Her mom’s room was incredibly cluttered.
Mac was sure that there was some sort of organization, but her mind wasn’t the one it was meant for, so she spent the better part of the morning, after getting coffee and breakfast, rearranging the room into areas of similarity. She wasn’t even prepared for what the closet might look like, but when she opened the door, she found it neat with a few towels, an upholstered ottoman, a lone box, and a full-length mirror on the back side of the door. The light could be controlled from inside the closet, so Mac made a mental note that if she needed to shut herself from everything for a moment, this was the best place. Normally she would use the shower or bathroom, but she wasn’t ready to tackle the mold and mildew taking it over. It did strike her as odd that the only way to use the mirror was to close yourself in the closet, but much of her mother’s life had felt odd to her. The organization for one, and the priorities that her mom had always differed from Mac’s
While she was a child, her mother had so frequently been drunk or partying and disregarding her boundaries that there was a little bit of resentment towards any alcohol or illicit fun that built up. As she grew up, at least until she learned ways to express how she was feeling, Mac had always been the fuddy-duddy that never wanted to partake because she had seen what it fully did to people. Yes, having a good time was great, but those people never saw what happened behind closed doors, what 2am looks like to a child with a parent stumbling around unable to care for themselves.
Mac sat in the chair and closed the door, watching herself in the mirror, looking for something in herself that she could catch in little moments. A little echo of her mother’s face in her own. There it was, in the shadow of a nostril, the twinge of a smile that would overtake her face when Mac heard Frank Sinatra.
“Maybe that’s what I need to get me through this; a little Frank.”
Mac selected a collection of Frank Sinatra’s biggest hits through the years from the discarded stack of CD’s from under the bed. After a few skips of the track, scratches from her mom’s carelessness and the sheer age of the disc, Summer Wind came crackling through the speakers on her laptop. She didn’t have any way of amplifying it through the house, so she only caught bits and pieces of the tracks as she moved in and out of the room, taking stuff out to the trash. She was grateful for the first-floor apartment, if for nothing other than getting to skip the stairs The album played multiple times before Mac was able to dedicate herself to being in the room for a long period of time, finally surrendering to the task of sorting papers now that the floor was clear enough for her to make a timeline out of the mess.
“This is going to be a nightmare. Might as well honor the hell and throw on some Steely Dan.”
Mac’s mother had a penchant for bands that played for too long with too many people, but in the fog of grief, nostalgia took over and Mac was able to let the music fade into the background. Little slips of memories of sitting in a living room watching her mom dance alone, trying to call people two hours away at ungodly times of night came pouring back in. These memories of her mother made the room feel small, like there wasn’t enough breath in the small bedroom for everything she had experienced. Feeling like she had made a sufficient dent in there, at least until she had the energy to keep tearing through her mother’s belongings, she decided to take a break for some lunch and would come back to tackle the bathroom.
When she returned, she regretted her choice; lunch should have waited. Nausea bubbled up in her throat as she pulled back the shower curtain to rings of mold, the old appliqués covered in grime having lost their texture long ago.
“Oh, mom,” Mac said quietly and pitifully under her breath.
She put on the nitrile gloves and little painter’s mask she had picked out, the barrier a small gesture. First things first though, get anything out that she could salvage for donation or that she might want to keep, though she saw little promise of either scanning the dingy bathroom. The bathroom was private and attached to her mom’s room, so hopefully no one else had to experience this, though the rest of the apartment wasn’t in much better standing. There were little baskets where her mom had stockpiled lotions and vitamins and supplements, and as Mac moved through each one, she carried the knowledge that most of this stuff was bound for the trash since she had a limited amount of space to bring anything back with her. She could ship the important papers and some of the sentimental items, but Mac didn’t have much space herself back home and was already stressed at the storage solutions she would have to come up with for what little she was returning with. Once the visible items were tackled, including the mess of bottles and soaps in the shower, Mac began the arduous task of cleaning out all the drawers underneath her mom’s sink. As she suspected, it was mostly loose items that could have been better organized but were left to form little piles in corners, just like her mom’s bedroom.
“Can’t wait to see the refrigerator,” Mac grumbled, thinking back on the dream she had of her father’s farmhouse.
Her attention coming back to the drawers at hand, Mac found what she had been so worried to find. A little folded up piece of paper, constructed to hold something inside without losing any of its precious cargo.
“Oh. Mom.”
This time the pity was for herself.
Knowing what she’d find, the white powder she had found so many other times, she opened the packet and dumped the contents into the toilet, flushing as much of it down that didn’t stick to the grime in the toilet. When the nausea hit this time, Mac didn’t know what part of all of it was spurring it. Completely sure that she would find more drugs in her mother’s possessions, Mac just started scooping everything from the drawers into the trash bag, tears starting to stream after handful and handful. She was still waiting on the death certificate and medical examiner’s report for a cause of death, but this was evidence towards a fear Mac had had most of her life: eventually the addiction would win. She supposed it already had, but the drugs and drinking had come and gone in waves and hadn’t been as serious in the early years as the last few had been. Mac knew that when she was brave enough to plug her mom’s phone back in and start pouring through the contents, she would find texts to dealers, texts to her aunt talking about their dealers, and the damning chain of money moved from Mac to her mom and from her mom to a dealer. The excuses were never elaborate, nothing so farfetched that someone would be unwilling to help.
