Today is the Day

Today is the day. The email she read from his boss saying he is leaving early and coming in late well she knows he will get fired in a week or two. The screaming at him, the love she shows, the praise, the money, the material purchases – none of it, copy that, none of it works. It has been years since she started saving him – sending her older son to check on him playing with other kids, spending afternoons at the elementary school yard making sure he was not singled out by those biased smirking teachers, living in New London a half mile from his college so he would come over, do homework and hand it in. Face it, she did the college work, she did the job applications, she completed the onboarding documents for his jobs, and now each morning she uses the extra fob to let herself into his apartment to wake him up so he will get to work, keep the job. But he doesn’t care. He is insolent, disrespectful, ungrateful. She tries to be compassionate knowing he has been through many traumas, but today she knows that she too has been through many traumas because of him, his coke use, the drugs that caused her to find him the first time writhing almost unconscious, as she called 911 and squirted Narcan up his nose, and the second time she found him lying on a bathroom floor full of vomit, he was wheeled out toward the back door so the EMTs could roll him down the ramp off the deck, she touched is pale unconscious face saying to herself, let me touch him one more time while he is still alive.

The therapists say do not knock on his door, if he does not get up, it’s on him, oh and the best advice that she never follows: Let him experience the natural consequences of his behavior. Don’t people know that this is nearly impossible for a parent? You want the kid to live, to have friends, a job, an apartment, you set it all up and what? He hacks into Morgan Stanley, steals $22,000.00 out of her account, and she still loves him, puts some weird, distorted trust in him, rents him an apartment down the street in a brand new building, oh sure it is an affordable housing unit but in this town, in this context, “affordable” means for an underperforming twenty-six year old with a well-off mother.

What does she incessantly hope for? That he gets up for work, that he goes to work, stays at work, doesn’t get fired, gives up cocaine, takes his medication, has a friend or two, speaks to her respectfully. Oh, and that last hope? She has allowed herself to be abused, to suffer abusive language, he shouts at her shut the fuck up, fuck off, she goes in for more excusing this horrible behavior because she does not want to believe he is really like this.

But he is like this. And the lifelong priming to be everyone’s savior (except her own) drives her into emotional sickness, the blur of the mess of hope and reality, the sinkhole between heartbreak and rage. Today is the day. She certifies to herself that she will no longer try to save him, that lifelong saving role, it’s now over. He does not care about her. He steals from her, lies to her, manipulates in every way he can, would wipe her out if she were not vigilant, checking bank accounts every day.

He will want to come to the house to get his gaming computer and guitar. She will say no. He will want money. She will say no. Will she bother saying, hey, you have money to go buy three vials of coke. That is what you are using my money for so there is no more money. Does she even have to say that?

She finds herself feeling hate, anger, a loss of compassion, the rosary not helping. She prays for compassion and love. It is not forthcoming for him. Today is the day she will begin to save herself. It will be a long undoing, a sad disentanglement. It will require a re-focus on joy and hope of another kind, there must be, there are different kinds of hope. The hope that he will survive emotionally or even avoid a physical death can no longer exist in the current context. The hope that she can survive, pull out of the morass of the long painful years of parenting him, this hope is but a seed that she might be able to nourish if she believes truly that today is the day, that as of today, there is nothing more for him. He can live on peanut butter, ritz crackers, vanilla yogurt, it does not matter if he cooks the expensive steak in his refrigerator and there will be no more money for Uber Eats or DoorDash. Maybe the gods of our understanding will be by his side, maybe take him off this earth, maybe leave him here rotting, maybe whatever.

Today is the day. It’s as if she is on a fast train travelling away from him, passing the snow-covered landscape and bare trees of winter, the last winter she will hit this bottom of sorrow over this boy. No blue sky or church steeple can alter this trajectory. She will tolerate the pain, find joy and hope away from him, leave him.

She tells herself she is not her mother, that mother who required her to be a savior, the mother who literally called her the phoenix, no, better yet, our phoenix. She realizes she is no one’s phoenix and the savior role, the efforts, the urgency, these are gone now. The thoughts of the mornings of last week that she can do this, bring him lunch and Dunkin donuts coffee and start his car in the below zero cold, and then wake him up, and set alarms from afar, these efforts are now in the past they will not be brought forward.

Today is the day.