The Introduction:
My name is Molly. I have an alcoholic, addictive, and bipolar brother. And I am an enabler.
7 Months Ago:
Sunday brunch in the commons in East Halls was my favorite. There is nothing that an omelet with everything on it and extra cheese with tatter tots on the side could not fix from the previous blurred out weekend. Or so I thought. I place my tray and silverware on the assembly line to be cleaned, put my hands under the automatic hand sanitizer, and walk downstairs while I wait for my roommate and two of our guy friends to do the same. My phone vibrates and “Home” is calling for the second time this morning. “Hey Mom, how are you? Sorry I didn’t pick up earlier I was eating,” I ask thinking this is her weekly check up phone call. “Um well… Molly, your brother is in the hospital.” I run outside and hide behind the building and ignore my friends phone calls that are wondering where I went. My mom continues to tell me that Patrick punched through the basement window and is now in surgery to get his hand reconstructed. The glass cut through a major artery and may never regain function in his hand. After I assure my mom that I’ll be fine I then call my sister, “There was blood, so much blood, Molls. I thought he was dead for sure this time.” My sister is a nurse, and for her to be scared into hysterics about the amount of blood she cleaned up made me spin.
Sleeping:
I wake up with my hair line and pillow case soaked. Crack the window open. As hard as I try to think of anything else I still keep having the same dream. My brother is in a casket and I get up to speak at his funeral but when I step in front of the podium, I have nothing to say. No fond memories, no reminiscing on our relationship, no speech about what kind of person he was – nothing. I didn’t obtain that knowledge. I don’t know who Patrick is, what he likes, or remember anything pleasant about our lives together. Just us being in the same house, forced to live with each other because we were related and still dependent upon our parents for shelter. Sounds barbaric.
Not Sleeping:
My heart pounding, my breath quickens, my forehead is damp and saliva builds in my mouth like I am going to get sick. I close my laptop and lay my head down. I feel nervous – but for what? This anxiety is completely foreign to me. I just want to close my eyes and hope this knot in my stomach will melt away. But if I sleep, I will dream and they will be nightmares.
Leaving School:
At the start of my 3-hour ride home to Philadelphia, the driver hands me her bowl, “This will help, I promise.” I grip the end and watch as the flames lick the herb. I breathe in, release my thumb, and suck in until it hits the back of my throat. I pull my lips off the glass but keep breathing in as much as my lungs will expand and I let the smoke escape the car while I roll down the window. My mind races faster than it would in any panic attack I have ever experienced and I don’t speak a word the entire ride. I think I convinced myself to be pissed off at her so that I wouldn’t be so angry with myself.
3 Days Ago:
The sun will set behind other apartment complexes in about an hour, but we are only going to be here for a few days so I will soak up as much sun as I can get. My mom, sister, and I took a flight a few hours before my dad and little brother so we could go food shopping and get the place set before our first session early in the morning. It’s going to be the first time I see my brother since his first rehab in February. Which was the first time I saw him since Christmas. Which was the last time my dad tried to admit him in Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital for the third time. “What time is it?” My sister rolls over on the towel and I am guessing rhetorically asked me because I had fallen asleep. Mom gets up, takes her towel and heads for the door but struggles with the lock. My sister tries but can’t get it. I try and the key will turn but is refusing to unlock the door. The three of us are in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with three beach towels, stuck outside our apartment. “Try and see if any of the windows are open around back, Mom,” my sister creatively and desperately suggests. I walk backwards and look up to the second door balcony that my sister and I looked out of to see the view when we first arrived. To my satisfaction, it was open. I put my foot up against the newly planted palm tree and both hands on the side of the apartment. “Bridge, hoist me up like in cheerleading.” I yell to my sister. She cups her hands and I put my other foot in them and I can just get my grip on the edge. “Mom! A hand please?” My sister screams because there is no way her little self can support all of my weight. My mom copies my sister’s body position with my right foot and together they try to lift but it is still too high. “Just stay under me in case I fall,” I manage to say as I lift my entire body with my hands holding on to the railing and lifting up my legs up and over. I was left with scrapes and broken skin on my left leg and hands and the door never again got stuck.
I accompany my mom on the ride to the airport to pick up my dad and little brother while Bridget stayed to order pizza and hop in the shower. When we are about to turn in into Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport I get a sharp pain in my stomach. Not motion sickness I usually get when I read in the car, but more like as if someone was taking a welded knife and puncturing my stomach for 30 seconds and then releasing. I don’t remember the car ride home much except for that I taking deep breaths into a plastic bag while my dad rubbed my back. My mom didn’t even park the car but instead pulled up to the door so that I could run up stairs. The second I opened the toilet bowel seat, everything that I had eaten in the past 8 hours was being released. This process continued every hour until 5:30 am. My sister slept in Michael’s room in fear I was contagious and so my routine vomit wouldn't disturb her slumber. No one bothered to wake me for the morning first session until noon I woke up to my phone ringing. “How are you feeling?” My mom asks in a sympathetic and helpless tone. “Well I haven’t puked since earlier this morning, which is an improvement!” I try to sound up beat so that my mom is convinced I am feeling better. I didn’t take a plane ride down to Florida just to miss seeing Patrick on the first day when we only have 3 days with him.
