Before my mom dies, I wanted to write this

Part II: Becoming a stranger

I’ve had to make some tough decisions throughout my life— one of them being the relationship I chose to have with my mom. I’ve made a conscious decision to love her unconditionally. And I’ve done that from whatever distance I’ve had to over the years.

I’ve come to realize that unconditional love doesn’t have to equate to suffering. But it took most of my life to learn that. My relationship with my mom has gone through many iterations over the years; my love is not conditional, but our engagement is.

In the past, I chose to keep my mom in the foreground of my life because I wanted her there. I wanted a mom.

Currently, those feelings aren’t as straightforward.

When I came back in the Fall of 2023, we had the best Christmas we’ve ever had as a family since my sisters were born. It felt like a new beginning. Or maybe the beginning of a happy ending.

Shortly after, my mom’s second life began to emerge.

Static.

It was like noise bleeding through our signal, intermittently, until everything suddenly became scrambled. Unrecognizable.

After my mom’s near-death experience a decade earlier, she fell back into phases of addiction for the following couple of years. But ultimately, she managed to pull herself out of it. She lived a relatively routine life from that point forward, at least from our perspective. If there were times she was using, we didn’t catch it.

Throughout this period, both of my sisters graduated from school, the oldest of the two got married, started having children, and my youngest sister was on the verge of starting a life of her own as well. It was the golden age of our family.

The Golden Era

I, on the other hand, would drop in about once a year because I moved over 1,000 miles away at the age of 17, when I graduated from high school. We were still a close family, and I was doing more good from 1,000 miles away than I think I ever could have if I stayed.

If I had stayed, I have no doubt I would be dead.

In Florida, I had a good life. I went to college, earned my degree, had a fantastic career, and bought my first house—I accomplished many things I never dreamed of.

In 2020, I decided to live abroad and spent those remaining years working remotely and traveling the world, mostly solo. It was a timely comeback in the fall of 2023. I had one terminally ill relative, another who was very sick, and in many ways, it was meant for me to be here during that period.

When my mom’s double life started to unravel, however, it was pretty shocking to us all. I can’t say there were any tell-tale signs, but she was always good at keeping secrets.

One day, she told my sisters and me that she had been seeing someone from work. She worked at a local jail, and long story short, she started dating an inmate. She ultimately had to forfeit her job due to the relationship. She was still married to my sisters’ father, however, which made this secret especially troubling for them.

Eventually, my youngest sister demanded that she tell the truth about the affair. My mom didn’t, of course, and left it up to them to sort out with their dad. After the truth came out, my mom started spending more and more time away from home.

It was a truly bizarre situation.

This individual had been released from jail by now and was living in a halfway house. They would spend as much time together as they could, which was surprisingly a lot. Once he was free to leave, they moved into an apartment together in an adjacent town. My mom walked away from her life, taking few reminders with her, and she didn’t look back.

We didn’t know it just then, but she was willing to give up everything— her stuff, the two cats she loved, her marriage, her home, and us.

I remember a conversation in the car one day. I told her that I wanted her to be happy, and if this was what she believed would truly make her happy, that I supported her. We all did. Even my stepdad was oddly accepting of the circumstances, and their relationship ended pretty amicably.

There were some pieces of the puzzle that we couldn’t quite make sense of in all this until much later.

It became apparent that something else was also going on with our mom.

Relapse.

It became apparent to us that she was abusing medication again. We didn’t know what to think at first because, like I said, after her massive heart attack, she was put on a lot of prescriptions. We tried to piece it together, looked up all the prescriptions she was on, read extensively about them, but nothing made sense.

They weren’t the kind of prescriptions that someone would want to abuse.

There had to be a caveat. There had to be more prescriptions, and she had to be seeing a doctor outside of her regular appointments. We continued researching and monitoring her prescription list. Finally, my youngest sister, Mia, found the missing link.

My mom was seeing another doctor. The kind that doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t care about medical history, and will happily prescribe whatever you are seeking.

Yeah, those still exist here. You just need to talk to the right (or wrong) people to find out where.

Just like old times, she had access to the holy trinity of prescription medications that she’d always turn to. She didn’t overdose during this time, but there were times we had to take turns watching her to make sure she didn’t.

It was awful.

It was hard for me to understand why now. Why, when I finally come back home. But there wasn’t time to dwell on it. There were more important things to worry about.

Other than the coordination loss, the slumping over, her being unable to make sense or communicate, the slurred speech, and the cigarettes she would light and forget about, there were new symptoms we weren’t familiar with.

All of this coincided with her new relationship, but we didn’t know how deep it was. We didn’t know if it was correlation or causation; I mean, he was living in a halfway house for most of this time, undergoing regular, close monitoring and drug testing.

My mom told us he didn’t do drugs— she vehemently denied he had anything to do with it and that the reason he was in jail was due to stealing copper from a coal mine. It was just as likely that she was acting alone, so we believed her.

She also told us she was going to AA, and he was supporting her through it. Every Wednesday, they would go out for a handful of hours, and my mom told us she was actively trying to recover.

Although my mom has also notoriously dated men in the past who didn’t have her best interests at heart. Including a man she had a marriage annulled with when I was in second grade, because he set a fire in our house while we were asleep on the second story. A fire that blocked the staircase and the exit out, and we lost everything in that fire. We could’ve easily lost our lives in it as well.

That’s another story, living in another decade. But the chaos always seemed to find a new wardrobe.

These new symptoms we were seeing threw us for a loop. It was a side of her we’d never seen before. Even when she seemed to be sober, she would sometimes seem to be out of her mind.

This was new.

She started talking about worms crawling out of her skin. She had strange rashes and blemishes on her skin. She started getting uncomfortably explicit about her sex life with us. It often seemed like she couldn’t sit still. She suddenly had a tremor that she never had before, which resembled progressed Parkinson’s disorder.

After she moved out, we went and saw her a few times. We even met the new guy and treated him with kindness. They came to one of the grandkids’ pageants, and my mom seemed sober for that, but after that, things changed quite rapidly.

I mean, Bill, that’s his name, he didn’t seem like a bad guy. Sometimes I wonder if even he bit off more than he could chew.

Shortly after all this, I got a phone call from my sister. “Mom’s in the hospital, she fell down some stairs.”

On my birthday, my mom, at the age of 56, fell down a set of 18 stairs— breaking her collarbone, four ribs, and sustaining many minor injuries. I never heard from her on my birthday.

She didn’t go to the hospital for that, however. I found out two days later that’s why I never heard from her.

The reason she went to the hospital two days later was that she had overdosed, and Bill had to call 911 because he found her lying facedown on the floor in her vomit.

A photo I took at the hospital

I often think about those idiosyncrasies in terms of how my mom has survived all these experiences. If she had passed out on her back, she wouldn’t have had a chance.

She was released from the hospital after nearly a week. She never followed up with the doctors. Her collarbone needed surgery, but she opted out of it. She was supposed to see an addiction counselor and opted out of it.

She doesn’t want help, and you cannot help someone who doesn’t want it. Trust me when I say we’ve exhausted every angle to get my mom help over the years.

She’s been in and out of the hospital since— primarily for overdose, but also for breathing complications. They treat her like a number these days. And I get it.

My sisters saw her the last time we were made aware of her being in the hospital. I, on the other hand, was back in Florida during this time. None of us saw her during her most recent hospitalization because we only learned about it afterwards, but the time before that changed things.

The body can only hold so many secrets before they begin to seep out.

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My name is Shaina, and I am a writer, builder, and connoisseur of clouds. I tell stories of reinvention, consciousness, and learning out loud.

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