Lies My Mother Never Told Me (16 page)

Dr. Ellen nodded and then asked me, “And how do you feel when you drink?”

“I feel…” I thought about this for a while, wanting desperately to be honest, wanting truly to fix whatever was wrong. “Brave,” I finally said. “And not so alone.”

Dr. Ellen nodded again, then asked me to describe my mother's drinking. I told her about our night at
The Will Rogers Follies
. I even told her about Timothy Hutton. Then I felt my face burning up, and my breathing becoming strained.

“I think your mother is an alcoholic,” Dr. Ellen said gently, as if she'd thought this for a long time and had just been waiting for the right occasion to say it.

But
she
was the one who said it—not me. I started to feel the need to defend my mother, to stand up for her, but I stopped myself. I trusted Dr. Ellen as I had trusted few people in my life.

I began to try to wrap my mind around this absolutely horrifying possibility.

 

My mother's ears must have been ringing that afternoon. I'd always believed, as my father did also, that my mother had an unusually powerful sixth sense, even though she tried to suppress it. Nevertheless, she could feel when certain people were in turmoil, and she would pick up the phone and call them, as she called me later the same afternoon.

I admitted to my mother that I'd seen Dennis again. I told her he'd stopped drinking and was really getting his life together.

“You're an asshole, you know that?” she said, disgusted. “You just can't stop fucking up your life.”

Suddenly I felt something explode in my chest, something volcanic and out of control, and bitter words erupted from my mouth. “You know
why
I'm so fucked up? You know why? Because you're an
alcoholic,
that's why I'm so fucked up.” I started looking around for a cigarette. I knew there was a pack of Marlboro Lights somewhere around here….

“
I'm
an alcoholic?” she shouted, furious. “Well what about
you? You
're the one who should watch it, you know.”

Now I brought in the cavalry, the expert words of the professional: “Well, Dr. Ellen says you're an alcoholic.” My voice
sounded so wrong, so stiff, so unbending to my own ear. Why couldn't I have a normal conversation with my mother without feeling like this?

I could hear my mother lighting a cigarette, then exhaling loudly into the mouthpiece. “I'll tell you what, you go tell that Dr. Ellen that I'm not going to help pay for those fucking sessions anymore. How's that?”

She hung up. And I decided not to call her back. I wanted to see how long the silence would last. And boy, was it a loud silence. I could feel the shock waves of her rage coursing through me and bouncing off the walls, and I heard every word she was saying to my brother, right now, over the phone. I even dialed his number, and indeed, the line was busy. Next she'd call my godmother Cecile, and anyone else who would listen. I shrank into a corner as if in an earthquake. While Jamie and Cecile would try to remain neutral, my mother had no shortage of sycophants and allies who'd tell her I was evil. That of course she shouldn't have to put up with such treatment from her daughter—so spoiled, that kid—and the guilt, the shame, the self-hatred that engulfed me seemed a prison of collapsing bricks from which I would never escape.

My phone started ringing. I let the answering machine take the calls. First, Jamie; then, naturally, Cecile.

Finally, the next day, I called Cecile back.

“Your mother is very upset.”

“I told her she's an alcoholic,” I said. “She didn't want to hear it.”

“She has been drinking more heavily since your father died, but she seems to have it under control.”

I started to feel that volcanic rage building up again in my chest, and with my voice shaking told Cecile I had to go.

My birthday in August came and went—no call from my mother. But Jamie did call and tried once again to reason with me to patch things up with her.

“Oh, Jamie,” I said, my voice breaking, “Mom's an alcoholic, and she's in real trouble.”

“Well,” he said equably, “I don't know about that. She's a heavy social drinker, that's for sure. But an
alcoholic?
That's a bit extreme.”

Dr. Ellen did not cut me off, even though I no longer could afford to pay her regular fee. She allowed me to continue with her at a reduced rate, for which I will be forever grateful.

