DEALING WITH INSECURTIES WHILE STILL TRYING TO FIND MYSELF IN ANOTHER COMFORT ZONE IN KEY WEST.
A long overdue therapy session helped release boxed insecurities from long ago.
I returned to the beach club after meeting with Ann at PePe’s Café. I was sated and relaxed. I felt good about our visit, but I still checked the local paper again to see if anything new had come up for rent, just in case. However, there was nothing new. Most ads were just looking for roommates. I already decided that moving in with strangers wasn’t my thing. I would try the guest house, or perhaps sleep in the van awhile until something came up.
I walked out on the Lanai overlooking the beach and the Atlantic. It was another glorious afternoon with white clouds drifting overhead against the deep blue sky. I sat on a couch, picked up a magazine to flip through and dozed off. I was awakened a couple of hours later by the ring of the kitchen telephone.
“It’s for you, Kate. It’s Ann,” Edy called out to me.
“Oh good, thank you,” I said as I tried to get the fuzz out of my head from a long nap and walked into the kitchen to pick up the wall phone receiver. “Hi, Ann, it’s me.”
“Hey Katie. Did I wake you? You sound tired…. I talked to my mom this evening over dinner. She said she would like to meet you. Do you have some time off tomorrow afternoon around 2:00?”
“Yes, I’m off the clock at 1:00.”
“How about I come over to pick you up and bring you back to my mom’s condo. I can be there at 2:00 and meet you down in the parking lot out front. Will that work?”
“That’s fine. I’ll be down there at 2:00 in my finest,” I said.
“Uh, well, this is Key West. Please don’t overdress for my mom or she will expect me to go shopping and get some decent clothes,” she laughed. “I’m very comfortable with what I have.”
“Okay, I’ll just look presentable. I want to make a good first impression, you know…. You can only make a good first impression once.”
“It’s just my mom, Katie. Not to worry. She knows I wouldn’t bring a dirt bag home.”
“Okay, but it feels like a job interview. I’ll do my best to just be me. I’m glad you don’t see me as a ‘dirt bag’….but, I must admit, some days after working out in the heat, I feel, and look like one.”
“Oh, we have them here, but most just blend in with the tourists. Relax, I’ll see you tomorrow and we’ll tawuk.”
“Roger that. Thanks.”
I hung up and walked back out onto the lanai. My head was still half asleep.
Edy was out there with an iced tea and had poured me a Pepsi on ice and laid out some potato chips for us to munch on. “I had a sandwich for dinner while you were napping. Not sure if you wanted one and didn’t want to wake you to find out,” she said.
“I had plenty to eat this afternoon at PePe’s. And that final course of key lime pie closed down any chances for another meal this evening. You’re so thoughtful to treat me with a Pepsi, even on ice, I might add, and chips, thank you.”
“Well, of course I am thoughtful. So how did your day go? Anything promising?” she asked.
“It went well. Ann is a trip, isn’t she? I just loved her clipped New York accent and her sense of humor. Very funny, yet gets right to the point. When a New Yorker talks, you listen, yeah?”
“If you can keep up with her, yes. And you better, or she will let you know it. She is really sweet and very bright, not only in her attitude, but intelligent. She came from a really educated family. Her father was a writer for The New Yorker Magazine for many years. He wrote the financial column, I believe,” Edy said.
“No way. I’m so impressed. The New Yorker! Wow! My dad used to get that magazine. I would leaf through it when I was at his apartment in Chicago once in a blue moon while visiting him. I liked to look at the cartoons. I rarely understood what any of them meant. I was too young and they were too studious for my little brain. But I felt very adult looking through it. Ann never mentioned that, about her dad, I mean,” I said.
“Oh, she wouldn’t. She doesn’t try to impress anyone. She knows her place in the world is a special one and she’s not the type to brag about it. But, she’s a go getter and one heck of a cook….well, Chef actually,” Edy shared.
“She did tell me that. She is so funny. She said to me in a quiet voice, ‘I can tell you about all the restaurants here you don’t want to go to. I know too much about their kitchens.’ I laughed at her.”
“And, she does! Don’t ask her for details or you may never go out to eat again,” Edy said. “Ann holds no bars. She gets right to the point.”
“My housemate is coming home in a couple of days. Have you gotten an invitation yet to meet with Ann’s mother? I just want to be sure you find a place.”
