Traveling Up the Mother Line

Gustav Klimt’s Mother and Child

When I’m interacting with other humans and sharing authentically about my life, like that my kids only have one grandmother who doesn’t live in the area, it’s natural for questions to arise. “Oh? Where does your mom live?” I respond that she passed a few years back but it’s always the next natural question that I grapple with. It’s usually some form of “how?” since I’m (relatively) young. And that is a tough one to answer in a single sentence. Saying she had stage 4 lung cancer she wasn’t aware of doesn’t roll off the tongue easily. Plus no one actually dies from the disease they have. Just like my big brother didn’t die from AIDS, it was multi system failure from the disease that took him. In my mom’s case, she did not die from stage 4 lung cancer. So what did she actually die from? 

For as long as I can remember I wished with all of my childlike fervor for my mom to make good choices. Make good choices with men, money and mothering. I was not quiet about this. I let my mom fucking have it when I saw her, first hand, make a bad choice. As the second oldest of her five kids I had a front row seat to her short lived highs and longer term lows. 

Buying packs of cigarettes when we had only pasta to eat in the house. “Damn it mom, why did you do that?” 

Withdrawing hundreds of dollars to buy a large quantity of pot even though she always said we didn’t have money for my sisters and I to participate in normal kid stuff like sports. “What the hell is wrong with you??” 

Leaving one of her boyfriends for the next. “Could you please just focus on yourself and us girls for once in your fucking life???” 

And then there would be the occasional Sunday afternoon where she would be dressed in one of her flowy skirts with all her makeup on just to go to Safeway. She’d come home from her run to the market and put on her favorite Celtic music program on public radio and busy herself with making an authentic Indian meal. Her skirt was so long that it almost seemed she levitated from the stove, back to the sink and then outside for a quick drag from her filtered Camel cigarette. She’d be cutting onions, her eyes watering, sipping on a glass of red wine playing the part of a regular mom getting ready for the week ahead by starting it with a family dinner. I watched her just as closely then as I did when she was making her bad choices. I loved her intensely when she was in regular mom mode. We’d talk about my hopes and dreams for the future. I’d even crack open a little more to allow her into my personal life and tell her what was going on with my friends at school or what teachers I adored and loathed. She had her vices and I had mine: my all consuming social life and obsessing about how different my life would be once I was an adult.

It was these moments that pained me like a charley horse in the heart for my entire adult life. She could make good choices sometimes. Once I followed through on creating a categorically opposite set of circumstances than the ones I grew up in at the young age of 24 I’d rage on her with fury to my little sisters. “God, why can she NOT get her shit together. Look at me! I’m 20 years younger and already living in a house nicer than the shitholes we grew up in. She needs to start making better choices.” I was hellbent that given the choice to numb herself or do something productive, she just needed to pick the productive thing more times than the numbing thing and her life would change in the ways I wanted it to. “It really is that easy.” I would say to whoever was on the receiving end of my mother bitching. My point at the end of my monologue was always “I know it is THAT easy. Just look at me”. As if my life was proof of the power of making good choices. Just like she was addicted to all her shit, I was addicted to my archaic thinking about her shit. 

When my mom vanished from this earth I knew my binary thinking had something to do with the fact that I wasn’t in contact with her in her final years. It’s a long story to tell (if I can ever get my book published you can read all about it) but at the end of a shit load of learning I can tell you that the DIS-ease that took her was the inability to face her pain and the things she needed to soothe herself in order to keep the pain at bay. It looked a whole lot like addiction on the outside but on the inside she was just another parentless kid who learned to comfort her own mother hole with cigarettes, pot, alcohol and boys starting in childhood (and yes I mean before her adolescence). So let me be crystal clear, addiction is about so much more than this or that choices. How do I know? Because my mom’s vanishing revealed my own complex issue with my inability to soothe (remember those running and drinking parts??) and because post-vanishing I had a years long binge on anything and everything I could read and listen to as a way to understand what.the.fuck.happened to the only human on the planet who was on the other side of my umbilical cord. 

