Читать книгу I Am Nobody. Confronting the Sexually Abusive Coach Who Stole My Life онлайн

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My mom, as much as she appeared to be loving and caring, and as much as she was loved by others outside our home, was incredibly cold and demanding. She was a closet alcoholic, one only we could see. She most definitely was not a happy drunk. She scowled at us, snapped insults, always had a demeaning comment about how we could be doing more or doing better than we were. I grew up thinking that white Bacardi rum was a cleaning supply because I always found bottles of it under our sink—and that’s what my mom told me it was when I was little and asked her what was in the bottle and, well, she was my mom, so I believed her.

Somewhere along the way, somebody or something had taken away her sense of life and fun. The joyful mother she appears to have been in a journal she kept after my birth quickly gave way to an overwhelmed mother of three who struggled to cope. Drunk and belligerent at dinner, or passed out on the couch after drinking to try to escape, life was just too much for her.

That made her incredibly difficult to live with. The sad thing is that every once in a while, maybe twice, three times a year, she would become the person we didn’t usually see, happy, carefree, laughing, and just really cool to be around. I remember her helping me build a crystal ball radio, just the two us, and it was as if she was a different person as we bantered back and forth until we sorted everything out. She joked that if we could figure this out then we could probably build a television and maybe we should just get rid of ours so that we would have to get right onto that next project. It was such a simple moment, yet because such moments rarely happened with her, that conversation is etched in my memory. And those few moments of joy with my mom kind of made it worse, because after seeing her so full of life, it hurt even more to see her the way she usually was around us.