I guess one could say that it started a few years ago. Most of my family would say it started before I was born, but I have no comment on the matter. For all I remember, my mother was a great mom. She drank occasionally, but her main purpose in life was me. Its how I plan to be a mom, but I guess now that I look back on it, my mom never really had anything of her own. No particular hobbies that weren't home related. She liked to garden, she liked to cook, and she liked when the house was clean. We shopped on the weekends and she was there for my entire extracurricular career, be it softball, chorus, field hockey, clubs, or just hanging out with my friends. She liked heavy metal and punk music, and rocked it through the house on Saturday mornings when she'd be on her cleaning sprees. She hated to love animals because she was so allergic to them, but it didn't stop her from doing so. When she wasn't being a mom, she was at work, being an independent badass woman that people knew not to reckon with. When it came to be chill time, she'd hang out with family mostly, though she did have a few people she worked with that she was friendly with, she kept it pretty close to home.
Looking back, I expect that was part of the problem. When things would get back with her and my dad (they've been breaking up for my entire life) she didn't have a lot of places she felt comfortable turning to. Though the first few times she did have friends. She moved out on her own when I was in third grade, and it was no big thing. She took me with her and handled it, but we eventually went home. Fact was, she was the one who taught me that you have to be able to take care of yourself, because no one else is ever going to. You can't REALLY depend on anyone but yourself. And as long as you have you, and do what YOU know in your heart is right for you, then fuck em all, so to speak.
The older I got, the less we got along, Madre and I. Apparently I'm very much like my father, and it becomes more apparent with age. This is funny, because I've been hearing THAT my whole life too. I'm so much like my father, until they meet my mom. I speak just like her and sound just like her (I did before she started smoking a pack a day anyway) and I move like her and I go off on tangents just like her. I'm not one a bitch to be reckoned with, just like her. So everyone has always said how much I am like one parent, until they meet the other. I guess I'm a fair mix of the two. I can only hope that physically I am more McKim than Balasz, for my sake. The McKim's are way healthier.
However, when I got old enough to move out, I did so, not because I wanted to but because I've always been a stupid romantic sucker and I moved in with my boyfriend long before I was ready to. A very expensive learning experience, my mom said it would be, and she was right. Ten points for her. But when I moved back home, I had to live with the both of them again, except this time I was an adult and working 50 hours a week, and had my taste of freedom. This was no real problem, because we all got along for a bit. But my mom had to have a hysterectomy, and that was where I remember it all starting. She had the surgery and was in lots of pain after. She got addicted to pain pills and wasn't able to handle it. She made friends with this neighbor, who I'd go back in time and smite off the face of the Earth if I could, just so that she never got the taste of the dope. The neighbor was a "self medicating" diabetic who apparently found that heroin was an acceptable way for him to manage his illness. Awful.
My mother started passing out in the bathroom at one, two o clock in the morning. I'd come home from work (movie theater) and the bathroom light would be on and she'd be asleep on the toilet. Or nodding out on the toilet anyway, not fully asleep. She'd be flittering around the house trying to decide if she wanted to make herself a bowl of cereal, and take thirty minutes to do so. A lot of the time I told her to just go to bed, and then I'd go to bed. I knew she was on pain meds, I didn't realize how far she had already fallen. She started coming home from work and going right across the street to the neighbors house in her work clothes, before she even came in the door. We'd see her car in front of the house, but she wouldn't be home for half an hour. My dad was FURIOUS. The only way he knows how to deal with things is to confront them head on. He told her she needed to stop this, and she denied that she was doing anything wrong. She couldn't help that she was in pain.
Next door to the neighbor was this relatively dilapidated house, that the owner decided he was no longer planning on maintaining. He went away on vacation for a month one winter and his pipes froze and broke, causing TONS of damage to the inside of the house. He decided he didn't care, and wasn't going to fix it. My parents bought the house for a disgustingly cheap price, and my dad went in with a sledgehammer. He had found his love in contracting, and decided to practice on this house. Originally they didn't plan to live in it, but after a few months of sweat and blood, they were attached. We picked out every single detail of the house and made it ours.
Then the neighbors got arrested, and their house got raided. And my mom could barely get out of bed for over a week. Withdrawal hurts, I'm told. It was then that my dad realized that he was making a huge mistake. We should never have moved into that house, because their marriage was falling apart for real this time. His main argument was that this had happened before, when i was a wee little baby, and he stayed with her and put up with all the rehab and whatnot because he was not going to lose ME over their weakness. This time around, I was in my twenties, and I wasn't a factor in whether he stuck around or not. I was part of the argument to try to tell my mom that she needed to stop. She never listened. She said she was in pain, she has medical problems, this and that. We tried and tried and eventually, my dad fell apart and started drinking. They got along less and less and less, and he would come home drunk and angry, and she would be wasted, and it was an ugly cycle. If I hadn't had Steve, I don't know how I'd have gotten through it, but of course, thats another story.