“I’ll pay you back, I was just a couple of hours short at work this week since I was sick, and I forgot that car insurance comes out tomorrow. It’s okay if you don’t have it. You’re my kid and shouldn’t have to always help your ol’ mom out.”
Mac always promised herself that she wouldn’t be like all the other people she saw enabling addicts, wouldn’t get caught up in the cycle of money and silence, but how could she not when her mother was crying to her on the phone? Mac had always been the one to save the day, something she still struggled with and was paying a lot of money for someone to help her figure out in therapy. Every time her mom needed something, a phone call, a couple of bucks, a hero, Mac was there on the other line trying to figure out a solution that would solve the problem the fastest while causing herself the least amount of harm. The money had been an enabler, but that was something she was sure her mom counted on since she had trained Mac from a young age to validate her behavior. Mac was the only person that hadn’t walked away from her mom because she was simply too young or too out resourced to be able to walk away for good. Sure, her mom held jobs, sometimes multiple, and had put a roof over their heads and food in their bellies, but Mac had made more meals for herself than not, at least to her memory.
There was another side to her mother that she often forgot about. Sure, the addiction had sapped away an ability to show up emotionally for her kid, as she called her, but Mac’s mom had these little spurts of care and comfort that flooded out of her. Like, all of a sudden, she could make up for the months of minor neglect in an elaborate home-cooked meal or in an exciting activity, but a cooked meal didn’t make up for the questions that Mac had to answer so often.
“Do you need me there? I will come if you need me there.”
“Hey Mac, where’s your mom? Is she coming tonight or is it just you again for parent-teacher conferences?”
“Do you need a ride home, honey? It’s already dark and so cold.”
Mac had always felt like the adult with her mother, a sentiment her father had echoed time and time again, apologizing that Mac hadn’t received the parents that she deserved. It hurt to look other adults in the eye and have both of you know that your mom wasn’t doing well and that you were suffering for it. You both also knew that nobody else was going to step in and do anything for you, even if you were an eight-year-old cooking their own dinners. Even with all of that suffering, now that she was gone, Mac felt herself contextualizing her mother’s behavior with compassion and forgiveness, something she hadn’t given her mother to absolve her guilt while she was still alive. Mac was angry, and she felt that she had a right to be angry, though that anger wasn’t going to do her much good anyway.
She sat on the floor against the wall, taking a breath from her cleaning purge and let some gentle tears stroll down her face. There had been good times, Mac just chose to forget those times to make room for resentment. There had been days at the beach and the pool where Mac and her mom had been able to play in the sun, long before Mac moved and now couldn’t tolerate any amount of sun without suffering a burn anymore. While inappropriate, there had been the nights at the sports bar, her mom shouting at a television for her team to destroy another, making friends and enemies of the other patrons in the bar.
“Your mom is wild, kid,” a man had told her once.
She didn’t remember which boyfriend or stepdad it was, the sentiment happened so often, each person having a different tone to denote what kind of wild was acceptable or admirable, and eventually led to her only taking the resentment with her. Mac had other friends whose parents were addicts, but those kids seemed to have admiration for their rockstar parent, loving the crazy adventures they got to go on, the heightened sense of the world experienced vicariously through their designated inebriated adult. It was too hard for Mac to shake the embarrassment, shame, and feelings of lack to be able to ignore the bad and enjoy the good without consequence.
Because of her mom’s antics, Mac had learned to play pool and darts at a young age, a knowledge of card games and dice before almost any of her peers and got to have a sense of the fun grown-ups could have. She had always gotten along better with the adults in the spaces she occupied, seeing herself as a peer there and always feeling disappointed when the adults didn’t reciprocate those feelings. Sometimes it felt worse when they did. She heard problems that adults don’t say to each other but for some reason felt comfortable to drunkenly tell a small child, a stranger with no sense of meaning for their problems.
Mac let out an audible sob, wiping the snot and tears from her face with the back of her arm, careful not to touch her face with the soiled cleaning gloves. Disgusted and upset, she pulled them off and threw them in the sink, the only clean part of the bathroom since Mac had started and marched out of the apartment. It was cold, but she needed the fresh air and the momentary escape to help regulate the complicated feelings.
“Use your skills,” she choked out between sobs, “at least you can go back and feel proud in front of the therapist.”
“You okay?” an old woman rattled from the balcony above her, lighting what seemed to be her second cigarette in a chain. The sunglasses out of place in the winter gray of the sky, the aged woman alternating the drags on her cigarette with popping sunflower seeds in her mouth. The crunch irritated Mac.
“Yeah, I’m good thanks.”
Dismissing the woman and returning to her own grief, Mac turned out toward the parking lot and took off walking towards the gas station. Some movement, a fountain drink, and maybe a donut, and she would be just fine. She turned on her wipers and cleared the woman’s smile from her mind.