Incorrigible: A Love Story

I Wanted To Be Good So My Mother Would Love Me. But I Didn't Know How.

Me, in motion

My mother kept three crystal decanters on the sideboard. They belonged to the category of items called knickknacks, which existed solely for the purpose of resting on open surfaces. The decanters held tap water my mother dyed with red, yellow, and blue food coloring, and their brightness stood out against the sage green braided rugs and rust-colored couch of our ’70s living room. I liked the decanters. They had removable crystal tops that resisted pleasantly when I pulled them out and stuck them back in, as I did repeatedly while dusting on Saturdays. Speaking of dusting, the decanters were difficult with their intricate patterned crystal. Or maybe they were glass? I don’t know. But I’m certain they held tap water, although I never gave this a thought even as I watched my mother top them off with fresh water and more food coloring. I had no idea the decanters were meant to hold liquor, let alone what liquor was, except for whatever I saw on television. Adults almost never drank in our house.

No, despite her colorful decanters and even more colorful tales of drunken escapades in her family —one uncle sawed a house in half, a cousin filed his teeth to points—my mother eschewed alcohol.

Why, then, did she so often seem drunk?

Other than coffee and cigarettes, I barely experimented in my youth. I was afraid to hurt my brain. If the Just Say No and This is Your Brain on Drugs campaigns scared just one person in America, it was me. I was also afraid to screw up and lose the goodwill of the teachers, neighbors, and even strangers looking out for me as my home life imploded. These adults had one thing in common: they saw me as a good student and, more importantly, a good kid. I would have done—or not done—anything to preserve that image.

By the age of twenty-one, and for a decade after, I alternated between pregnancy and breastfeeding, sometimes both at once. In this era, I ingested mostly substances I concocted with my Vitamix or spiralizer. Only in the throes of my catastrophic divorce at age thirty-two did I finally go searching—as my three children slept upstairs—for the bottle of wine my ex-husband and I had received as a wedding gift eleven years earlier. I was naïve enough to be wholly surprised by the instant relief of alcohol, and I’m frankly lucky for my unusually low tolerance, which may be the main factor that kept me from drinking too much too often during that terrifying time. Now, with age having shrunk my tolerance further still, I rarely drink at all.

None of this ever interfered, though, with my drug of choice, which flows straight from the bottle of Not Good Enough.

Like many low-income families, mine moved a lot. Whenever we settled for a bit—the longest stretch being two years—Mom would start rearranging. “Grab the other end of this hutch,” she’d say. “And get that end table out of the way.” The couch, the chairs, the rolltop desk from Nana, everything had to be lifted or dragged until the pieces fit together again but differently, inside the same walls, doors, and windows of the same room where my stepfather terrorized us, including my mother, whom he beat in front of me.

When we had everything where Mom wanted it, she’d stand with her hands on her hips, flushed and perspiring, green eyes narrowed. Our dog, Pete, would assess, too, sniffing all the bright, new spots on the carpet. “So much better!” Mom would say, adjusting her headband. “Now, get me a can of soup.” The soup was for pounding in nails so Mom’s reproduction paintings could be moved to complement the new layout.

The painting I remember best is Winslow Homer’s The Fog Warning, one of several in which the artist depicted the hard lives of New England sailors and their families. In The Fog Warning, a fisherman realizes he’s too far out in ominous weather with a dangerous fogbank rolling in. Should he throw out the fish he’s caught to lighten his load and increase his odds of survival? It’s a question the painting doesn’t answer.

“Is it level?” Mom would say from where she teetered precariously on the arm of the couch or the top of an end table, soup can in hand (Mom taught me that ladders and hammers are rarely necessary). Ultimately, she’d climb down and assess her own work from several angles. “So much better,” she’d say again. “What a goddamn difference.”

I miss my mother. She’s seventy-six now, and two years have passed since I last reached out. She refused to respond then, a thing she does. When I said her coldness and silence hurt my feelings and made me hesitant to reach out again, my mother said, “Then don’t.”

“Why is she always like this?” I asked my sister.

“I don’t know,” my sister said. “She just is . . . at least, to you.”

In Mrs. Lavelle’s first grade, I recited the Pledge of Allegiance by heart and sang “America the Beautiful” in my best voice. I filled in every blank on every worksheet with my finest penmanship, and I eagerly carted armfuls of scissors and paste and construction paper to the proper bins as soon as Mrs. Lavelle rang her red metal bell. I almost always put my head down on my desk during rest time. Even when I didn’t—even when that boy behind me raised his hand and tattled—Mrs. Lavelle said it didn’t matter because I was quiet and good. I could see Mrs. Lavelle’s eyes twinkling behind her rhinestone glasses when she said this. I loved her with all my heart.

