Families in Recovery

WebMD has an article reprinted from Marie Claire and written by Gretchen Voss that tells of one woman's experience learning to forgive her mother. The article starts:

"What about me?" I spat at my mother as she sat frail and broken in a wheelchair, her legs too wasted to carry her emaciated body.

It was Christmas of 1999, and my father, two brothers, and I were at a family-counseling session during my mother's second — though not her last — stint in rehab in Florida. My father had found her a few weeks earlier, lying half-dead on the couch, her once-pristine condo looking like a homeless person's final filthy squat, splattered with puke and diarrhea. I guess our tough-love tactic — booting her out of the house in New Jersey to go "deal with herself" near her sister in Florida, plus my father's recent visit on their anniversary to announce that he didn't love her anymore and wanted a separation — was too much for a woman who had always defined tough. When my father scooped her off the couch and rushed her to the hospital that day, the doctor glared at him and asked my mother, "Who did this to you?"

What a stupid question, I would have said to the doctor, had I been there. She did this to herself.

Click over and read this in full. It is a fantastic example of both the impact her mother's alcoholism had and the slow process of recovery.