Padre came home one night and punched a hole in the wall, Madre called the cops and he hasn't been allowed anywhere near her since. He moved in with Gamara, and he still isn't really the same. He drinks too much, he has a girlfriend who drinks too much, and he's not happy either. Not that being with my mom would make him happy, its right that they got divorced. But its common that everyone thinks their relationship falling apart has only affected my mom and not my dad. I may be the only person who sees that's not true. He's guilty too. He never knew the right way to deal with what her problems were becoming, and unfortunately he knew that it was right for them to be apart, and one day just said FUCK IT. He knows that he could have tried to get into therapy, but he didn't feel he was the one that needed it. She always did, but he never realized that it was more than just her, we were part of her problem too. Maybe he was scared of some therapist picking his brain and telling him that he's got issues too. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to go and talk to someone about what was going on. She tried to get me to go to a therapist when they were breaking up when I was in high school. I refused. I still don't think I needed it. I had a great group of friends that I could lean on at the time, and my journal (which I still have, but I type much faster than I write, and have a lot to say) and I'm pretty good at figuring myself out. I don't feel that I'm chemically imbalanced to feel the way that I do, and I think I've done an ok job thus far of dealing with the things that have been thrown at me. Except maybe now. It's been harder to deal with things this time around.
Anyhoo, fact is that my dad is struggling too. He should have taken more time to be alone, and gotten his act together by himself. He didn't, he got lonely and found himself a girlfriend that brought a whole new set of drama into his life. She makes him happy sometimes, but I guess its only when they're alone. In a social setting its difficult because the both of them drink like fish, and then they get angry and fight like stupid teenagers who don't care about the consequences of their actions. I refuse to deal with that anymore. I'm tired of being the adult in every situation, I'M supposed to be the one doing stupid things and learning from them. Instead I learn from everyone else's mistakes. I'm not particularly reckless, but I'm due to do some crazy shit sometimes soon. I feel much older than I really am, and I worry that maybe I'm not actually living my life. Imagine them hearing that. Because they need a little more guilt to deal with, right? Ha.
So Madre's problems got worse and worse. And she lost her job, and her company car, because she was constantly passing out at work and not able to function. They laid her off. That was a pretty huge weight onto the small bit of strength that was holding my parents together. She stopped trying to make things work, because she just wanted to stay home and get wasted all the time, because she couldn't deal with the pain of the things that were going on around her. Forget about the physical pain she was in, she was making herself numb to life. Shortly after my dad moved out, I had to move out, too. Steve needed to leave his mom's house, and he lived with us for a few weeks while we saved up our security deposit, but living with my mom as the person she'd become was unbearable, and I could feel myself going the same route as my dad. I didn't want to fight with her constantly, I didn't want to end up getting myself arrested, so I removed myself from the situation. The next year and a half they spent in an ugly divorce, in which she got the house and he didn't get anything, but they agreed he didn't have to pay alimony. Which is good because he doesn't have a leg to stand on as it is, he certainly wasn't about to work his ass off to pay her so she could just sit in the house and be fucked up all the time. Which is exactly what happened.
The Balasz family moved in, to "help with the bills" even though she has been planning on just skating by in the house as it is. They haven't paid the mortgage in I don't know how long. Their plan was to keep on the utilities until one day someone put a lock on the door and they'd move to somewhere else. Like a bunch of freaking gypsies. So far that plan has been working out for them, except my mom has fallen down so far I don't even know who she is. She's passed out half the time. She can barely speak, its like there are marbles in her mouth, and she misdials even MY phone number. I don't think she could go back to work even if she wanted to, she doesn't have the mental capacity to be that badass independent woman she was. Maybe she could get back to that, but she has to kick the habit first, and get through LOADS of therapy.
Which is where I come in. She nearly burnt down the house a few weeks ago, trying to cook in the middle of the night. She passed out in the bathroom and the thing she was cooking spilled grease and the fire alarms in the house went off. My uncle called me flipping out the next day. She's gotten so bad with them being there and no one ever does anything. I left because I knew I'd fight with her, they came in with their kids hoping the kids would remind her why she shouldn't do these things, but no dice. Every time things get bad, they call me and hope i can talk some sense into her, and half the time all we do is fight. Its HARD to not fight about it, because I don't know who I'm dealing with. MY mother would never be this person, but alas, here she is.