My first-grade report card came back with a perfect line of straight As. Same with second grade, third, fourth, fifth, and so on.

I wanted to be good so my teachers would love me. And I knew exactly how.

Sometimes, the legendary tales about drinking in my mother’s family feel like just that: legends. One thing I know, though, is that my mother was orphaned at seventeen, the same year she got pregnant and married my father. She was already beset with grief when my father’s father died soon after their wedding, followed by two close friends killed in an explosion that also injured my mother. I know addiction and prolonged grief are family diseases. And I know I married a drinker when I was twenty-one and that although he stopped drinking through most of our marriage, the shape of a bottle stayed inside him, waiting to be filled again as soon as we split, and the fumes from that bottle and all the bottles before it in his family and mine still float over my life and the lives of our children even as they, one by one, choose sobriety.

During my junior year of high school—before I went into foster care but after Mom’s house was foreclosed—Mom apparently inquired with some neighbors about adopting me. I was reminded of this episode recently while digging through old records. Mom typed pages and pages in response to various county questionnaires during the foster care era. In one instance, she wrote that I was “intrigued” about the idea of being adopted by these neighbors. I do remember this couple and their large, clean home in the heart of the same neighborhood on the edge of which our little brown house teetered precariously, awaiting repossession. I see myself perched on a sateen, striped sofa in a formal living room, trying to look and sound a certain way. Trying to be the kind of teenaged girl a respectable couple might adopt. But despite these hazy images, I have no recollection of discussing my potential adoption with my mother. What I do recall is a frequent childhood dream of a beautiful, heavy quilt sewn for me by my adoptive parents and the weight of it on my chest.

When my first two children were small—Sophie was two and Max was still a baby—my then husband and I got licensed for foster care in the rural county where we lived. I was staying home with the children in those years, and one of our neighbors—her name was Mike, and she was like the grandmother of the whole block—had done foster care while her kids were growing up. Mike’s husband was a psychiatrist, and I admired their family very much. They had a little cedar playhouse in their backyard, soft with rot and moss, that Sophie liked to explore whenever Mike and I chatted with one another. Between Mike’s gentle influence and my own biography, which I mostly kept secret then, I came to believe foster care was a necessary thing for me to do, a way to rearrange some cosmic injustice. The stipends for fostering weren’t much, but the money wasn’t nothing, either, and it felt right. Starting with babies felt right, too, but turned out to be challenging given the ages of my own children. So, when we got a call for a fifteen-year-old girl, we said yes.

I was twenty-five.

When reunification efforts between our foster daughter and her parents fell apart, she was already embroiled in trouble at school and had become expert at sneaking in and out of our house through her first-floor bedroom window. On the night Clinton was elected president, she removed her own braces with a pair of pliers. So, when she started disappearing for days at a time, the county moved her to a higher-tier, therapeutic home an hour away. I would drive there once a week to visit her and participate in family counseling sessions because no one from our foster daughter’s biological family would or could. Our foster daughter spent holidays with us that year, too, because the other kids in her program spent holidays with their real families, and we were the closest thing she had.

When our foster daughter was moved again, this time to an even more controlled setting three hours north, I felt guilty for having failed her and even guiltier for the relief of being released from weekly therapy. By this time, I was pregnant with a third child. When my foster daughter moved yet again later that year, we finally lost touch.

Maybe there is a more technical, less jarring term than “night raids” for what too often happened in my childhood as I lay in my twin bed, fast asleep and dreaming, only to be jarred awake when my mother threw open my door like a storm, howling and raging over some small item she could not find, like her comb or scissors. I don’t know why those two items so often disappeared or why their absence was so calamitous—but I was always to blame.  

Here’s how I would find Mom’s comb or scissors as my panicked body fought and fled inside of itself: I’d float above that numb, dumb thing and drag it like a dog from room to room, wrangling it into the necessary positions—bend the knees so the head can look under the couch, make the arms swipe under the couch one at a time, turn the head back and forth on the neck, yank it all upright again and move the feet, faster, faster, faster.

Looking back, it seems likely these terrifying episodes happened not in the middle of the night but in the predawn hours when Mom was getting ready for work, panicked about combing her hair or sewing on a button. But that doesn’t matter now. What matters is that I cannot recall ever finding Mom’s comb or scissors, even though I must have. Instead, I remember only the panicked searching.

“Your mom is so pretty!” my friends would say when they saw Mom at school. Mom was younger than their mothers, and she was pretty—tall and broad with what people in those days called a “nice figure” in her wide-legged jeans and slim-fit turtlenecks. She kept her shoulder-length auburn hair tied back with scarves or pulled it into high buns, and her heart-shaped face was dramatic with her thick, straight-across bangs and silver hoop earrings, big enough to sway and glint as she walked. Sometimes, on weekends, Mom would lie on her back on the living room floor and do leg lifts or slip her feet under the edge of the couch for sit-ups. Sometimes, I would lie on the floor near her and do the same.

