Been circling round for 20 years

When writing things that are for public consumption it’s always hard to decide how far to go with what you are telling people. It’s hard to know when it’s Your Story vs Their Story. Do you have the right to talk about your friends and family, and if so, to what extent?

I have spent a very long time thinking about what I can say, what I should say and what I want to say contrasted against what others, namely my family (or more to the point, my mother), would want out there for the whole world to read.

There comes a point when it becomes necessary to tell somebody else’s story in order to tell your own. Sometimes you need to possibly hurt somebody else’s feelings in order to mend.

I have a long history of not telling my story. That has to stop.

My name is Dawn, and my mother is an alcoholic.

I was recently in Vancouver for her first birthday (she has been one year sober and in AA). This was a very hard trip to make. I didn’t know what to expect. I honestly didn’t know if she could do it. I guess I’d spent so many years resigned to the idea that things were never going to change, they were never going to get better, that eventually Something Really Bad would happen. I never, in a million years, thought she would join AA, never mind quit drinking.

One of my mum’s friends pulled me aside and asked me why I had never told anybody, why I hadn’t said anything. I told her that I had tried, nobody listened. I think that was one of the hardest parts about growing up with my mum, nobody listened to me. I tried. I told people. They said that she was just unwinding, she was just having fun, there was no problem. They didn’t live with her. You can only try so hard for so long until you finally just give up.

Being back home I wasn’t prepared to deal with all the emotions that came flooding back, all the memories I had left behind. I don’t exactly bury things, but I don’t exactly face things head on. I think when I became an adult, especially after I was no longer living at home and having to deal with my mum on a daily basis, I just decided to move past most of the crap I’d been carrying around with me. There was nothing I could do to change things, especially the past, so why bother stressing over it?

It is going to be a long time before I completely believe that my mum is on the road to recovery. I think it’s fantastic what she’s doing and I fully support her. But it’s going to take a lot of work, on both of our parts, to rebuild a very damaged relationship.

I think most people would be surprised at how much work my mum and I are going to have to do. Most people would think that we were really close, but we aren’t. I may talk to her every day but she knows almost nothing about me or my life. Not in any deep sense anyway. I gave up trying to talk to her half a lifetime ago.

So now I’m starting to look at what I can start to talk to my mum about, to start telling her what it was like for me growing up. To start moving forward with her. I can finally start to tell my story because at long last somebody is actually listening.