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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

My son, the junkie
I finally had to let him save, or kill, himself.
By Wendy Mnookin
[08/27/99]

Emotional handicap
What do you do when your normally sweet, loving child wholeheartedly rejects his suddenly disabled, wheelchair-bound grandmother?
By Diane Lore
[08/26/99]

Wild Thing
Is hell satisfied?
In keeping with their authors' dark histories, "The Iron Giant" and other children's tales by Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath tell ominous fables about ambition, despair and people's disregard for nature and one another.
By Polly Shulman
[08/25/99]

The dark side of Disney
There's no escaping the commodification of childhood.
By Samuel G. Freedman
[08/23/99]

Disney rocks!
Forget the long lines, the schlocky toys and the canned music. Disneyland will always be the Magic Kingdom for this lifelong Mouseketeer.
By Lisa Moskowitz
[08/22/99]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

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In many ways, I found college easier than high school. I was not worried about getting A's -- I knew I wasn't going to law school or med school -- and with a minimal amount of work, I could get B's, regardless of how fucked-up I was. There were some embarrassing moments -- like the time I passed out in my freshman writing seminar and the class turned out the lights and left me there, or when I vomited walking through Harvard Yard at 2 in the afternoon. But for the most part, college was like high school, only with more freedom and less demands on my time.

In November of sophomore year, something snapped. I would smoke pot, and five minutes later need to smoke again. I would drink, but as Tennessee Williams so accurately described it in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," I never got the click. So, at 19, I checked into an inpatient drug detox and rehab program at McLean's Hospital in Belmont.

I only stayed at McLean's for eight days, but it was the first time I had been clean for eight days in more than four years, and, as trite as it sounds, when I got out, I knew I was capable of staying sober. And I did, for the rest of sophomore year, for all of my junior year, and the first months of my senior year. I turned 21, sober. I fell in love for the first time, sober. I wrote poetry, sober.

But at the same time -- despite copious psychotherapy and countless antidepressants -- I remained fundamentally unhappy. The relationship I was in ended and that woman still refuses to talk to me, despite my annual entreaties. I was never able to focus on my writing  --  be it poetry or essays or academic papers  --  as clearly as I thought I should be able to, and so always I felt that I was falling a little short.

I didn't have the faith, or the patience, to deal with the hard times. Besides, I was only 21: No one really expected me to stay sober forever, right?

So eventually, one Wednesday night at around 11, I went and bought a bottle of vodka and sat in my room alone until it was done. The next morning, I bought a bottle of red wine and drank it down before lunch; by the time Thanksgiving rolled around, exactly two years after I went into rehab, I was once again smoking pot every morning.

I was high six months later when I graduated from Harvard, as I had been when I graduated from high school. My thesis, a speed and adrenaline-fueled affair on epilepsy and ax murderers and 19th century American jurisprudence, was, needless to say, not the crowning academic achievement it might have been, but I did finish it.

After college, I moved to New York. I moved without a job, and freelanced for a couple of months until I landed a gig as the managing editor at a start-up kids' entertainment magazine. I was living on the Lower East Side, just south of Alphabet City, and one Saturday afternoon, while walking around, I decided I wanted to try heroin. Part of this impulse stemmed from the enduring, romantic image I nursed of myself, a sort of renegade, gonzo writer, snorting and smoking and boozing his way through his freewheeling 20s. After all, I had really not suffered many consequences, at least externally. I had an Ivy League degree, no criminal record and steady work. And heroin didn't scare me so much as it excited me, all the unknown, seedy glamour, William S. Burroughs and Thomas De Quincey.

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