“Yes, in fact I’m going over tomorrow to her condo to meet her. Do you think she’ll think I’m okay?”
“Wow, that’s a loaded question….You goofball, of course she thinks you’re okay or you wouldn’t be invited to meet with her. Trust me, Ann would not have set this up if she thinks it’s going to be a bust. Just relax. You’ll be fine.”
“I am kind of a squirrel about meeting people. What if they don’t like me? What if??? What then??? I’d be crushed for days. I attribute my need for an alcoholic beverage when I am around someone who I like that might not like me.”
“You really are a basket case, Katie. I hadn’t seen that side of you before.”
“Did you notice I always order a drink where ever I go? I need confidence. I’m actually a very bashful person inside. I don’t need to drink to an extent…just to get that first layer of insecurity to fall off.”
“Where do you think that comes from?” Edy asked. Uh oh, now I have an amateur therapist asking questions.
“I donno. I think it’s from having an alcoholic mom who I always was embarrassed to be around when she drank. And I always felt like people felt sorry for me when she had bad days. I just wanted to hide sometimes. I can’t explain it all, really….” I felt myself falling into that dark hole I rarely share. I wanted to end the session I suddenly found myself in.
“I think a lot comes from my Psych Class in college. I spent a lot of time studying people. I’m a pretty good judge of character. However, I am hardest on myself. If I feel someone doesn’t like me for one thing or another, I spend a lot of time on self judgement and deprecation,” I admitted. “I always blamed myself for my mother’s drinking. After all, I was usually the only one home with her. Who else could I blame? My brother just got mad and left the house in anger. Certainly, I couldn’t blame my mother, who I loved dearly….at least, when she was sober. She was a sweet, sensitive, and very caring person. She was pretty much all I had as my grandparents lived in Florida, and my dad was a rare visitor, who occasionally took my brother and I to Chicago for a rare weekend.”
“Was she always an alcoholic? I mean, do you remember her always being like that?” Edy asked.
“It was like I had two mothers, the sober one I loved so much and the inebreated one I didn’t even know. I know my dad left her, when I was four and my brother was eight, because of her drinking. He was in the Navy, so she got custody. So yes, it went on most of my childhood. One day I came home from school and there was a fire truck at our house with lights flashing. I walked up to the door and there was a smoldering mattress in the front yard. My brother was there and told me mom fell asleep in the afternoon in bed with a cigarette after drinking all day. I was in shock. An ambulance came and took her to the hospital and my aunt came over and took care of my brother and I for a few days. Mom was okay and had no severe burns, but it left a horrible image for us to live with. She never talked about it when she got home. We never talked about her drinking. I couldn’t. I just got too emotional and cried a lot by myself in my bedroom with the dog at my side. When I got older and she had a bad few days, I would go out and ride my horse, sometimes even at night. I really had no cushion to fall back on.”
“Kate, that was a huge burden for a child to have to deal with. Wasn’t there someone you could call?”
“Once, she was falling down and couldn’t eat with us. She went to bed in the late afternoon. I called my aunt as I was about 11 then. She called my mom’s doctor and they came over. Our doctor did house calls back then. We lived in a small town and he knew my mom. We were in the bedroom with my aunt and doctor and he pulled me aside and into the hallway, a big man… and he looked down at me in his white lab coat and said, ‘Have you ever talked to your mother about her drinking?’ I was mortified. ‘I can’t,’ I told him. And I started to cry. I just couldn’t say that to her. “You need to tell her how much it hurts you. It will help her to hear it from you. I never did. I could never find the strength. I just felt like I would hurt her and she would drink even more,” I confessed as I felt those damn tears now in front of Edy….it’s that deep.
Edy reached over and touched my hand, “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I can’t imagine you living in that world within yourself at that age, playing protector.”
“The doctor walked back into the bedroom. My mom was in bed and he spoke to my aunt in front of my mom where I could hear him. ‘She’s not going to live past thirty if she doesn’t stop this heavy drinking. ‘Do you hear me, Lenore?’ he asked my mom as she lay silently with her eyes closed, but she nodded her head yes. I’ll never forget what he said. Just thirty? Oh my God. I remember the look on my aunt’s face. She was stunned. I couldn’t even think of my mom dying, especially so young.”
