"If there was someway to make me have never been age seven, I would have chosen it. It would have remained the number of the days in a week, or the number in a game of hopscotch I would have thrown a pebble in and giddily hopped over, but never would it have been the number I would have ever lived."
- Nesa, age 7
Artwork by Malgorzata Jasinska
My mother is lying across the kitchen table. The lace tablecloth that came from Nana's house, the only thing Mommy wanted after Nana died, is hanging lopsided, ready in a minute's notice to fall to our black and white checkered vinyl floor. I see visions already. The beautiful white lace tablecloth soaked with the deep ruby red of her blood after she falls. I have tried to shake her awake at least ten times. She will not budge. I want to cry and run into my father's strong arms and smell the faded scent of his cologne, but he is gone. He left after too many times of my mother promising that she would not drink, finally realizing that it was a promise she could not keep. I am my mother's daughter, so I take care of her. Isn't that what daughters are supposed to do?
I was seven when my mother fell to the floor and hurt herself really bad, almost cracked her head I'm told by my father's side of the family. It is the story they tell over and over at family reunions as if it is a bit of history I shouldn't be ashamed of. "Your Mammy, well 'er young 'um, she got so drunk one night, she nearly cracked her skull open. Ha, ha, ha!"
I always wished that my father would set them straight and protect my mother's and my honor. But he would just disappear, go off and mingle with some long time no see relative, leaving me to defend my mother. He was a coward, but I still loved him. I remembered when he was home and was my savior whenever my mother got drunk. I remembered when he swept me up into his arms and put me in my room before calling the ambulance when my mother fell and hit the edge of the table. I still had on my birthday dress because I had just had a birthday party a few hours before. I had turned seven years old. When the ambulance came my father took me to our next door neighbor, Miss Bell's house and told me not to worry, my mother would be fine. I believed him.
After what seemed like an eternity, I heard my father's voice and my itty bitty self, as my father liked to call me, nearly knocked Miss Bell out of the way to get to the door.
"Where's Mommy?" I asked.
"She's home baby girl," my father said. "She only needed a few stitches and she's just got a small bandage across her forehead," my father said, trying to dispel the fear he saw written all over my face. "I already got her settled in bed before I came to get you, so you have to be quiet, okay?"
"Okay," I lied. I couldn't help but make noise because I wanted to see for myself if my mother was okay. My father led me to my bedroom, past his and my mother's as if he was hiding my Christmas presents in there and didn't want me to see them.
I peeped and saw her. She was still, and I wondered if she was dead. At seven I knew what dead was. My mother talked about death often. She talked about how she saw her mother die when she got hit by a car. Saw how her body was all twisted and her eyes were wide open just starring at her until the ambulance came and took her away.
I asked my father, stood right in the doorway of my bedroom and asked him, if my mother was dead because she wasn't moving.
"Of course not baby girl," he said with a slight smile. "She's just asleep."
I am twenty-seven years old now. I have long stopped writing in my diary about my mother's drinking. I do not blame her for being a drunk. She is sick. I realize this. Alcoholism is a disease. She drinks because it dulls her pain, the one deep in her soul and the real, physical pain that comes from her body craving the toxic alcohol. Once I tried to drink with her, get as drunk as possible to see if I could experience what she was feeling. Euphoria. Earlier that night I had gone to a jazz club with my best friends Derek and Brazil. Yes, Brazil, and she's just as dark and exotic as the country is. Anyway, after they dropped me off at home, I saw that my mother was sitting in her usual spot at the kitchen table, drinking her scotch and water. I went and got a glass, already half tipsy from some apple martinis, and poured some scotch into it. My mother said nothing. I filled it with some tap water. My mother said nothing. I swallowed the strong alcohol and wanted to puke.
"Becoming an alcoholic takes years and years of practice, baby. Takes years of having a broken heart and years of feeling you'll never amount to much. It takes years of fighting off demons from your own dysfunctional childhood and years of guilt because you destroyed others, others who really loved you, Nesa. You, thank God, haven't tasted that bitter side of life yet and baby you never should want to," my mother told me as she downed the rest of her drink.
I led my mother from the table and took her to her bed. She still, even when drunk, sleeps on one side as if waiting for my father to take his rightful place beside her. She curls into a fetal position, fights me when I try to put on her nightgown after taking off her clothes. "Leave me be, Nesa. Leave me be."
