In Real Life: My Journey to a Pixelated World

Playing inside your brain lets you develop your creative mind and manufacture fun out of thin air. Plus, your imagination is never going to run out of battery power. If there’s some sort of energy apocalypse, you won’t ever get bored.

  Chapter 3

  Warrior Mother

  The first word that comes to mind when I think of my mother is warrior. My earliest memories of her are as a struggling single mom, working long hours cutting hair at a local salon, while still always being there for Nicole and me. Mom was the one who taught us to use our imaginations to have fun instead of relying on expensive toys, and it was Mom who taught me how to be a storyteller.

  I have many memories of her being the most caring and loving person in the world, and she could always make me laugh. I loved dancing with her most. She would blast songs by her favorite band, Journey, and throw me up on her hip and boogie around the room. She also knew how much of a sweet tooth my sister and I had, so each night, she would make us frappes (scoops of ice cream, milk poured on top, and then it’s all mashed up with a spoon) in our favorite cups—plastic beach souvenir tumblers with sand and seashells encased in their clear plastic bottoms.

  Mom’s number-one priority was taking care of us, and she did a ton with what little she had. She made sure we were happy and loved. She might ground me for a week but later that same day would come into my room and tell me that I could go hang out with my friends after all. (My dad was strict and very quick to punish me if I did something wrong.) She was the best mom in the world!

  One of my favorite activities with her was going grocery shopping. We had our little routine down pat: first, we stopped by the dairy section where she’d grab me a free sample of cheese. Then she’d send me off on little errands like picking out the cereal, and on my way back to her, I’d visit the flower section and charm the florist into giving me a single rose. I’d then sneak a cookie from the bakery and surprise her with both of them as a gift. But more often than not, we’d finally get to the checkout counter only to have my mother’s credit card get declined. She’d laugh nervously and ask them to run it again, making up some excuse like that she’d just made a payment. The truth was that we were broke. I don’t think there’s anything more embarrassing than leaving a store empty-handed after an hour of shopping. I hated that feeling.

  Although she couldn’t balance her bank statements, my mom always wanted to appear to be an expert on everything. If she didn’t know the answer to something, she’d make one up with such enthusiastic conviction that we’d have to pretend that she was right, even when we knew she was wrong. She insisted on calling veins ventricles and once launched into a totally incomprehensible response when I asked her what made a car run: “The centrifugal hits the equilibrium of the motorized mechanisms . . .”

  “I’ll just ask Dad,” I said quickly before she could say anything more. Her confidence was adorable, though, and I loved her for at least trying to answer questions that we asked even if I knew she was basically making it all up as she went along.

  • • •

  When I was eleven, my cousins and I went through a phase of pretending we were a family of witches, and one of our favorite pastimes was mixing special potions with all of my mom’s shampoos, lotions, perfume, and hair gels. We’d pour as many different kinds of liquids that we could find into little glass jars, stir all of the ingredients together, and then study them like mad scientists over the next several days to see what would happen. The mixtures would usually separate into beautiful, cloudy layers of gunk that looked like the swirling atmosphere of an alien planet.

  One day we realized we’d used up all of my glass bottles but still wanted to keep mixing. I noticed a container of hydrogen peroxide in Mom’s bathroom cabinet and decided it would work perfectly. I emptied it out and filled it with liquid soap, shampoo, bathroom cleaner, body lotion, and a dash of cologne. A perfect recipe, I thought. I put it back on the shelf and forgot all about it until later that night, when I heard screams coming from the bathroom.

  Uh-oh. What I didn’t realize was that my mom used hydrogen peroxide as a mouthwash (go figure!), and she’d just taken a giant swish of my nasty concoction before spitting it out all over the sink. She was furious at first, but ended up laughing about it before long—which was pretty cool of her given that she could have become sick if she’d swallowed the mixture. Little did I know that she was already starting to become sick from an entirely different kind of potion—one that made the beacon of light inside of her ( the one that always made me feel protected) start to fade.

  • • •

  When I was in about sixth grade, my mom’s disease started interfering with our lives. It’s possible it had been going on longer, but if it was, I didn’t start noticing it until the end of elementary school. I remember seeing her with a glass of wine once or twice at the salon, but I never noticed anything drastically different about her personality when she drank.

  It’s odd that she began drinking heavily when she did. It would be one thing if our lives had been really rough at the time, but everything was great. She and my stepfather, Bob, were totally in love, and she was finally pulling in good money working at her own salon out of our house. I think it might have had something to do with the fact that she wasn’t used to having a good life. I didn’t know much about her parents. She didn’t talk about them a lot, but what little I did know sounded truly awful. Her mother had died when she was little and then her father abandoned her and her six siblings. They were split up into different foster homes, and my mom ended up with guardians who emotionally abused her. In a way, I can understand how all her newly found happiness must have felt foreign compared to her childhood and what she was used to. Change, even the good kind, can be scary for some people.