I wanted to be pretty, so my pretty Mom would love me.

Survivors of childhood trauma sometimes use perfectionism to correct or conceal self-perceived flaws and vulnerabilities. But for a long time, whenever anyone ever called me a perfectionist, I took it as a compliment. The part of the Serenity Prayer that mattered to me was the middle stanza. I was determined to change and control whatever I could.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, I, too, spent the first years of my first marriage rearranging furniture. Sometimes I even swapped whole rooms, turning the living room into the dining room, and vice versa. My feverish bouts of rearranging occurred an embarrassing number of times before I realized other people don’t shuffle couches and tables like playing cards. Even after I knew better, a frenzied effort to reimagine my life could sometimes overcome me, especially during the years of my bad divorce. Once I even enlisted my third-grade son to help haul a heavy hutch from the second floor to the first.

“Why, Mama?” he said as we bumped slowly down the wooden stairs.

 “We have to,” I said. “You’ll see when we’re done.”

I’ve never written in detail about my year in foster care, partly because I remember so little of it.

There was the emergency shelter in Duluth, an asymmetrical building on the edge of the woods. It had windows and carpet. My little sister was there too.

There was the foster home in St. Paul, sticky with nicotine from the foster parents’ chain-smoking. I remember the night we foster girls huddled in our bedroom—an attached garage—smoking and laughing. We knew we were allowed to smoke only outside, but it was below zero that night. When the foster mom blasted through the door in a fuzzy bathrobe with hair blooming wild around her face, we hid our burning cigarettes behind our backs as she yelled blah blah blah into the wisps of smoke curling around us. I worried my cigarette would ash on the bed and start a fire before she finally shut the door. Forty years later, I can still feel the thickness of that smoke, how it clung. And getting clean was hard in that house, because foster kids could shower only at night, when it was dark and cold. Morning water was for the real kids. So I sat ugly on the long, freezing bus rides to high school, ashamed of my bed-ruined hair. My little sister didn’t worry about her yesterday’s braids, though. I remember playing with her in the lower-level family room, long hours of Chinese jump rope between dinner and bed. And I remember the day she left. A social worker would be overseeing her reunification with our mom, who said she wanted my sister back but not me, because I was incorrigible, which means “incapable of being corrected, amended, or reformed.” The foster parents called me upstairs to explain, and even from the distance I kept, their voices sounded funny and their faces looked funny, too, the way grownup faces always do under the weight of pity for a thing no one wants.

Then there was the last foster home, a nice stucco house in the old Lake Phalen neighborhood. This one was organized like a duplex, with real kids downstairs and foster kids in an apartment upstairs. A buzzer on the door alerted the foster parents to our comings and goings. Curfew was at eleven, after which doors were locked and anyone unaccounted for was reported to the police. For food, we got a weekly credit with the corner grocery. That part I liked. I felt grown-up and alive wandering the aisles of that dusty market, adding up the cost of Rice Krispies and cottage cheese. In the apartment itself, boys slept in the back overlooking the driveway, while girls overlooked the lake. I remember how the inside of the bedroom window grew thick with patterned frost and how I would scrape it with my fingernail at night until I could see the dark expanse of ice beyond and imagine what it might feel like to fall in.

After foster care, I attended college on a Pell Grant for two years before dropping out to get married. Six weeks after the wedding, I got pregnant. What to Expect When You’re Expecting told me exactly what I should always and never do, starting with the admonition that every bite was an opportunity to nourish my baby or deprive her. As I chewed anxiously through bowls of whole wheat spaghetti and broccoli, more birthing and parenting books found my nightstand until soon, mothering guidance filled every available shelf—Wise Woman Herbal for the Childbearing Year, Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, The Attachment Parenting Book, The Continuum Concept, Your Baby & Child, Your Spirited Child, Siblings Without Rivalry, and on and on and on, a cacophony of voices warning me constantly of the dire consequences of my every mistake.

I wanted to be a good mother so my daughter would love me. But I didn’t know how.

When my little sister turned twelve, she walked herself to a police station six blocks from the apartment she shared with our mom. My sister pled with the officers there to put her back in foster care, which they did, over my mother’s objections. My sister stayed in foster care for the next six years, until she aged out.

After my daughter was born, I would bring her to visit my sister. Sometimes, we played Barbies on the floor of my sister’s attic bedroom. Other times, my sister’s foster mom cooked dinner for us. My sister was sixteen then. I was twenty-two.

