TINA MOM OF TWO UNDRESSED PROFESSIONAL

When I asked after her on the second day, a counselor reminded me to “focus on myself.” On the third day, I wanted to leave. We waited to see our mom, but the patients never came. On the first day, Emma and I wore name tags as we listened to testimony and watched videos about addiction. The facility itself was a hospital-bright contrast to the northern darkness. It was dark as I scraped ice from the windshield each morning and dark as the steering wheel slipped through my gloved grip on our drives back. The first day of the program, Emma and I left the hotel at 6 a.m. But I had blown up our lives on the promise that we could get her back - the real version - and I wasn’t willing to concede defeat until I saw her for myself. In their notes, they implied that she was manipulative, hostile, uncooperative. Her nurses and counselors were less than charmed. She made friends wherever she went and believed - against all evidence - that I could do the same. We wanted her to be healed we worried she wouldn’t be.įor weeks, we had been getting reports: She thinks she is special, different from the other patients. We didn’t talk about Mom or how things would go in the morning. At the Holiday Inn Express, we drank red wine out of paper cups on a queen bed.

I met my middle sister, Emma, at the Hertz counter in the Minneapolis airport, where the clerk tacked on an underage fee for our Toyota Camry. So I boarded a plane to Minnesota for “the Family Program.” If I wanted to talk to her, to convince her and myself that I had done the right thing, I would have to track her down in person.

I acted like everything was normal, all the while wondering what I had done.Īround Christmas, my mother stopped responding to my emails. I commuted to my secretarial job in Midtown on New Jersey Transit and drove my youngest sister to her extracurriculars. I brought my boyfriend, my dog and my M.F.A. Like a usurper, I left my small apartment in Manhattan and moved into her house - my childhood home in suburban New Jersey, unrecognizable with disrepair. Her 30-day stay at the rehab facility in Minnesota turned into 60. The woman I loved, in the doe-eyed way you can only ever love the one you imprint on, had been consumed by the parasitic brain worms of alcoholism.

TINA MOM OF TWO UNDRESSED PROFESSIONAL

I was the one who sent her away.įor months, I had plotted against her - with her siblings and friends, with professional interventionists - until, while she sobbed and sobbed, I packed her suitcase. The world was ending? Of course the world was ending. I was 23, and I didn’t care about any of it. It was January 2015, and all anyone could talk about was Ebola, Boko Haram, and Charlie Hebdo.

Tina mom of two undressed