But anger never travels alone. I searched the boxes of my mother’s things for photos to use in the slideshow that would play at the memorial and discovered her old journals, notes to herself and letters she never sent. In her beautifully composed entries, it hit me: the constant thread of her life that was so clearly the missing piece from what I originally wrote. The part everyone always left out when they talked about her. The part that I was still trying to understand myself.

In the entries I read, I saw my mother’s desire for a good life. A safe life for herself and for me. She wanted to be a hairstylist and had a stint as a facialist. She worked long but enthusiastic hours in food service, and then in Hawaii, when I was preschool-aged, she took us on multiple buses a day to get to the community college so she could get an education. She was motivated to learn, write, make art and lean into early motherhood while maintaining her sobriety.

But there was something in the way, and it was more insidious than her addiction – perhaps even the most prevalent cause of it. The force of domestic violence. For most of her life, my mother didn’t know a day that wasn’t shaped by it. In a diary entry, she wrote: “Every time I’m about to do something for myself, he picks a fight, causes a scene. Makes it so I can’t get out the door.” This was written in the same breath as describing her excitement for starting school again – she was concerned about her ability to safely get to class at all.

I watched my mother go to war every day in her own home. You can’t be a mother, a student, a sober and thriving individual when you’re not sure you will get through the day alive. Many people said she should have just left. Believe me, she tried. Many times, we tried. But the effects are long-lasting, even when the abuser is no longer in the room. Her brain changed because of it. The shame, the obliterated self-worth, the trauma she carried. All my life I wanted to fix it for her. A few times, I thought maybe I could. But the abuse stood between her and everything else, everything she loved and wanted. Most of all, it stood between her and me. Of course, all of this made it impossible for her to be a mother.

“Loving a mother addicted to alcohol was endlessly frustrating – until I found her journal entries”