I’ve tried many times to reconcile with my mother, but she prefers her peace and quiet. In her version of the story—some of which I’ve read in those old foster care records—our trouble started when I was in eighth grade and disclosed how my stepfather had sexually abused me throughout the six years of her marriage to him, when I was ages four through ten. My mother wrote that after my disclosure, I “suffered intense disillusionment and anxieties about our family” and that I “became very critical, seeking support from friends to strengthen my self-image.” In these same documents, my mother details how she and I “had too-long hours of work, with Jeannine and me both earning income to support the household.”

I was fourteen.

Not long after my troublesome disclosure of sexual abuse, my mother kicked me out of her house for not having folded the laundry. I bounced between neighbors, teachers, friends, and, at times, Mom’s house again, until I landed in foster care in the fall of 1985. At that exact moment, almost to the day, my stepfather was convicted of felony sexual misconduct against his new stepdaughter.

Years later, my mom would tell me that she knew, even while she was married to my stepfather, that he was “doing something” to me and that she “made him get counseling for it.”

I wonder if the reason my mother keeps her distance from me is simple: the sight of me reminds her of too many things that hurt to look at.

My own children are imperfectly grown now. I still want them to love me. I still want my mother to love me too.

But I’m not trying so hard to be good anymore. I’m already good enough.

My youngest child, B—the one I was pregnant with when I lost touch with my foster daughter—became a foster parent during the pandemic. B’s first placement was a little boy named Z, for whom weeks stretched to months and then years of unsuccessful reunification efforts. Ultimately, the county asked B to adopt Z, and in preparation for that possibility, B bought a house around the block from mine. Together, we labored to make that house fit for a child. In particular, B and I remade Z’s room, which the previous owners had used as an office. For hours and hours, we blended various shades of greens, blues, yellows, and grays to cover Z’s walls with evergreens because he loves our cabin in the woods. By the time we were finished, our whole bodies were drenched in paint and our muscles burned from squatting for the trunks. “My forest!” Z shouted when he saw it.

My youngest wants to be a good parent to Z because they love him. For the most part, they know how.

Maybe I do too.

Late one night about a decade ago, my phone rang with an unknown number. My foster daughter had searched for me on the internet and wanted to tell me, among other things, that she was “thankful for every minute I spent making her a better person.”

After saying I was happy to hear from her, I told my foster daughter I was sorry for the ways I had failed her.

Both of us were saying true things. But it’s possible that the truest things live in the spaces between.

Z is three now and bursting with life. He’s the strongest kid I’ve ever known—an Olympic-quality athlete. I’m not just saying this; I taught elementary school for ten years. Z rides a two-wheeler bike without training wheels—at three! He does unassisted handstands and cartwheels. He runs so fast I can’t catch him in my flip-flops. He’s funny, too, with a knack for language that thrills me and stops me short. And his facial expressions and intonations combined with the sheer brilliance of his physical comedy could easily get him into movies. Look, shouldn’t everyone be astonished by the miracle of children in their lives? But Z has star power. He could do or be anything. And sometimes, when I hold him after one of his extended panic attacks in the night, as he sobs from a place I cannot reach but know too well, I feel the vastness of it all, the full gravity of the deep past—his and mine, the addiction and violence and jagged gouges from ill-fated attempts to make things more perfect by dragging furniture and pounding nails with dented soup cans into already marred walls. In these moments, I feel the old pull toward a circle of melted frost overlooking icy expanses where stars don’t matter—where nothing does.

That’s when I listen for another, realer thing—a quiet, soprano vibration from a future that already exists somewhere, one where our fierce, flawed love is enough to keep this child safe. I harmonize myself to that gentle hum as Z settles beside me, his face smooth with sleep. As we breathe in and out in a silence that feels, after so much crying, still fragile, I picture the mobiles my stepdaughter makes for all the babies in our family—those free-hanging sculptures suspended in air. I picture how each handcrafted star swings in response to the movement of the others, and how all of us, too, are swaying through the sky of generations, seeking always to balance each other’s forces.

***

This essay appeared first in July, 2023 in The Rumpus Voices on Addiction.

Voices on Addiction is a column devoted to true personal narratives of addiction, curated by

Kelly Thompson

, and authored by the spectrum of individuals affected by this illness. Through these essays, interviews, and book reviews we hope—in the words of Rebecca Solnit—to break the story by breaking the status quo of addiction: the shame, stigma, and hopelessness, and the lies and myths that surround it. Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, adult children, extended family members, spouses, friends, employers or employees, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors, victims of crimes, and those who’ve committed crimes as addicts, and the personnel who often serve them, nurses, doctors, social workers, therapists, prison guards, police officers, policy makers and, of course, addicts themselves: Voices on Addiction will feature your stories. Because the story of addiction impacts us all. It’s time we break it. Submit here.