Wallpaper Paste

After a blissful month of rebuilding life with my mother who’s in recovery, I awakened this morning to find the hope I resurrected had disappeared right along with her.

I’m the daughter of an addict, and this wasn’t my first rodeo. But I stupidly convinced myself that this time was going to be different. It took a while to sober up to the idea that she was again partaking in binge-disappearing cycles.

Times, her presence was so tangible that it ignited a sense of hope. I believed it held the power to burn away the past. And the next moment, her absence disrupted that reality. My mother had so many broken pieces, I prayed that my love would be the gunk to make her stick to teetotalism. I piled it on with hugs and kisses as a curtain crawler, but she just slid off to the bottle, anyway. Often, she tried to rationalize her sobriety for me. “It’s just one drink…I’ll be fine.”

I’ve always assumed that mothers were to be god-like in their abilities to keep families together. That they were the paste needed to secure any possible chaos and calamity from being unleashed. Mothers are peacemakers. Mothers are the glue. I always imagined she’d be around here, that she’d be the one to make this house a home. Like wallpaper.

Magazines describe wallpaper as something that had never been dated. Rather, it was a phenomenon that represented a union between timeless design and fresh inspiration. But this is simply the tarradiddle.

I, myself, still see it as old-fashioned and intimidatingly permanent.

With the right tools I’ll do my best to remove her, then it’s cold turkey time. Because I yearn to descry beauty anew in my life. Hopefully, it’s enough to inspire a mother to peel herself from the booze, likewise.