Wedding Present

Wedding Present

Reason number 452 to forget I was married a second time: the week I sang Amazing Grace to Mom was the week before my wedding. Only five days before I was supposed to be a bride again, she was supposed to die again.

I couldn’t count on my mother at my wedding. I couldn’t even invite her to my wedding. I did – of course – knowing that there was no possible way she could make it. Thinking about it now, I guess I could have had it somewhere in Houston and not Austin where he and I lived. But that’s not what I did.
Probably part of me was trying to move on and not care. What’s interesting is that two weeks before the wedding I called my therapist to say that I surely was selfish for spending any money on a wedding when my mother was in the shape she was in, that probably I should take that money and put my mother in a rehab – one last chance. I called around and found a place that had a bed. My therapist told me that I was sabotaging my own prospects at a happy life, feeling survivor guilt, and was trying to parent my mother.

Next thing I know, my mom lands herself in a bed. Well, I don’t believe in coincidence. And she wasn’t hearing it from the doc that she even had a problem with alcohol at that fatal point. Plus, she was hanging out with old man mean-o mooch.

I think the good Lord was showing me that she wasn’t ready and that I didn’t have to feel guilty. Of course, I didn’t get that at the time.

At the time, I was full of grief for what I didn’t have: my mom. Shouldn’t every girl/woman be able to have her mom when she gets married? Why oh why can’t I? Too, and fair enough, I was terribly sad that she was dying for certain and that the dream that she may recover was really over. I missed her, or at least what there was of her.

Flashback: about a year before that, when I did live in Houston and Mom got released from her assault – after they’d taken her car. I talked to her about staying in a shelter. She let me know that sometimes she did go to Star of Texas, but that she didn’t like the rules plus she had a bed in a room with so many people that she had to sleep with her shoes on or they would get stolen.

I call Star of Texas to find out what the rules are. The young man on the phone tells me that, yes, it’s true that no alcohol is allowed and that often that is a reason that some folks refuse to stay. They would rather have their drink than a roof and a bed. He fills me in on some more harsh truth, which is that this mission area is a known haven for heroin addicts and prostitutes, that often this is what becomes of people who hang around there, that it’s a vicious cycle.

I call an institution to find out the legalities of having someone committed for their own good. Turns out, they have to be a lot more than homeless and refusing a bed so that they can drink. It seems that they have to prove that they are a danger to themselves or others. I am certain that if they just talk to Mom they will see that she is a danger to herself – she stays out on the street and gets assaulted, ending up in the hospital. The police who question her call me back and claim that she was very clear and lucid about what she wanted and wasn’t doing anything wrong. I call the young man again at STAR of Texas and he says, yep. There’s your trouble. And if you want you can work very hard to try to get someone to maybe commit her for a short time while she hates you for a long one.

This is when my panic starts to really set in. This is when I start to experience real symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is when I start staying up nights, not eating. I lose 16 pounds in two weeks – I wasn’t heavy in the first place. A counselor at the school where I teach stops me in the hall and asks me what’s going on with the dark circles under my eyes. I tell him, and he tells me I am not going to make it through the school year like this. And I don’t.