LETTER TO MY MOTHER
By Peggi Cooney | Author This Side of Alcohol | Hola Sober Host + Columnist | TSOA on FB + Instagram |
Dear Mom:
The official cause was rheumatoid arthritis and pneumonia, but we both know that alcohol was also responsible for you leaving this earth at age 51. I was 19. I wasn’t a child and yet I was so far from being an adult. Your sons, Bob, Jerry, and Jim were nine, 27 and 29. All these years, 49 of them without you now, I have been so angry with you for all the things you missed: my college graduations, my boyfriends, my careers, marriages, your grandkids and great-grandkids, my successes, my fuckups, everything. I had no one to bounce things off of and I lost my cheerleading section. I lost my way several times. I inherited your creativity, your love of reading, and your struggle with alcohol. Oh, and I suck at cooking, just like you. (Remember how our dog, Sam, was so skinny?)
I was walking this morning, and I was thinking about how much you would have loved reading Drink, This Naked Mind, We Are the Luckiest, The Sober Diaries, and Drinking: A Love Story. You would have loved Sober Sis, The Luckiest Club, and Hola Sober. I was thinking how those books and these amazing communities might have changed the trajectory of your life as they have mine. Mom, I know you would have loved the science behind it all. For me, it hasn’t only given me sobriety, but the grace to forgive you because now I know it wasn’t your fault. I’m no longer pissed off every time I think of you. I never appreciated your growing up during the Depression with five siblings and how hard that must have been. I didn’t have the compassion you deserved for becoming a widow with two young boys when you were just 29 years old. Or how you lost your brother Harold in the war. Or the years you suffered from debilitating and painful arthritis. I do now
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