Driving My Mom to Rehab
‘Although I probably wasn’t fully aware at the time, I was embedded into my mother’s recovery as much as she was’
Growing up, my relationship with my mother was not a seamless one-shot take, but a montage of different clips. Certain scenes were in Memphis, Tennessee, jumping from house to house for reasons I was unaware of at the time. Small flashbacks of finding airplane bottles of whiskey, vodka, and gin hiding amongst my stored baby clothes stick out to me. A number of clips take place in Southern California, visiting her at the Betty Ford Clinic and staying with her in a cluttered rental apartment.
Once my mom returned to Memphis, I started to learn what it was like to be a child of a parent in recovery instead of a child of a person with an addiction. We moved into a home two minutes away from her Alcoholics & Narcotics Anonymous meetings, where I met people that to this day feel like characters in a storybook. During my mom’s early months of recovery, I remember spending hours with her and her fellow recovering addicts — a couple named Gina and Raymond, hairdresser Jennifer and her temperamental baby Harper, and my mother’s proudly gay male sponsor Lonnie. I attended AA meetings, went to sponsored dances, and spent the holidays with them. Although I probably wasn’t fully aware at the time, I was…
