The last straw

I'll start this story with gratitude for the fact that I am sober and that the misery that I am about to write about is not my misery - that the story I am about to tell, by the grace of God, will never be my story. It is my mother's story and her present descent into alcoholic misery and death, and I am powerless to stop it.

I have posted only a little about her and about my childhood. She is an alcoholic. She has been drinking since I was 2. She has never gotten help, never been to an AA meeting, never been sober. She is an angry, mean, bitter, resentful, negative, manipulative, lying alcoholic. I am not judging her, it is just a fact. I was the same person right before I came into AA. In fact, that is how I landed in AA when I did - I realized that I had become the very thing I had tried so hard not to be, which was like my mother.

She has basically treated me terribly my entire life. We have always had a horrible relationship. Today I am able to engage with her, but that's because I limit my interactions and pay attention to my part of the relationship as AA tells me to do. What I remember of my childhood is this - she drank, what seemed like every day. She passed out, what seemed like every day, by 5:30. My parents hated each other. They fought, they yelled, they screamed, they manipulated each other and pulled us into the middle of it. My mother lied about drinking while hiding alcohol in the bottom of two liter pop bottles in the basement. She lied and lied and denied all of it. She called me names and yelled at me. She used to tell me that I was the most selfish and ungrateful person she had ever known in her entire life (I was about 10). She used to tell me that no one ever did anything for me because they wanted to - they only did things for me because they had to or I forced them to. She used to tell me all the time that I was manipulative. She used to tell me all the time that she hated me and that I treated her terribly.

My parents didn't tell me that they loved me. They didn't hug me. They didn't play games with me or do anything with me really. I played alone in my room or out in the yard with my imaginary family - trying my best to avoid her. I had one friend - all my life, until I was 18 - I had one real friend. They were not emotionally supportive, they did not love us unconditionally - there was always a condition attached. My mother used to get drunk and fall down the stairs a lot, or fall in other places of the house and my brother and I had to take responsibility for her. I was afraid of both of them. That is what I remember of my childhood. My mother has never apologized. She has never taken responsibility for any of it or owned up to anything except for being an alcoholic (and though she admits it, she does not take responsibility for it). She has only ever blamed my father for her misery and her alcoholism - believing that someone else is to blame for all of it. Indirectly she has blamed my brother and I. If not for the whole of her life's misery - for bits and pieces of it. Somehow I was to blame, because when she used to say I hate you, I would say, I hate you too. To this day she still tells me that she never cared whether she had children.

When I was 11 I told my 5th grade teacher that something was wrong at my house - I didn't quite understand what and I don't remember exactly what I told her, but shortly after my teacher and my parents came to me and wanted to know why I was lying. I never asked for help again. I just waited, in my bedroom, for the years to pass by so that I could get out of there.

My mother had a horrible childhood herself. She grew up with an alcoholic mother who treated her surprisingly like my mother treated me. Does that give her an excuse? No more than it gives me one. Frequently as an adult she has told me the following: "I know I was a terrible mother, but that's your problem now."

All my life, my mother seemed to be a functional alcoholic. I never really saw her as having material consequences. The only consequence seemed to be that she alienated and destroyed her relationship with her children. My parents did get divorced 7 years ago - so I guess she lost her marriage - but it wasn't something that she wanted anyway. She always managed to keep a job and friends, never wrecked a car, never got a DUI even though she used to drive drunk with us in the car all the time when we were kids - she managed to keep up appearances and really, to this day, we don't know who knew what when, though my dad's family now claims to have known she was an alcoholic. No one, even my father, really tried to help us. When I was a kid, I would pray that she would get into an accident but not hurt anyone, so that she might be forced to get some help.

When do we get sober? When we hit a bottom. Mine was purely emotional. I hated myself and I wanted to die and I was so unhappy that I didn't think I could continue to live my life. My mother hasn't hit her bottom I guess, though I expect it is about to hit her. I talked to her once though about what I call my bottom - the pain and the misery that I experienced before and when I came into the program. She called me one day crying, telling me how horrible she felt and how miserable and sad and depressed she was. It was perhaps the only time in my life that I have ever talked to her from a place of "sameness" - when I said - believe me when I tell you, that I understand, like only we can, the misery you are going through. That was the day I told her that I was sober and that AA changed my life. That was a year and a half ago. I have talked to her about recovery to no avail. We talk very infrequently these days.

Her financial situation has been bad since my parents divorce. It could have been decent - she screwed my dad for everything he had and then threw it away in a business that was doomed to fail. She has asked me for money many times - sometimes I have given it to her, sometimes I haven't - but I, or someone else, has bailed her out repeatedly. She owes me money right now in fact. My mother would argue that you help family no matter what. Except that this never applied to her helping my brother and I - she never has, not once with anything - particularly during our adult lives. She didn't even offer me one bit of help when I had breast cancer or even offer to come see me.

My mother called me today and asked me for money. And in the best display of emotional black mail she could muster - told me that I have a choice not to give it to her and that she will love me anyway if I don't - and by the way, she also says - that she has recently come to realize that I never got the attention that I should have. It's too little too late, and notice the distinct lack of an apology for any of her behavior. My mother's financial situation is not good - but we don't know how bad it is. I think she is on quite a steep downhill that ends in her losing everything she has. It isn't the bottom I had hoped for her. My mother would say that the circumstances of her life are not due to her alcoholism. She does not get it and I am afraid the denial is impenetrable.

If I give her the money, am I enabling her? Am I prolonging the misery before she hits bottom? Am I contributing to her failure? Am I obligated to help her?

Would I rather deal with the blinding rage that I will feel if I give it to her? Or the guilty way that I will feel as her life crumbles around her and she blames me for it?

Which feels less bad? Does that matter? Because either way, I think I want this to be the end of my relationship with my mother. Is that wrong? Am I the horrible person that she always told me I was because I don't want to help her and I don't want anything to do with her?

I don't know what to do.

My mother is dying a miserable and alcoholic death.

I think of her pain and misery and it makes me more grateful than I can even tell you for my sobriety. Thank God I got to AA when I did and that my bottom was what it was. This is a miserable, painful, horrible disease to die from.

"There but for the grace of God go I."