Dear Mom,
You don’t know how many times I’ve cleaned up after you, but I do. You don’t know how many mornings I woke up hoping that maybe tonight would be different, but it wasn’t. You don’t know how many times I’ve explained to my younger siblings that, “mommy has a stomach ache because she ate something bad,” because you were in bed, passed out before their bedtime, but I do. You don’t understand why I don’t have friends over, because I’m afraid to show them how my home life really is.
Now, I don’t mean any of this in spite of you, I don’t mean for any of it to hurt you and I definitely don’t mean it to make things harder on you. You’ve gone through a lot and I get that, or at least I try to, but I’ve been through a lot, too, where I’ve needed my mom and you haven’t been there. I’ve missed having you where I could talk to you about everything without being judged. You weren’t there for me when I broke up with my boyfriend of almost three years. Instead, I stayed up on the phone with my sister crying my heart out to the point where I couldn’t breathe. I needed you the most to remind me that everything would be okay and it can only get better. I needed you when I felt like all of my friends were turning against me - but again, I was talking to others.
You have been absent. Not physically, because you were always there cheering us on, but the mom who raised my siblings and me has been absent. You have gotten mean, yelling that we can go live somewhere else or making us feel bad for being upset with you. I can’t come to you about everything like I used to be able to because I don’t know how you will react. I don’t know what will set you off.
It wasn’t until my junior year in high school that you weren’t up in the morning to say goodbye before we went to school or yell at me because I was wearing your clothes. It wasn’t until then that you were passed out before nine every night. It wasn’t until the summer before my senior year that I had to explain why you didn’t feel well to a 5-year-old. It wasn’t until my senior year that I stopped asking if I could have friends over. It wasn’t until I went to school that I got some peace. I miss home, of course (when I’m there), but hearing other people talk about how much they miss home makes me really jealous. I wish that I missed home that much. That I had a normal house to come back to and not have to fear what life was going to be like when I got there.
Alcohol has taken my mom. I get her sometimes, but not at 1 a.m. when I can’t think straight or am having a mental breakdown because the stress of college is just too much, when I need her strength and encouraging words most. I need my mom while I’m going through all of this. I need my mom who understands the meaning of family. I don’t need the mom who chose alcohol over her daughter. I don’t need, nor do I want, the mom who allowed her daughter to move out because she couldn’t stand seeing our mother like this. I need you to realize that the woman that you’ve turned into isn’t the role model I used to proudly say you were.
It wasn’t always this way. Through your hell of a divorce and through everything else, you weren’t like this. I don’t know what happened, but I want my mom back. I want the woman who I aspired to be one day back. I want my family to be whole again and I can’t keep coming home to a broken house. I can’t deal with staying up at night crying and hugging my siblings because of what alcohol has done to our family and you shouldn't let that happen.
