After we moved into the trailer park my mom started to go out more after work with the two brothers’ mom and people from her work. I also began to hear her talk more about the other people she met for drinks after work as well.
One name kept coming up in her conversations.
One night she told me she was seeing this man. He was her new boyfriend. She had told him about my bad acne struggles.
While my acne had begun to stabilize, and I think it was beginning to retreat because there were little patches of skin that were smooth and not irritated, my mom approached me to let me know that she was told of a cure for acne.
I didn’t believe her. I had learned a lot about acne and the causes from dealing with mine, and from talking to other boys at school who also had bad acne. I felt more at ease in knowing that I was not alone with this challenge of battling bad acne.
And acne is one of the dreaded parts of puberty. There wasn’t much you could do about it.
So, the cure as told to my mom came from her new boyfriend.
He had convinced her that by giving me a can of beer each day for a month it would make my acne go away. I was shocked that this was even considered by my mom to be a cure.
I don’t remember how my mom convinced me that this would be good for me and that I should try this treatment for the next month. Maybe the convincing was because it was alcohol and I was a teenager.
No matter what, this was not going to be a good time for me. And my mom set the rules for me to come home after school for my daily can of beer.
For the next two weeks after school I would come home and she would be waiting for me with a can of beer to drink. And she would watch me to make sure that I consumed the entire can before she left to go out.
I began to hate the taste of beer, and I did not want to continue with this claimed treatment. And I did not believe this was an actual treatment after telling the other boys at school what I was doing and hearing their shocked responses.
Maybe it was something else.
After about two weeks of the forced drinking, I rebelled. I said, “No More. I will not drink any more beer, ever.” I think I had become disillusioned with her. This wasn’t my mom I kept thinking.
We fought verbally and very heatedly. I stormed off to my room, closing the door quickly and locking it. I did not want to see her. And the horror of drinking alcohol daily at fourteen quickly presented another bad experience for me.
Yes, the beer did make me feel a little disconnected from my body.
This is when I realized that my mom drank too much, and that her new boyfriend also drank too much. They drank every day, every afternoon, every evening.
After several days of being angry with her and avoiding her, I decided to confront my mom. And that is what I did. And I was brutal.
I called her an acholic mom and told her that she didn’t care about me. I yelled at her and said, “All your drinking has only brought me challenges and abuse in my life, and that making me drink beer was an abuse of my body and my mind.”
I spoke of things that I had experienced that I don’t think she ever knew. I didn’t care. I was angry.
She cried, but I still didn’t care. I think that I had had enough torment in my life. Enough was enough, this is how I was feeling. And I was letting it all out.
I continued to yell at her and then I said, “I’m fourteen and you and your boyfriend are trying to make me become an alcoholic teen. Go to hell.” Yes, this is what I remember saying to her in that heated moment.
She looked shocked when I said this.
I begged her to stop seeing him and to stop drinking as tears flowed down my face. I was a mess during our argument, but this had to be done. What I said had to be said.
When our confrontation was done, she agreed to stop seeing her boyfriend. I made her promise.
And she did.
I was cautious in accepting her promise. She didn’t seem to be genuine in making her promise to me. It was too quick and agreeable.
As time went by, I suspected that she was still seeing him in secret. This bothered me but I was not ready to confront her about it. I needed to wait until I had the proof and could confront her again.
And she was still drinking, less visibly though. But you can’t hide the smell. You can’t hide the instability of walking. You can’t hide the slurring of words.
And while this was going on, I managed to still be active in my own world. I was getting better in bowling, I could kill twenty clay pigeons in a round, and I was very confident riding the desert trails on a horse at a gallop, just like when I rode the desert trails on my bike as fast as I could.
When I was performing in the spotlight, I was confident. But when I was alone, I was still scared. Memories of the challenges and abuse I had experienced kept creeping out when I was alone.
I was also silent in my new fear of girls. Yes, I wanted a girlfriend. But I had very little confidence in being with a girl. Maybe I hadn’t figured out girls yet.
And I didn’t want to become an alcoholic.
One day I asked my mom if she was still seeing that man who drinks every day and she replied, “No.”
This would prove to be one of her biggest lies to me.
And that day of revelation was coming quickly.
Very quickly…
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