[duncan]

I gave up trying to help my abusive alcoholic mother when I was seventeen, at least that’s what I told myself. I kept her at arm’s length while I dealt with the scars left behind from a very tumultuous childhood. Scars remain, but at twenty-four I am strong-minded, willed and healthy.
My mother is still precontemplation, her condition is severely worsened since I left home at seventeen; once an independent, strong, working-woman supporting two children on her own (although abusing them upon drinking), I still admired her growing up. Now she is an anxiety-ridden, depressed shadow of a woman once there. Wheelchair bound due to both her self-inflicted injuries or will-power to walk again, she pulls herself along by her feet. Balding, because she pulls her hair-out as a “punishment,” to my father for….well, your guess is as good as mine, but I suppose delusions never make sense to the sane.
I’m well on my way to becoming a clinical psychologist, so of course, curiosity to understand her condition, a symptom, I’m sure, of a child who never stopped asking questions (which she encouraged).
Although she refuses to discuss her medical conditions relating to her alcoholism and denies the doctors address them, and the doctors refuse to push any treatment due to her “being of sound mind,” I am still able to stipulate her condition fairly well through my own observations.
She seems, lately to have developed a seemingly rare alcohol induced psychosis called “alcohol idiosyncratic reaction.” I’m trying to get a specialist opinion, vainly, I’m sure in the ill-hope that I can somehow take her power to choose this fate. How can a woman have hope when she can’t resist the substance that depresses and blinds her? And now her little left sanity is crumbling too.

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