 

With my mother and me not speaking to each other in the summer of 1991, I couldn't go home to Long Island and instead went to the beach in New Jersey with Sally from Columbia. Once I went to East Hampton to visit my best friend from high school, and once, Dennis and I visited his mother on the North Shore of Long Island. I wanted to see Dennis more, but he wouldn't oblige. He was trying to teach me about boundaries. “You need to respect my boundaries,” he would say. I responded, “What's a boundary?”

Our relationship, which was more than a friendship because we slept together, but less than a romance, because we'd totally exhausted each other in that department, was vague and unclear. But he would not clarify it for me.

One weekend morning, Dennis called and told me to watch a John Bradshaw six-hour lecture on PBS that afternoon. Coming from Dennis, the cynic of cynics who found Louis-Ferdinand Céline's writing amusing, this was so stunning and bizarre a suggestion that I grudgingly complied.

For about six hours I listened to this weird ex-seminarian and recovering alcoholic talk about societal myths and family myths. He said the bigger the myth around which a society or family bases its beliefs and cultural biases, the thicker and higher will the wall be that they build to protect the myth from scrutiny. He used two examples that nearly blew me right off my futon. The
first was the obsessive deification of money and the pursuit of it in our society; the other was the prevalence of alcoholism, and our inability to confront it.

He said that in an alcoholic family, the members inevitably circle the wagons around the alcoholic, then, to protect the myth of normalcy, build walls—a veritable fortress so impenetrable no projectile of truth can penetrate.

Like Tolstoy's Prince Andrej trying with all his might to keep the door closed on death, I tried with all my strength and resolve and logic and intellect to keep the door closed on the truth. And when the truth became too powerful and began to press in upon me, making me feel sad, angry, and panicked all at once, I did the only thing I knew that would quiet the emotions, anesthetize them, and that was to drink. I had to rely on Valium quite a bit to get any sleep at all.

I took to controlling my alcohol intake with an iron-fisted resolve. I spent so much time figuring out what to drink and when to drink and how much to drink and making sure that I would not have to talk to Dennis on the phone if I did drink, that the last six months of my drinking are a blur of self-obsessed worry and fear.

I discovered the term “narcissistic disturbance” in Alice Miller's book
Prisoners of Childhood.
When I came across the following passage, it was as if a light had been turned on in a completely dark room: “We cathect an object narcissistically…when we experience it not as the center of its own activity but as a part of ourselves. If the object does not behave as we expect or wish, we may at times be immeasurably disappointed or offended.”

In my mind, I could hear my mother saying,
How can you listen to such shit? You have no taste in music, you know that?

On another occasion:
You wear the ugliest clothes I've ever seen. You have stupid taste.
Perhaps what she meant was,
I wish you were more like me; I wish you liked the same things I like.
My mother
could never say, for example,
I don't like strawberries.
For her, it was always,
How could you eat strawberries? They are the most disgusting fruit in the world.

A parent suffering from a narcissistic disturbance sees her child only as a mirror image of herself. My mother always maintained that she hated her own mother, the Dread Gertrude, and that Gertrude hated her and had taken every opportunity to humiliate her. Gloria fought back with everything she had. One of her greatest weapons had been her father, who adored Gloria above all his other children and taught her the very defiance she used against her mother. “The child, an only one or often the first-born, was the narcissistically cathected object. What these mothers had once failed to find in their own mothers they were able to find in their children: someone at their disposal who can be used as an echo, who can be controlled, is completely centered on them, will never desert them, and offers full attention and admiration.”

But, of course, a child cannot help but be a child. A child grows fussy, sometimes rejecting, sometimes demanding, easily exhausted, and exhausting. My mother had no patience for any of this. She adored me—as she was quick to announce—but she could only tolerate my presence in very small doses.

Alice Miller writes that the extreme forms of narcissistic disturbance are depression and grandiosity. That “in fact, grandiosity is the defense against depression, and depression is the defense against the deep pain over the loss of the self.”