Edy handed me a tissue she pulled from a box at a nearby table. I felt spent. I felt like I was 11 in my mom’s bedroom in that wonderful house I loved so, that my own grandmother had built to her architectural specifications. In my mother’s bedroom where mom gave me comfort during the many thunderstorms that terified me when I was little. I went to her for refuge in the middle of many summer nights for safety, running in between lightning flashes as I held onto the wall in the darkness. My dear mother who I adored and tried to protect….who I tried to keep happy while walking on thin ice daily so as not to upset her for any reason, for fear she may go on another binge. A binge would last three or four days, or sometimes even a week, so I dreaded the beginning that came with that first drink.
I was on my second tissue. “I never shared that with anyone before, Edy. And when my mother passed away in 1987 in Montana, I still never found the courage to ask her not to drink. I doubt it would have mattered. She always denied that she drank when my brother was home and she was drinking. She hid a bottle of vodka in the toilet tank so no one would find it. My brother did find it one day and afterward emptied it once or twice and filled it with water after he poured out the vodka…she and he had big arguments and I dreaded those days. He just left the house in a storm, and then she drank more when he left.”
“How did you cope with all that?” Edy said.
“Like I said, I had my dog who would be near me, or I’d go out and ride my horse and take long rides in the back forty on our farm. I would go home and go to bed, knowing the mornings were usually the best. I had a neighbor friend who would invite me over for sleepovers. Her mom knew about my mom, and she told me I was always welcome to come and stay with them. So I did have some place to go if it got really bad.”
“Don’t blame yourself, Kate. You did what you were able to do at the time. You couldn’t have changed anything. Alcoholism is a disease. You had no control over her addiction. Let that go,” she assured me.
“But. to this day I can’t forgive myself for not following up on speaking to her. It’s like I never became enough of an adult to just do it. I will always carry that guilt. Maybe it would have helped her. I’ll never know the answer because I was a coward. I think I even tried to hide the reality of her illness from myself….I know I tried to keep my friends from seeing her like that.
I do remember her doctor finally telling me it was a disease, so I felt better somehow knowing it was a sickness, and wasn’t caused by anything I said or did…but there was always that resonating doubt.
She found a boyfriend who would come over with a bottle of vodka. I liked that she had someone who ‘loved’ her, but that was the worst thing he could have done.
She finally reunited with an old college friend, Ted, whom she and my dad met at Perdue when she was only 18. He called her from Chicago on a business trip while I was in College and they began dating. She stopped drinking for him and he married her after a year of being together while she stayed on the wagon. They moved to Arizona, then California. She went on binges, but on very rare occasions. She became the mom I loved again and she was finally happy for several years of her life. She even took me out to lunch at nice restaurants when we got together and didn’t drink. I loved those special, but few times with my mom. Those clear, but distant memories…. Ted was the best stepfather I could have ever asked for. He did everything he could for her, including therapy. The greatest cure is love, and he truly loved her. I can’t be more grateful for anything else then her finding the man she loved as much as he loved her.”
I arose to get another tissue. I was spent. Edy stood and gave me a hug. “You’ve come a long way, Katie. Look where you are…” as she opened her hand toward the ocean that spread into the aqua crystal waters as the waves moved gently, but with strength as they fell onto the beach below in an incoming high tide. The sun was picking its colors from God’s pallet and just beginning to touch the canvas in the sky.
I took a deep breath and tried to compose myself. ”Thank you, Edy. I really needed that. I feel like a knot around my chest has finally begun to loosen itself. A good cry is healthy, for sure.”
She smiled, “The bill will be in the mail.”
“It’ll be worth every penny….” I smiled back. “I’m glad I’m working in the morning. It will give me a chance to cleanse my body a little bit and get back into a hug from paradise.”
I’ll be meeting with Ann’s mother in the afternoon. Then I will know where I will be going from here. Another deep breath was in order. I headed for the restroom. I was shocked that my face was rose red and felt hot as I washed it with a cool wet washcloth. So many tears bottled up for such a long time. This is the true meaning of friendship. Having someone who cares for you and helps you share your burdens when needed.
It takes a lot of guts opening up to everyone. Your mom seemed like a loving mother. Be forgiving to yourself about not saying anything to your Mom. She knew and just showing up for her let her know that.
Kate- thanks for sharing your story.