded, and she went on. “I’ve done drugs,” she said. My eyes widened as she confirmed what I long suspected but didn’t want to believe. “And now I am done. No more drugs.”
At this time, a one-on-one with my mother was so rare as to be nearly extinct. My stepfather had recently left her, after a fight in which she charged at him with a butcher knife and slit open his palms as he struggled against her. He moved into his own apartment a couple of blocks away, but after a few months, he skipped town altogether and disappeared. The six months after he left and before we moved in with my grandparents were perhaps the loneliest and scariest of my life.
Mornings were unpredictable. They wavered between my mother refusing to get out of bed in the morning — time when I dressed and walked myself to school after tending to my toddler brother — and waking me up with slaps and violent shaking, due to her desperate dope sickness. She once yanked me out of bed so hard by my legs that I slammed down to the floor with a force that knocked the air out of my chest. I would then follow her into the kitchen while she banged the kitchen cabinets.
“I suppose you want breakfast, you little cocksucker,” she’d snap, while I stood still, my hands balled into tiny fists by my sides. At 8, I had no idea what a cocksucker was. I thought it was a reference to roosters.
So I’d give a stiff little nod, and in response she’d grab a plastic bowl from a shelf and hurl it in my general direction. After ducking out of its way, I’d pick up the bowl from the floor and proceed to the refrigerator for milk. My silence enraged her more (though then again, so did my words or tears, so I opted for silence in the hopes of being as inconspicuous as possible). Often, she’d grab me by my hair or neck, pulling me back toward her as I walked past.
“When I was your age, I could scramble eggs, but you can only pour yourself cereal. You’re useless,” she said as she let go of me.
Another of my failures was an inability to properly braid my Lady Godiva-length hair, which my mother would gripe about as she attacked my scalp with the plastic teeth of her comb. On the occasions when I squirmed too much or she was confronted with an especially stubborn knot, she would drag me across the peeling particle-board floor by my mane while she wildly waved a pair of scissors in the other hand, threatening to take away the only part of me I knew to be pretty. When she tired of the burden of my weight, she’d let me go and order me to braid my hair or she’d get rid of it for good. I’d stand there sobbing, my fingers shakily trying to thread three thick strands together while her scissors pointed tauntingly at my head. Eventually she’d give up on the threat and settle for a swift kick to my midsection or some more expletives whose meaning I didn’t know, but whose tone I couldn’t help but understand.
After school, my mother often went away for hours at a time, leaving me to babysit my brother and fix myself more cereal or a bologna and mayonnaise sandwich for dinner. When she returned, she banished Matthew and me to the bedroom or disappeared into the bathroom. Later on, I’d find her slumped in our lounging chair or sprawled out on the rollout couch, her legs and arms brandishing marks that looked like the vampire bites I had seen in the horror movies I was much too young to watch but which she’d allow anyway. My mother’s state veered dramatically between catatonic and so cranked up that, Catholic schoolgirl that I was, I suspected demonic possession. I kept half-expecting her head to start wheeling around on her shoulders like Linda Blair’s in “The Exorcist.”
When she came clean to me that night about her drug abuse, she didn’t apologize or show any sorrow over her vicious mood swings, of which I was the sole witness and scapegoat. Instead, she disavowed the junkie she was as though it were a separate spirit that had taken her over and that she had chased out solely through the brute strength of her own newly discovered willpower. After acknowledging her addiction and redemption in the same breath, she went on to offer a laundry list of reasons why I should never do drugs, which included macabre anecdotes, most of which I would learn much later in my life were merely urban legends.
cont at
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/31/my_mother_the_drug_addict/
