The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [20]
It scared the crap out of me. I didn’t call my father. I didn’t call an ambulance. I called my sister, who lived in Boston, where she was busy getting a Ph.D., trying to erase her origins. My sister told me to call an ambulance and then to call our father. My mother in the living room watching soaps.
I didn’t know yet how wanting to die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life. I didn’t know then how deeply my mother’s song had swum into my sister and into me. I didn’t know that something like wanting to die could take form in one daughter as the ability to quietly surrender, and in the other as the ability to drive into death head-on. I didn’t know we were our mother’s daughters after all.
My mother did not die. At least not that day. Eventually I did call an ambulance, and she went to the hospital, and they pumped her gut out. She was diagnosed with severe manic depression, and her doctor assigned talk therapy as part of her recovery. She saw a therapist five times. Then one day she came home and said, “I’m done.” But when she came home she was a dead woman masquerading as a live one. Drinking. Slowly. Surely. What she did next, well, sometimes it’s difficult to tell rage from love.
When I was 17 my mother signed me into an outpatient teen drug treatment center. She found dope in my pants pocket while doing laundry one day. The place I had to go to every day for eight weeks was a soft Khmer Rouge. I was told that “behavioral healthcare” is your “doorway to choice and hope.” That was the motto. I didn’t find choice and hope through the doorway. I found bibles and Christians with thick gator-mouthed drawls and skin cancer tans counseling me on self-esteem and a purposeful life. They fed me bible passages. I brought Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with me every day for moral support. They always made me put the book at the front counter, but I knew it was there. I knew it had my back. Not like my mother.
Through the doorway to choice and hope were the saddest girls I have ever met. Not because someone beat them or because someone molested them or because they were poor or pregnant or even because they put needles in their arms or pills in their mouths or weed in their lungs or alcohol down their ever-constricting throats. They were the saddest girls I have ever met because every one of them had it in her to lose a shot at a self and become her mother.
My rage became nuclear. But I did my time. I exited the program with a certificate. I wanted to punch my mother - my mother the puffy hypocrite, the woman currently putting away a fifth of vodka a day - in the face. But she was the same woman who would sign the signature on my scholarship papers a year later. So I did not punch my mother’s mouth off of her face. I just thought this: get out. Hold your breath until you can leave. You are good at that. Perhaps the best. This woman’s pain could kill you.
Later in life, after I flunked out of college, I lived alone in Austin in a crappy-ass efficiency off of the freeway. I got into some more trouble living on my own that led to another round of mandatory drug and alcohol counseling for six weeks in a very strange basement of a medical clinic serving underprivileged folks. Poor people, Mexicans, unwed mothers, African Americans, and me.
There, I was meant to “find meaning in life’s traffic through clearing spiritual barriers.” A different healing slogan. More self righteous hypocritical Christians. There was even a woman in my sessions named “ Dorothy.” My mother’s name. Or The Wizard of Oz. I did my time there too, and left with yet another certificate. Trust me when I say I definitely found “meaning in life’s traffic.” Eventually.
So then this is not an addiction story.
It’s just that I have a sister