Mommy's Little Helper

One afternoon my senior year, I drove home to our little rented town house in my gold Pontiac Sunbird hatchback. My head was buzzing with the drama that had taken place at school – whatever it happened to be that day. I dragged myself inside crying and complaining that I’d had a bad day. Mom was enormously sympathetic and sat on the stairs with her arm around my shoulder while I talked and cried. She didn’t judge or berate me. Suddenly she stood up and told me to wait right there. She came back with - very popular at the time – a wine cooler and half of a little, white pill. She told me to drink and take both, that that’s what made her feel better after a hard day. I obeyed, but I did ask what the white pill was. “That’s Valium. It just makes you relaxed.”

I forget at what point it was that I learned that a doctor had actually told mom that in order to help her relax at night, she should drink a glass of wine. He also prescribed her Valium. We know now that this was a fairly common practice back then, and it reeked havoc indiscriminately.

Truth be told, Mom had a lot she needed to relax over. Based on a combination of things she told me, other facts I know myself, and what I have learned from therapists and doctors, she was a victim of years of incest. This causes Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had an episode of PTSD, but it can make you feel as terrified as if someone were holding a gun to your head. What is happening is that you are essentially feeling the emotions of a past traumatic experience – such as incest – at a time when you are physicllay safe enough to experience it. In the actual moment of the trauma, often times our bodies and psyches shut down and we do not feel. But we do later. This, in turn, can make you feel comepletely crazy because you know you are terrified but you also know there’s not really anything that bad happening at that moment. I should know. I have it, too.

I won’t spend too much time on this subject now, but I do want to say that I am so grateful to be part of the first wave of women who can recover from sexual abuse in a healthy way, because more people have now studied it and found what works to help us heal. There are also better medicines.

But we didn’t at the time. The kind of pain and fear my mom lived with and in every day of her life would level a lesser person. And it has. But not her. She actually did what the doctor ordered. And it cost her.