Refuge Recovery : A Buddhist Path to Recovering from Addiction (9780062123091) by Levine Noah

Author:Levine, Noah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

18

Mary

I grew up in New York City with a schizophrenic mother. It had an impact. My dad passed away when I was five, and my two older brothers had already moved out of the house. So it was just me, my mom, and a scary and overwhelming world.

Everything was my responsibility, but I didn’t know what to do. For a while Mom was somewhat functional, at least on the outside, but the house was always falling apart, a disaster that I couldn’t handle. I couldn’t allow anyone to know that my mother was the way she was and that our house was horrific. I kept the outside world and world inside my house separate and made sure the two would never meet. The more the house’s walls started to fall down around me, the quicker I built my figurative inner walls at a very early age to protect myself. The inside world of my emotions moved behind this wall because no one could ever, ever know anything about that either. Ever.

I see pictures of myself at age seven. They show a little girl getting plumper and plumper. They show a little girl who found refuge in food.

I remember going to the corner market and buying candy bar after candy bar. The man behind the counter looked at me and said he hoped the candy was not all for me. I lied and said, “No.” I had found solace in food, and hiding and shame followed me there.

By the time I was a teenager, my mother’s paranoid schizophrenia had taken its final hold. She lived on the couch and listened to the messages on the TV. She believed people were keeping her riches from her and that the comedians on TV were making jokes at her expense. When I broke my arm, she thought I did it on purpose, so the hospital could get some money from her. She was my responsibility and my fault. It was such a mess I barely survived high school. I honestly don’t know how I did.

After graduation, my brother invited me to come live with him and his new wife in San Jose. I said yes, and they sent me a plane ticket. I left New York, left my mom by herself, and went to the Promised Land. Northern California in the early 1970s was party central. I was eighteen, my brother and his friends were thirty, and I immediately became grown up. Everything was wonderful. I no longer stuffed my face to fix the pain. But there were bottles of wine, tequila and whites, sheets of acid and kilos of dope. I thought I was in heaven.

In California, I started to get my life together. I got a job and went to college. But my drinking and drug use really took off there. I was in a relationship with a guy who liked to drink as much as I, so everything seemed fine for a while. But the walls I had put in place when I was a kid were pretty solid by then.

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