fall, see how she tiptoed on eggshells around me, in exactly the way I would tiptoe on eggshells in the house I grew up in, terrified of my raging father, and I would be so disgusted with myself, I would shout more, drink more.
In between, when I was sober, I showered her with love, with gifts, with attention, trying to make up for my bad behavior, my guilt. The poor child never knew which mother she was going to get, never knew where she stood. It was as unsafe a childhood as I had had myself, more so, and there wasn’t a minute that went by when I didn’t hate myself for it.
The night Jason finally said he couldn’t do it anymore, he was leaving, I wasn’t yet drunk. I was kidding myself that I was just having a glass of wine at the end of the day, and that I would stop after that glass, and that tomorrow morning would, yet again, be my first day of not drinking, because I knew I had to get serious.
“I love you,” he said, and he wasn’t angry as he so often was, but weary, and my heart started knocking in my chest. “And I love Annie, but I can’t do this anymore. I can’t watch you destroy your life, and ours. I’m leaving and I’m taking Annie with me.”
And he did.
* * *
I didn’t actually believe he would. I sat in the chair in the living room, dizzy with despair and vodka, a terrible combination, and saw him get the big suitcase down from the cupboard in the hall and fill it with his and Annie’s clothes.
I lost it then. Burst into tears and staggered down the hallway—how ashamed I am to admit I was too drunk to even walk—and sank to my knees, begging him not to leave, crying that I couldn’t live without him, but he wouldn’t look at me, said nothing, just quietly moved through the rooms, as if I wasn’t there.
He packed their things and left me in a sobbing heap on the hallway floor where even in my drunken stupor, I honestly thought my heart was going to break. I stayed there all night, and in the morning, when my pounding head and dry mouth woke me up, I wished my heart had broken. I wanted to die.
Instead, I stopped drinking. That was my bottom. Abandoned by my husband and daughter. There was no place left to go; the switch was flicked, and while Jason and Annie moved in with his parents, I got sober. And this time it was for real.
I had been a terrible mother; I deserved everything I now had. Something in me woke up, and instead of dwelling on all that had been, all the horror and shame of the past, I knew I had to change, and this time it was serious.
I went to America. To the relapse treatment program at Caron Pennsylvania. I had tried the UK rehabs too many times; it was all a well-worn and familiar road that hadn’t worked. Getting serious about getting better meant coming to America, and from the first day I walked into Caron, I knew things had changed.
Jason knew things had changed when I finally got back home. He saw me going to meetings, and working the steps, and more than that, saw how different my behavior was.
I was allowed to pick Annie up from school and take her out for tea, returning her to Jason for the night.
And I was there at the school gates, on time, every single day. That alone was enough to tell him I had changed.
“You look different,” he said to me one day, when I was dropping Annie off and he had invited me in. We were in the kitchen of the flat he had rented in Belsize Park, with me thinking how weird it was to see our furniture in new surroundings, for he had moved a number of things in—the sofa, an armchair, paintings—and how awful it was that I no longer had a claim to these things, to Jason’s life, to Jason.
“Different bad?” I said, for I was taking great pains in my looks every afternoon before hitting the school gates. Not so much to compete with the other Yummy Mummies, although that was definitely part of it, but to show Jason what he had left, to try to tempt him into coming home.
“Different good,” he said with a smile. “Your eyes are clear