Mom is sober now, but I still need time to rebuild our relationship

This translation has been automatically generated and has not been verified for accuracy.First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines atI hardly ever wondered any more, if Mom was or wasn’t sober. After years of riding the waves of recovery and relapse, I’d finally accepted I was powerless, that my desperation for her to be well had no bearing on whether or not she was. My anger and resentment had, for the most part, been swept out to sea.

She and Dad were in Florida, enjoying their annual mid-winter sojourn and escape from the Canadian cold. Desperate for Florida sunshine, I begged her. “Please, pretty please, send us some warmth. It’s so damn depressing here.”As the conversation wrapped up, Mom took me by surprise and said, in earnest, “I miss you.”“Yes,” she said, her tone gentle yet emphatic. “I miss you.”I gulped, swallowing the words I ached to speak. “Well,” I stammered. “Have a great day. Love you.

More time? She’d been sober for seven years. I’d moved from my front-row seat to the bleachers long ago, to observe from a distance. I’d become cognizant of the tiniest nuances: her eye-to-eye contact, inflections in her tone of voice and her capacity to listen. Any flickers of doubt about her sobriety were fleeting, the subtle changes in her behaviour suggesting that this “in recovery” was different. Mom’s heavy burden of shame carried no weight in a sober world.

Perhaps saying “I love you” to parents is easier than revealing the vulnerability of missing them. Missing can hurt, the way it did in the summer of 1970, during my homesick-ridden month at sleepover camp. The dull pain in my gut heard only grown-up messages, “Stay strong,” or “Don’t cry,” and I’d bury my discomfort for fear of being exposed.Or maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe I didn’t want to give Mom the satisfaction of knowing that I missed her. After all, she’d ignored me for 20 years.

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