Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Our town
The place I share with Timothy McVeigh.
By Mark Phillips
[04/19/00]

Baby barf rules
Take the hit, then reach for the tequila.
By Jonathan Kronstadt
[04/17/00]

Of football and flamenco
A coach's kids flee sports for the wussy arts.
By Kerry Madden-Lunsford
[04/14/00]

Little girls on the big prairie
Through these classics of childhood, a kid could suffer the privations of starvation in the flashlight-lit privacy of her own imagination -- and live to cherish the memory.
By Melanie Rehak
[04/13/00]

I luv Ruby
My love smoldered in the margins of great books.
By Stephen J. Lyons
[04/13/00]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

After the surgery to remove half his lung, my father started on morphine; but for fear of getting addicted, he took only half his prescription. Also at this time, my father did break down and add a new drug to his wee host of pharmaceuticals -- a seasickness pill for the scuba diving he took up after his lung surgery.

In his case, cancer was like a mangy dog you keep thinking you've left on the highway but that keeps showing up at your back door. It took six years, but the cancer had shown up again, filling my father's lungs, metastasizing to his spine.

It was only then, in considerable pain and under the doctor's orders, that my father began popping steroids and painkillers. As my father got sicker, I began to develop psychosomatic symptoms. His back and neck hurt; the length of my spine felt as if it was being forced through a meat grinder. He couldn't draw deep breaths and his throat was sore; ditto for me. He had numbness in his extremities, and he had nausea; me too, me too.

I suppose I wanted to be close to him. At the slightest threat of pain -- headache, stomachache, a swollen gland -- I was certain I, too, was dying. After all, I was his daughter. I was sure I loved my father more than any other girl and so how could I live without him? I took a pill.

I popped pills in defense, I popped pills in solidarity. It was a bonding thing, although I never confessed my ailments to my father. I liked to think that, sometimes, as I took a pill like Wellbutrin -- a bit of smiling sky -- perhaps my father and I were dosing at the same time. One part of me knew that I was going to lose him, but there was still a part of me that held out some hope of a miracle. I was desperate for even the most tenuous connection.

Returning home from the hospital after my father died, the first thing we did was go through the house with a giant green trash bag, rounding up all his pills, from morphine to Benadryl, and throwing them out. We blamed them, in some small part, for failing him, for failing us. I was punishing science, turning my back on pills. I didn't believe in them anymore.

It didn't last. The fallout from his death was overwhelming and I found myself back on an antidepressant; but all my other drugs, all my little friends, I shunted to the back of the medicine closet. I wanted to feel pain. How much more could I possibly hurt? To not feel pain felt like a betrayal.

After a couple of years, I started to realize I didn't need to carry an arsenal of painkillers and mood modifiers. After all, the worst I could have imagined had happened, and it didn't kill me. I could, if I chose, handle anything. Pills didn't hold the same sway for me.

Next page | In my heart I still believe in the power of the pill