In my own room I spread my body on the whole expanse of my bed. If I wanted to I could bring a man into my room without my mother knowing. I could have hot, passionate sex throughout the night, and wake up to fix him a southern style breakfast, bacon, scrambled eggs, cheese grits, and biscuits along with black coffee without my mother even stirring. After a night of drinking, she will not rise until the mid-afternoon.
I wake up and find that I am still in my clothes from the night before. I peep into my mother's room and see that only the impression of her body remains on the bed. Her covers are on the floor and her slippers are placed right where I neatly put them last night. Odd how she loves to walk barefoot even when the floor has not been washed. It is like shoes of any kind confines her movements when she's sober.
"Hey baby," she says when I walk into the kitchen. She has prepared some scrambled eggs and she sits the hot skillet on a dish towel so I can take what I want. I don't bother to put the bread she hands me in the toaster; I just fold a little bit of my eggs in it and eat it, washing it down with the glass of orange juice she also set beside me.
"Nesa, I'm…I'm going away for a while," she says eating her eggs out of the skillet. "I have this friend who lives in Arizona. I'm going to stay with her until I can clean myself up. She has this lovely house where I can see the sun rise each morning over the mountains. Maybe I can even start keeping a diary like you did. Remember how you used to write in it all hours of the night? Probably was about me, huh? You know I never read what you wrote even though I was tempted to when I was sober. I promised myself I wouldn't take your words from you because I had taken so much from you already."
I felt like a little girl again, getting that nervous, jittery feeling in my stomach. I hated to admit it but I still needed my mother. I wanted her to get clean and sober but I didn't want her to leave me in order to do it. She had abandoned me enough.
"You okay with that, Nesa?" she asked when I didn't respond.
"How come you don't go to one of those outpatient A.A. clinics here? Arizona is so far."
"Because sometimes you need to be selfish baby. Sometimes the only way to get whole again is to leave the cocoon and spread your broken wings somewhere that's been untainted. Arizona is so beautiful, so serene that I can do that there. No one knows my dirty little secrets in Scottsdale."
"And what about me? You're forgetting about me as usual, huh?"
"No baby…I'm thinking about you. You are twenty-seven years old and after your father left because he couldn't take my drinking anymore, you were my caretaker from the age of seven on. You did things that no little girl should ever have to do, heard things no little girl should ever have to hear …you saw me at my lowest," she said wiping her eyes with the dish towel she now removed from under the skillet.
"I want you to have a life, Nesa. No more being my co-dependent during my darkest hours. I want you to dance, to sing, to run barefoot and fancy free without the stench of my drunkenness following you."
For the first time in years I looked at my mother and saw a vulnerable yet truthful soul. I had always thought she was weak for not being able to stop her drinking but now I realized she was indeed eagle strong. She could have chosen to end her life, like my father had told her to do one day when he had enough, before he left for good, but she didn't. She knew that one day she would break free from her addiction. She knew that she had to in order for me to one day break free from it too.
"One day baby all of this will make sense to you and you will see that there was a plan unfolding from the very beginning and we just had to chart our course, however bittersweet, to get from point A to point B," my mother said folding her grimy feet beneath her on the kitchen chair.
I blinked back my tears but a smile managed to escape and line my face. I was my mother's daughter. I kicked off my slippers and folded my feet beneath me and reached across the table and grabbed her hand. It was starting to make sense already.
The End
About the Author
Jeanine DeHoney is a freelance writer and a former early childhood teacher. She has had her writing published in Essence, Upscale, Today's Black Woman, Radiance, and Bahiyah Woman Magazine. She has also had her work published in the book Chicken Soup For The African American's Woman's Soul. Jeanine attributes her passion for writing to her late mother Evelyn who used to buy her notebooks to fill with her thoughts from the time she was a little girl....
My curse is my gift. My nightmares, deep sensitivity, and emotional instability gives the best (and most uncomfortable) inspirations I could ever have. For me, art is passion - and visions are the mirror, which show my feelings and connect me with the rest of the world. Read More...
Jeanine DeHoney is a freelance writer and a former early childhood teacher. She has had her writing published in Essence, Upscale, Today's Black Woman, Radiance, and Bahiyah Woman Magazine. She has also had her work published in the book Chicken Soup For The African American's Woman's Soul. Jeanine attributes her passion for writing to her late mother Evelyn who used to buy her notebooks to fill with her thoughts from the time she was a little girl....
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