I arrive to a room full of older people that looked like parents, one young adult male, and two other girls that looked around my age – if not younger. “How are you feeling, Molly?” a woman with white and black checkered glasses, hefty set, and tanned Florida skin asks me. I answered with a fake smile and nod. “Well then, I guess it’s time to see your addict.” When Patrick walks through the door he is tan and thin and his hair grew out just a little since February. We all hug him and are told we can’t sit next to our relative who we are visiting. All of the other addicts go around and tell the families what they have learned about the other people. I learned that Matthew is 18 just like me and already diagnosed as an alcoholic but is considered a leader in the group, that Ryan who is a handsome kid with a sister my age was shooting up heroine has trouble telling the truth but has good commentary, and that in the last three months no one knows anything about my brother. In fact, Matthew said he walked into Patrick’s room to be astounded that his family photo revealed he had siblings. Let alone 3 of them and that all of them were coming to Family Reconstruction Weekend. Time is up and we now have to say goodbye to our family member’s until tomorrow. Patrick leaves and I cry. I cry for the first time in months.
2 Days Ago
“Why don’t you tell her why you don’t have a relationship?” My brother’s therapist asks my brother about me in front of the entire room of addicts, their families, and my own. Shocked by the question, but more embarrassed by the question or perhaps more scared of his answer I turn completely red. I look at Patrick and he just stares at Greg. “Why don’t you tell her?” Greg is now pointing directly at me. Patrick lifts his head and but doesn’t look me in the eyes, just in my general direction. “I never knew you wanted a relationship with me. You never seemed to have any interest…” my brother is abruptly and sternly interrupted, by his counselor, “Bull Shit!” I feel as if the entire room is looking back and forth from my face to his to see whose reaction is more interesting. “Tell her the real reason or I will.” What reason? They have actually talked about me before? Why is this about just about me? Patrick’s eyes are glaring at Greg’s. I think he hates this attention more than me. I look directly into his dead eyes. “I didn’t like you. I never liked you. I chose not to have a relationship with you.” Before I could admit I think I was better off being ignorant of that fact, I am distracted by snorting and blubbering coming from across the room. I am quiet flattered that the studded belt wearing and hair jell using 20 year old pot head would feel this bad for me that he would start sobbing for my sake. “Would you like to say something?” Greg asks Robby. From that point on I was forced to listen to a little boy trapped inside a mans body cry over the fact that his dad denied his request to spend a week together to reconstruct their relationship. His douche bag of dad who wore tight, obnoxious colored v-neck t-shirts and went fake tanning. His dad who walked out in the middle of the session and never came back.
The Breaking Point:
After another morning of half ass listening to a motherless and yet tragically beautiful cocaine addict, Meredith, try and convince her boyfriend she was through with her infidelities or hearing Brian’s little sister cry that she doesn’t want to see her only brother left go down the same road of her now deceased sibling – Davita, the family therapist, wakes me out of a fog, “Alright, lets take a 10 minute break.” It is 10:03 and if I try to walk through the doors at 10:14, Davita will make me or anyone who is late walk right out that door and sit outside until the next session. This method is to prove if you can’t listen or obey rules, how could you expect your addict to?
It’s like the time my parents brought home a pitbull from the SPCA (thinking that giving Patrick a responsibility that it would somehow cure him because my mom read in an article once that it helped soldiers who came back from war recover. Can’t blame her for trying, it did feel like I was walking on a mind field every time I came home). We would have to stand over our dog’s food and pretend to eat it, to show him we were the alpha dogs. Instead we are now training out addict to behave.
I don’t hesitate for a second to head straight for the woman’s restroom down the hall, open the first stall I can push open, and lock the door. I let out a long, dramatic sigh. It seems like the first seconds I have had alone all weekend. Instinctively, I unzip my newly bought pair of yellow, high wasted shorts (we were going to spend the last day on the beach and thought I’d look nice) and sit down even though I didn’t have to go. I place the palms of my hands over my eyes and it isn’t until I dig my nails into my forehead and run them through my hair that my eyes are finally uncovered and to my complete anguish, discover a rose pedal stain on my underwear. “SERIOUSLY?!” My voice cracks. “Molly? What’s the matter?” I didn't even hear my mom had entered the bathroom. “Do you or Bridget have a tampon on you?” I say with a grudge against Mother Nature herself. For the time being I rip a piece of toilet paper out of the dispenser and fold over twice and place it as a temporary pad on my underwear and pull up my shorts and zip them up before I hear a rip. “You have to be kidding me,” I say with almost letting out “fuck” in between that sentence before I realized my mom was still in the bathroom. I look up to the ceiling because I feel that stinging feeling I get right between my eyes that travels down my nose, so I tighten my jaw try to and hold back the tears.
I am now in a bathroom stall, trying to squeeze into my older sister’s two sizes too small jean shorts, at my brother’s rehab over 1,000 miles away from home.
Forgotten
I have known the excruciating emptiness of glass,
Far beyond any repair, meaninglessness of baseball cards and bed sheets,
All the pain in picture frames and paintings,
Abandonment of a destroyed ottoman,
A neglected windowpane, cabinet, photograph,
The forgotten scribbles on drawing pads,
Desolation of dried up deodorant, a blue lamp, baseball caps,
The never-ending success of disregard and dust.
And I have seen the imprint of a body,
In a bed that is home to no one, anymore,
That haunts –quite intentionally—all who pass by,
Walls stained where frames hung. Green eyes
Stare but never grasp, the fear of his return.
-Molly Mullen
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