I love Super Bowl Sunday! Even if I don’t have a team in the fight, I still love it! I love Super Bowl Food, I love the commercials, I love the Half Time Show, I love buying squares (of course only in states where its legal LOL) and I just love watching the excitement of the game no matter who is in it!

But Super Bowl Sunday also has some dark memories for me that this year are particularily tough.

NOTE TO READER: stop reading this and revisit it tomorrow if you want to hear nothing but happy tales today.

So most of you know by now or have figured it out through my previous writings that my mom was an Addict. Actually both my mom and my dad were Addicts and I dealt with being the child of an Addict my whole life, but that is alot of back story to tell and will have to wait for another day. At some point around 2010 my mom had fallen off the wagon after being clean for about 12 years (again another story for another day). It started off because she had broken her shoulder while walking a dog and had to have surgery and go on pain meds. Even though Alcohol had always been her drug of choice she got addicted to the pain meds and then ultimately moved back to alcohol to get off the pain meds. For those of us that have never battled addiction this thought process of moving from one drug to another to get off the first doesn’t make a ton of sense, but for an Addict it absolutely does.

Fast forward to 2013… In the back of my mind I think I knew she had fallen off the wagon, but like the good child of an addict I convinced myself that she wouldn’t do this to me AGAIN and there was no way she was drinking again. There were signs of course: mistakes at work she’d normally never make, isolating herself in her apartment even from me, my liquor disappearing from my house. I resorted to leaving little notes under the decanters saying “Don’t drink me I’m expensive” and “Please don’t fill me with water”. It was like having a teenager around. But I never could fully confront her, because I just didn’t want to believe it was true and in a weird way I felt like it was my fault  (which later in a drunken mess she would tell me she did blame me and then recant again after she went into Recovery…man is there a lot to tell you). Again, classic feeling for a kid of an Alcoholic. Then Super Bowl 2013 happened…. she had obviously started early that day or maybe she never stopped from the night before but she ended up fainting (lets be real passing out) in the bathroom and hitting her head on the sink. I had to call an ambulance to come get her and take her to the hospital. After hours she was cleared with no major injuries thank goodness, but I was given instructions on what to do just to make sure she didn’t have a concussion. Brought her home got her in bed and comfortable and listened to her give me the whole “I’m sorry routine”, but still we didn’t discuss the elephant in the room. At this point I figured we were good so Pat (my husband at the time….oh yea he is another story too) and I went down to the neighbors to watch The Big Game!

I don’t know how much time passed but it wasn’t that long (I mean the game wasn’t even over) before my phone rang and it was her. I answered my phone to hear her sobbing and teling me to come quick she had fallen. I of course raced up the road to find her slumped at the bottom of the stairs that she had fallen down holding her arm…it clearly was jacked up. So I put her back in the car and raced to the hospital for the second time that day. Now this is where is becomes PRICELESS…. got her to the hospital and got her checked in and the doctor and what I thought was a nurse asked to speak to me privately. I literally thought to myself this is it, the circus act is over, time to discuss the elephant. But nope the doctor and what turns out to be a social worker start questioning me about Elder Abuse. Are you fricking kidding me I yelled at them, you think I did this to her or somebody in the family? Ummmm hello she is a ragging alcoholic I screamed at them. I had lost it enough was enough. I told them to patch her up and keep her overnight cause nobody was going to deal with her for the rest of the evening and I left the hospital mad as hell.

I drove back home went into her apartment and started ransacking the place. The amount of empty bottles of wine and liquor I found hidden were shocking to me and I literally just sobbed and sobbed while I boxed them up and left them in an empty box in the middle of her living room so when she did come home the next day she would see the Elephant was no longer going to be silent.

At this point I’ll stop going into all the back and forth that happened from that day till I checked her in for Medical Detox in April of that same year. I’m sure we will revisit it again because there are more stories to tell, but this is getting long and you and I both have other things to do today. Like watch The Puppy Bowl, the 1st Annual Snail Bowl (do a search of Snail Bowl and Jimmy Fallon if you don’t know what I’m talking about LOL) and of course The Big Game. But I guess the point of today’s writing is that life is so damn complicated. At one point, I woke up this morning feeling sad because mom wasn’t a football fan but she loved the commercials and the half time show and The Puppy Bowl and she would have been all about The Snail Bowl. We would have texted all day today. She was my best friend thats what best friends do! But on the flip side I can’t help remembering the milestones that happened along the way that got her to the place of finally being Sober and us having the relationship we did the last almost 6 years. The point of my writings aren’t to make you believe we lived in a land of unicorns and rainbows rather they are to give you Hope that tomorrow can be a better day.

xoxo,

Lydia