Everyone I know is touched, in some way, by a loved one who can’t put the thing they’re numbing with down. We all know the bad, no-no numbing ways: pot, pills, alcohol and more! But what about the more insidious ways we soothe that, some times (or a lot of the time) we’re praised for in society? The socially acceptable ones that will in some ways advance our worth to others: work addiction, chasing achievement, people pleasing, staying in a toxic relationship for decades and so on. Or because we’re such upstanding citizens what we’re using couldn’t be that bad? It was this type of questioning posed by Dr. Gabor Maté in his book “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts” that began the end of my good-and-bad-choices way of thinking. The through line in his book draws on the Buddhist concept that we all have a hungry ghost inside of us. A part of us that will never be satiated no matter what we try to feed it. The concept of the hungry ghost (along with the humanity he brought to the page working with skid row like addiction in Vancouver Canada) is what put a wedge in my this or that way of thinking.

Dr. Maté’s theory on addiction has to do with a genetic predisposition for sensitivity and lack of attunement in childhood. Ooooof, man, it tracks completely, like a straight line for my mom. There are many other theories on addiction but this is the one that I subscribe to because it fills in the gaps of what took my mom at such a young age. It wasn’t her stage 4 lung cancer, it was the thing beforehand that made her damaged cells grow and multiply. It was her all consuming chronic psychic pain. In my mind she died, truly, from despair. 

One of my most vivid memories from growing up was her coming home from work and checking in with my sisters and I briefly before going off grid. She’d come into my room for about 90 seconds and I swear her hungry ghost was riding on her back like it was the smallest child in the house that she really needed to take care of.

If I don’t work with this despair burden then I risk it getting passed down to my kids just with a different expression, like the way mine was. Thanks to the likes of Gabor Maté (who came recommended by Dara 💛) and so many others I’ve begun to understand how my very own mama left this earth without having the chance to say goodbye. I carry some of the forever pain just like she had. Obvi, though, instead of numbing it like she did I’ve learned to talk about it, write about it, process it physically with yoga and hiking, and a whole lot of other good shit.

It’s my birthday today and I miss my mom more than I miss the sun during winter or clean air during a smoke filled summer in Central Oregon. Seeking to learn, versus having two different thought buckets: one labeled “good” and the other labeled “bad”, floods my heart with a sense of peace that is almost like the gift of her presence. Sharing what I’ve learned with others only amplifies that peace and, dare I say, brings me a warm and refreshing sense of joy. 

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Here Are the Resources That Literally Changed My Binary Thinking 💛

☯️ In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Dr. Gabor Maté AND Dr. Maté on the Rich Roll podcast Addiction is Not a Disease - These are my timeless repeats that I pick up when the despair has me by the ankles.

☯️ Deconditioning The Hungry Ghost podcast by Tara Brach - Some people go to church on Sundays and I listen to Tara while walking.

☯️ The Urge: Our History of Addiction by Dr. Carl Erik Fisher - This guy is incredible. He tells the history of addcition interwoven with his own personal struggle with alcohol and, later on, pills.

☯️ Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari AND Johann on the Rich Roll podcast On Lost Connections - I’ve seen Hari’s work get criticized quite heavily in addiction spaces but there is something about his theory “the opposite of addiction is connection” that I can’t unsee.

☯️ Emotional Inheritance by Dr. Galit Atlas AND Dr. Atlas on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast How Family Secrets Shape Us - The patients in her book gave me insights into my own journey of healing ancestral trauma. According to Dr. Atlas, there is one child in every family that feels the inherited pain more intensely than others.

☯️ Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Idenitity by Andrew Solomon - Not directly related to addiction but Solomon’s work did a lot for me in terms of metabolizing my very very very different upbringing and seeing the value inside of it. Or, stated another way, it grew my confidence and sharing my authentic human experience.