HBD to a legend

Thoughts on the Fallacy of a Just World

To say my 16-year-old self would be surprised by the relationship my mom and I now have would be an understatement. She’s coming up on 13 years clean and sober. When we whisked her away to Betty Ford in October of 2011, I was done. DONE. The betrayal, heartbreak, and rage of loving an addict had taken its toll on me and I was no longer able to hold hope, certain if I did, it would only get smashed over my head again.

And yet, like a quarterback scoring a touchdown in the final minute, she stopped drinking, and slowly, we began the painful process of repair. Now, I get to experience my children’s relationship with her and watch them feel what I wasn’t guaranteed—safety, consistency, and unabashed love.

My little family of four surprised her for her 75th birthday last week, and seeing my two boys jump out from behind the bushes and run into her arms while she squealed in disbelief was a special kind of magic. Like fairy dust was being sprinkled all over me. I’m grateful for all the lessons of motherhood and daughterhood. Even the hard ones.

I don’t sit with the same stress and fear regarding my mom’s sobriety as I used to, when she spent a decade in the painful cycle of using, sobriety, relapse, and using again. Her abstinence has now come to feel guaranteed. (Hallelujah!)

But I can still tap into that feeling I had thirteen years ago when she was at Betty Ford, how burnt out I was, sure that this would be another failed attempt. I remember sitting in my Noe Valley apartment when I got an email from my stepdad saying my mom’s best friend from rehab had graduated, went home, and drank herself to death. The fear and grief were so real to me then. That could have been my mom before going into rehab, and at that moment, I knew that it could be her as soon as she left. She was still safe at Betty, but the fear I felt when she went home was something palpable and constant, an ever-present weight I carried with me for many years after her discharge.

I remember thinking, is this really how this ends? Like this? All this suffering, all this pain, all this chaos, and it’s going to end…like this? In an alcohol-fueled life that we never get to repair? That all those small and big moments of abandonment of my childhood, adolescence, and now adulthood would cumulate in an estranged relationship, my mom circling the drain, and no ability for us to ever make it right. It was heavy. It was heaaaavvvyyy.

But my mother got sober. And beyond sober, she got clear, stable, secure enough to hear all the things I’d needed to say to her. We had the beautiful and painful opportunity to repair. It took a lot of heartache. In the beginning, I was so grateful for her sobriety, I showed her my apprecaition endlessly, like I had been desparate for water all my life, and now I was getting a drop. I can see now, that I deserved that all along, that consistentcy, stability, motherly love. But life doesn’t always go like that. It’s not a just world.

But it could just as easily been me who was mourning the loss of my mother after her rehab stint, instead of the daughters of my mother’s friend.

I have friends who have lost parents to addiction. Clients who have, friends who have died young from drugs and alcohol. Suicide. How do we make sense of the losses that we can’t recover? That we never have the opportunity to repair?

There is so much hopefulness in healing, to being able to repair and try to right the wrongs. But there’s also loss that is unexplained, and forever difficult to grapple with.

No, not everything happens for a reason, and not everything gets to be sorted out. Some loss in life is like that.

There are people who won’t heal, situations that won’t right themselves. There are people we have to let go of, for all sorts of unfair reasons. And there are also people who heal. You can’t control who is going to do their work and recover, and who won’t. You get to control how you heal and recover, how you show up, how you hold boundaries, and let go when you need to.

I am forever grateful that for thirteen years, I’ve gotten to experience my mother. And I also hold space for the part of me who could have gone on without this version of my mom. Who would never have gotten to experience her as Momo to my boys. And I hold space and love for her, too. Because if I’ve learned anything, it’s that it’s a crapshoot. It’s not a just world. Bad things don’t happen to you because you’re bad. Bad things just happen. To everybody. Good things happen, to everybody. You don’t do good to get good. You do good because you are good.