While children raised by parents with a narcissistic disturbance will most often be allowed to grow and develop intellectually, they are often squashed in the emotional realm. “There are those with great gifts, often precisely the most gifted, who suffer from severe depression. One is free from depression when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of one's own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.”

Alice Miller describes the secretive nature of this relationship. The parent cannot let anyone else know about this manipulation of the child; and so, the rest of the world remains oblivious, while the child immediately believes the problem is within him or her. And, most strangely, “the mother often loves her child as her self-object, passionately, but not in the way he needs to be loved.”

Perhaps my mother did truly love me, or believe she loved me, in any case.

I listlessly began riffling through Janet Woititz's
Adult Children of Alcoholics
, holding it at arm's length, as if the distance could protect me from what was inside. By chance I came upon the “laundry list” of characteristics of ACOAs. The first one, “Adult children of alcoholics guess at what normal behavior is,” made me crumple into a ball on my bed. If my view of reality was so skewed that I couldn't rely on what my own eyes were telling me, how was I ever going to tell truth from lie?

I vacillated wildly between enormous relief at having found a plausible explanation for my mother's behavior toward me, and horror at the possibility that it might be true and I might be the only person on the planet who would ever know.

I wondered how a man as wise, intelligent, liberated, and experienced as my father could not have seen any of it. But, then, he'd not had the sanest relationships with women before he'd met my mother. He'd not been looking for a housewife and a mother for his children, after all, but for a lifelong companion who would support his work and his creative process, and, of course, his strong sexual desires, and his heavy drinking.

 

My mother did not call me for four months. Finally, toward the end of October, she left a message saying she wanted me to come home for Thanksgiving. “Let's just put it all behind us,” she said into the answering machine. And just like that, my calling her
an alcoholic, her hanging up on me (twice), and my exile were erased from the annals of Jones history.

 

After that brutal summer of exile, I ran into my old friend Gianna, who had been at Poets & Writers when I'd worked there in the mideighties. She said she'd just been looking at an apartment around the corner, having decided to move back to the City from Sag Harbor. Gianna and I have the same ethnic background—Italian, German, Irish, Welsh—and our features and coloring are so similar that people often mistake us for sisters. Around ten years my senior, she is, and someone I've always loved and admired.

Back when we'd worked together, she would invite me home for dinner, and her partner Bea would cook. The only problem was that Bea would take three hours to get dinner ready, and meanwhile Gianna and I would sit in the living room polishing off two or three bottles of wine. After dinner, restless, Gianna would tell Bea we were taking Toto, Bea's little gray poodle, for a walk, and we'd hit a bar on Second Avenue, leaving Toto tied to a meter just outside, where we could watch him through the window. Bea would chase us down and holler at us for being disgusting lushes, and I'd cower into a cab while Gianna went home.

Gianna had given up drinking about a year before I met Andrew. She had been a guest at our wedding, probably one of three sober individuals out of the 250 at the reception. Not too much later, she asked me out to dinner, and told me about quitting drinking and how she'd left Bea and found herself, and how wonderful her life had become since. I remember thinking, Poor Gianna, what a horrible way to live. Thank God
I
don't have to stop drinking!

I wanted to ask her now,
Are you still not drinking, Gianna?
But I couldn't say it. I realized she probably wanted to ask me a similar question,
Are you still drinking, Kaylie?

“Are you doing okay?” she finally asked, gingerly reaching out a hand and placing it on my shoulder.

“I'm doing fine. I'm really good,” I said bravely. “I've been reading Alice Miller and
Children of Alcoholics.
”

“Ah.” Gianna nodded meaningfully.

Several months later she told me she'd understood in that instant that I was on the brink, almost ready to leap across that terrifying chasm. But I wasn't quite there yet. She also told me that for the next few months, she fervently, daily, prayed on my behalf.