My grandmother and I dragged her up to a hospital in Bergen County, and told them that we thought she was trying to kill herself. We didn't know what she had taken, or how much, and she gets angry when we try to find out. She also LIES. She used to be a pretty good liar, but as I said, her mental capacity has gone so far down that she's not that good. Its getting easier to see through her lies, but its hard to think like she may be thinking, because logic goes out the window. I'm trying to keep a handle on that, and its helping me to stay a step ahead of her. She spend 10 days in detox, and did nothing but fight tooth and nail because she was in the psych ward (you can only hold someone against their will in NJ for psychiatric purposes, you CANNOT force and adult drug addict into rehab- amazing I know). She got out, though she admits she needs therapy because she is depressed, but still refuses to admit that she has a substance abuse problem. I've cut off her supply that she gets from her doctors, by calling them and explaining why she was hospitalized, but that's only a temporary solution I know. She can get what she wants from her slimy associates and I know it, its just a matter of time. She is mad because she was getting what she wanted from them by trading pills, and by my calling her doctors and cutting off her supply of "good" prescriptions (which really are "bad", obviously) she doesn't actually have any currency on the street, since she doesn't have any money.
So the last few weeks have been brutal. Since I put her into the psych ward, she's PISSED at me, even though she constantly tries to say she's not. She refused to let them release any information to me, so I don't know if half of what she tells me is true. She's made it very difficult to be a part of the healing process for her, and she's got a dozen different reasons why she's making it this way. She's trying to protect me. She's embarrassed. She doesn't want me around because she looks at me and sees my father. Whatever. I'm the only one who really has her best interest at heart and all she has done is do her best to hurt me. I know this isn't my mother I'm dealing with, it's the drug addict, but it doesn't hurt any less. I flushed all her pills, even though I honestly considered taking a Xanax because I felt like the top of my head was going to fly off and I know my own blood pressure had to have been through the roof. I had a headache for a solid week, and couldn't even THINK about wearing my contacts, because a day didn't go by where I didn't cry. She doesn't know what she's doing to the people around her, and I don't think it's because she doesn't care, but she doesn't understand because she can't see past herself. And I can't do anything about that but wait until she's in therapy. And I'm going to have to go too. Still not thrilled about the idea, but I have to do what I can if it will help make her better. I can't have her like this, and I can't bear the thought of turning my back on my mother.
"Sometimes, you have to choose between what is right, and what is easy."- Dumbledore.
I wish I could say it stops there. But it doesn't. My mom isn't the only member of my family who has fallen so far away from the person they used to be. Missy is beyond out of control. She is in Maryland now, and tearing Jess to pieces much like my mom is doing to me. She is living with a stage 4 cancer patient and god knows what she is on. She totaled another car, and tried to fight Jess a few weeks ago. Autumn has been down there visiting and hasn't even seen or spoken to Missy in like, two weeks, from what I understand. She is hurting because her mother has a reason to get better and doesn't want the help. My mother feels like she lost me in the divorce, like she doesn't need to get better because I don't need her to take care of me, but Autumn needs a mother more than ever. She never really had one. And it kills me, I worry so much about the emotional damage Autumn is going to have because her mother SUCKS. But I can only be so much to her. I can fill in the big sister shoes where Jess can't but I have to impress things on her my mother did to me (when she was good) and just hope that she soaks them in. I have to hope that she doesn't make the same mistakes Jess did. Jess is doing her best to try to be the sister Autumn needs her to be, but her life in Maryland is wearing her down.
Marty is medically addicted to methadone. He and my mom were in cahoots for a while, and their problems both sort of came to a head at the same time. He fell down a flight of stairs when he was at work in Jersey City, broke his whole face, his teeth, nose, glasses, etc. A horrible mess. He started having issues because he was addicted to pain pills after his back surgery (though I'm pretty sure Marty was doing badness before that, only wasn't a complete fuck up) and it sort of went the same way my mom did. He and my mom and Missy have been their own little bad news triangle for a while, so bad that Missy is trying to say that Marty gave her Hep-B. Which isn't true. He has C, and swears to god that he never used a needle for drugs before.
Pretty much, there are so many things going on in my family right now, that my personal life has fallen apart and I haven't dealt with it. I miss Steve even though I know its best we're apart. And I'm a basket case half the time. It is an honest to goodness struggle to keep my mind clear and focus on anything. I'm not sure if I have ADHD or what, but I can't sit still for any length of time, and if I do, its better that I just go to sleep. I don't know that therapy is going to be good for me, they may discover a whole laundry list of things wrong with me, even though I've functioned inside my own brain for this long, I'm pretty sure I can keep it up as long as I am able to vent and let myself figure me out, but who knows. I'll have to get into the Steve and I story in another post, because this one took much longer than I had planned, and I have to start getting ready for work.
"Some things you don't forgive
Some things you don't forget
Sometimes the fate you suffer is so much worse than death
We're way off course now,
And we're drifting out to sea
So cut the anchor on your heart to be set free, set free...."
Appeal to Reason- Rise Against
