Addicted Like Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

sweet, personable woman who was loved by everyone, too. She was quite beautiful and had her share of suitors when she was young, but when she met my dad she was swept off her feet. She was always willing to lend a helping hand to anyone who needed help, like the time when we were driving home and my mother saw a very pregnant neighbor woman hanging clothes out to dry. We stopped our car, and my mother got out and finished the job for our neighbor. People never forgot the little things like this that my mom did for them that they found so meaningful.
    The house we lived in was a two-story home that was owned by my mother’s older brother. He lived upstairs with my aunt and three older cousins. I have heard he wanted to keep my mother close, to keep an eye on things. I just knew it felt ideal to grow up surrounded by family. Our home was well-decorated, very cozy, and always spotlessly clean. As children, we were all very well-groomed and received the best education possible. From the outside, everything looked good. We never talked about the problems that happened in our home, not even with each other. I learned early on how to act normal even when crazy things were happening.
    My mother was the rock in our household. She provided my sense of security. She was very close to her family, and they were often not very pleased with the way my father acted, and how his behavior affected us. When he wasn’t home, life was great, and it almost seemed as if we had a normal family. My brother remembers hearing the car pull into the driveway in the evenings, when my father would return, and thinking, “Oh, no!” He says he felt a knot
in his stomach, never knowing what frame of mind our father would be in as he walked through our door.
    Dinnertime could be very contentious if he was in a bad mood. I ate as fast as I could so that I could get out to play with cousins and neighborhood friends. I became quite the little escape artist. I felt as if I danced around the fringes of my family when my dad was around, and it worked well for me. I once had to sit with my father when my mother went to visit a friend who had taken ill. He drove my mother and me over to her friend’s house. When we arrived in their driveway, she started to get out of the car and told me to stay with my father. I panicked. I begged her to let me go with her. She firmly said no and left, and I tried to hold back the tears, but I couldn’t stop them from coming. I was terrified to be alone with my father. He told me to stop crying, but the more he yelled, the harder I cried. I was hysterical by the time my mom returned to the car. Little did I know at the time that this was just a glimpse of how my future would play out after she died and my father and I were the only two left in the house.
    The stress of dealing with my father also drained my mom. One night, when I was eight years old, my mother had to put out a fire he had caused in their room after coming home drunk and smoking in bed. The mattress caught fire. I woke up, hearing my mother’s screams. I smelled smoke and ran out the front door bare-foot in my pajamas. A neighbor couple was out for a late night stroll and I told them that our house was on fire. The next thing I knew, there were sirens and fire trucks roaring down our street. My mother doused the fire with water and was able to put it out, but my father
had climbed back into the bed in his drunken state, even though it was still in flames. When my uncle came downstairs to help, my mother was sitting at the kitchen table with tears streaming down her face. She said, “I can’t take any more; I have got to leave!”
    My sister has shared with me that when she was five years old, my mother made a suicide attempt. She had been taking diet pills, and it all ended up with my mother sticking her head inside the oven and turning on the gas. She had to go away to a hospital for several weeks of treatment after the