With or Without You A Memoir by Domenica Ruta

Author:Domenica Ruta [Ruta, Domenica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780679645023
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2013-02-26T08:00:00+00:00

SOMETIME DURING MY SENIOR year at Andover, my mother told me not to come home for the next few weekends. Why? I asked her. She had started shooting heroin again and was trying to get herself off it.

“I’m going to be really sick, Hon. I don’t want to scare you. I don’t want you to see me this way.”

Kathi didn’t stay up all night talking anymore, as she did when she was on coke. There were several bottles of pills at her bedside, but that was nothing new. I knew that she had dropped out of her classes at the Harvard Extension School and that she had quit her job at the salon, but heroin? How could I have missed something like that? Probably because I was so stoned myself.

For as long as I was a conscious being, my mother had been afflicted with some incurable pain. First she was recovering from a car accident. A few years later, when she was thirty-four, she had a hysterectomy. This surgery, I’m certain, was unnecessary, a solution concocted by a male doctor trying to shut up what he generalized as another complaining woman. The hysterectomy caused a slew of reactions, one disease after another. These diseases were elusive and always changing. Some of them were very real—my mother had lost her uterus and both ovaries in one scoop; it was only natural that her body would howl in protest. But some illnesses were most definitely her invention, a ploy to get prescriptions for stronger pills.

At some point in my adolescence, the brief period of sobriety ended and my mother’s pills became bigger and stronger. She was always good about sharing—with my stepfather, with her so-called friends, with my own so-called friends. Even her dog, an obese Dalmatian that was dying of cancer, got licks from the plate she used to crush up and snort her pills. Naturally, she shared her pills with her own daughter, too.

The first time I took one of my mother’s pills I was ten years old. I had a headache and we didn’t have any aspirin. We never had any practical stuff like that in our house. I doubt we had Band-Aids or Q-tips that day, either. But we were well stocked with Percocet and Vicodin and Ativan. Whenever I went to a friend’s house and complained of a headache, I would look at the aspirin I was given with confusion. “Is this really all you have?” I felt like saying. I assumed that other people’s mothers were just stingy.

Then came a new pill, OxyContin. My mother had lots of pet names for her pills. I wish I could remember all of them—Oscar de la Rentas, Oscar De La Hoyas, and, in honor of the Academy Awards, plain old Oscars. It was a prescription painkiller new to the market in the 1990s. On the off chance that you haven’t heard of it, here is a little analogy:

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