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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]

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That day at McLean's, my mother sat down across from me in yet another well-meaning doctor's office in a yet another institution. She adjusted her gray glasses, played with her hands and said: "This is it. Either you go to long-term treatment, or we are going to have to cut ourselves off. I will always love you," she said. "But I will not watch you kill yourself, and I will not let you do this to my family."

And without knowing what I was doing, I agreed to go to Florida, to a long-term inpatient program my family had first heard about when I was still living in New York. I wish I could say that it was something in her words that made me decide to go to Florida, some parental tug that made me want to do right by her and my father, but it wasn't. It was desperation, pure and simple: desperation that if I ever did decide to get sober, I wouldn't have a family to turn to, desperation that I would need money or food or shelter and there would be no one there to give it to me.

So I went to Florida, to a rehab that felt like a combination boot camp/cult. But for some unknown reason, the program there seemed to help me. Maybe it was because I didn't know where to get heroin in Palm Beach County. Maybe it was because, for the first time, I was in a treatment program that pushed me harder than I pushed it. But I really don't know; one day I woke up and realized I had been clean for 30 straight days, and that was longer than I had managed to put together in years.

Also Today My son, the junkie I finally had to let him save, or kill, himself. Why he became an addict and why he is no longer one will perhaps never be known.

In January, less than three months after I arrived in Florida, my parents, brother and sister came down for a "family weekend" of therapy and group sessions. I was proud and excited. My track marks had healed, I had gained some weight and, for the first time since I moved to New York, my hands were no longer shaking. But I did not get the reception I had been fantasizing about. My mother refused to hug me; when she first saw me, she drew an imaginary circle 5 feet around her and said that was her comfort zone. It is not OK, she said, over and over during those two days. I do not forgive you. On Sunday, before she left, she told me that a manuscript of poems dealing with her relationship with me and my addiction had been accepted.

I fought that program, and eventually got kicked out, but today I am one of five or six people in the program -- out of more than 50 -- who have been continuously sober since that time. I wish I knew why this was the case. I wish I knew so I could tell my best friend in Florida, Jordan Hall, a 23-year-old who was smart and funny and charming and energetic. He overdosed last July. I wish I knew so I could tell Colin McGinty, one of the boys I was arrested with in high school. He was found dead, crumpled in the bathroom of a Burger King in downtown Boston with a needle in his arm. One very simple part of the answer is that the three months I was in treatment gave me enough time to get all the heroin and clonopin and trazedone out of my system. Another part of it, for the first year anyway, was probably stubborn pride: My mother seemed so convinced I wasn't going to make it and I was damned if she was going to be right. And part of it was my sheer desire to live and write again, a desire that has been slowly reawakened over the past 22 months.

I didn't read my mother's manuscript for another nine months, until I had a job and a car and an apartment and my family didn't wonder whether every phone call would be the grim reckoning they'd half-expected to get for years. At first, she wasn't sure if she wanted to send it to me. Later, I wasn't sure I wanted to read it: I was sober, but that didn't mean I wanted to deal with the wreckage of my past. But slowly, gingerly, my mother and I began to share our lives with each other again. She clipped out obituaries when Andre Dubus, one of our favorite writers, died of a heart attack, and I talked to her about Lorrie Moore's new stories.

Still, when she sent me her manuscript, she wasn't asking me for comments or suggestions, as I had imagined, years before, would be the case; she had asked my younger sister, who is headstrong and reliable and still angry with me, to give her feedback. She just wanted me to see it, to read what she had written, because it is about me, because I am her son, and because I am a writer. Her poems make me cry, but I do not tell her that.  These articles are the first pieces my mother and I have worked on "together." This is not the way I imagined our writing careers would evolve in tandem. Still, there is some of the old breathless exuberance about the process. "Can I see what you've written?" my mother asks in her daily e-mails. I'm so excited, she writes. She asks me what protocol is for freelance work, how to deal with an editor, what she is expected to do. "Do I need to come up with a title?" My mother and I are still wary of each other. She is wary of the startling tenacity with which I can embrace addiction, and I am wary of her love, which will always be there, but is not unequivocal.
salon.com | Aug. 27, 1999

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