  My babysitter at the time had a daughter named Jonica who went to a different school than I did, and we became close friends. Even when her mom wasn’t taking care of me, I’d persuade my mom to drive me over to Jonica’s house so we could play with each other.

  Jonica and I were very resourceful. We loved playing with Beanie Babies, but when we got bored with the ones we had, we needed a way to get more. Because those things were like crack! We had to have all of them! My mom set up an arrangement: Whenever we helped her clean up the salon and around the house, she would take us to the store and we would each get to pick one out. We were intense with our games—we spent a lot of time building houses for our Beanie families, and then making them have sex before killing them. It was magical.

  One Friday afternoon I was playing at Jonica’s after school when Mom came to pick both of us up for a sleepover at our house. Mom visited with Jonica’s mom for a little while, and I remember noticing that they had a drink together before we left. It barely registered, but when it was time to go home, I climbed into the front seat and noticed a big orange plastic cup in the holder between us.

  “What’s in there?” I asked as she pulled out of the driveway.

  “Water,” she said.

  When she tried to pick the container up, it slipped out of her hands and spilled all over the floor and seat. Call it a child’s intuition, but I knew that whatever was in that cup wasn’t water. She told me to grab some napkins out of the glove compartment and help clean the mess up.

  When we got home, Mom was still holding the cup, and she seemed a little off to me, though not in any way I can describe because it was so subtle. I just got the distinct sense that my mother wasn’t actually quite in the room with us.

  “So what do you kids want to do tonight?” she asked.

  “Can we set up a cushion bed in the living room?” I asked. “And watch Halloween Town?”

  “Suuuure,” she said, smiling widely. “Sounds fun!”

  Her voice sounded different though, sort of high-pitched and amped up. Again, it wasn’t something I could pinpoint. I was embarrassed but also a little scared. It was like an absence of the person I knew, even though she wasn’t exactly acting all that different. I can’t remember h
ow or where I’d learned that grown-ups get drunk—probably from television—but I was pretty sure that was what was going on. I didn’t even really understand what “drunk” meant, except that it wasn’t a good thing.

  “Why don’t you go set up the cushions in the living room and I’ll get you some snacks.” She disappeared into the kitchen and I could hear her slamming drawers and knocking things around. I peeked in on her and watched as she swayed slightly while trying to put some cookies on a plate.

  “Are you okay, Mom?” I asked.

  “I’m fiiiiiine,” she answered with a slight slur and a funny little smile on her face. “I’ll be there in a sec, and we’ll all watch the movie together.”

  “No!” I yelled. I was becoming angry and confused. I didn’t know who this woman was. She looked like my mom, but she didn’t talk like her, and I didn’t want to be anywhere near her. I ran out of the kitchen and up into my bedroom, where I slammed the door as hard as I could. I threw myself down on the bed and started to cry. She knocked on my door.

  “Joey,” she called. “Come on out! Come watch the movie!”

  “Go away!” I screamed.

  I heard her walk away, and then stayed in my room for another ten minutes, fuming, until it occurred to me that I’d left poor Jonica alone with her. I jumped up and ran back downstairs, where I found the two of them sitting on a pile of cushions on the living room floor.

  “Come on,” Mom said, patting the seat next to her. “The movie is just about to start.”

  “You can’t watch it with us,” I said, not moving from the doorway.

  She stared at me for a few seconds before pushing herself to her feet. “Fine,” she said, looking hurt. A few moments later I heard her bedroom door close.

  I couldn’t concentrate on the movie at all. I felt terrible for telling my mom that she couldn’t hang out with us. Maybe she had just been acting goofy, and I was being overly sensitive.

  “I’ll be right back,” I whispered to Jonica and tiptoed up the stairs to Mom’s bedroom, knocking softly on her door.

  “What?” she said. Her voice sounded muffled, as if she was talking through a pillow.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. You can come watch the movie with us.”

  “Forget it.”

  “No, really. I’m sorry.”

  There was silence. “Mom?”

  More silence. I finally gave up and went back downstairs to finish the movie. Jonica and I fell asleep on the floor and woke to the sounds of my mom cooking breakfast for us as if nothing had happened. Back to normal.

  But there was another incident not long after, when our family went to a pool party hosted by Bob’s best friend who lived in a fancy section of town, in a mansion with a huge backyard. My cousin Meagan came with us, and we spent the afternoon splashing around in the pool, racing each other from one end to the other, and playing Marco Polo with a bunch of other kids. I was having a lot of fun, and it wasn’t until the party was over that I noticed my mom was acting strange again. She was talking and laughing really loudly, sort of as if she was a kid herself. I knew that she was drunk. Meagan and I were still in our swimsuits, and I was shivering as I tugged on Bob’s arm. “You’re going to drive us home, right?” I whispered.

  “Yup,” he whispered. “Don’t worry, kiddo.”

  During the ride home, Mom laughed and gossiped about different people at the party while Bob kept telling her to be nice. We got home, and everyone went to bed. I probably would have forgotten the whole thing if Meagan hadn’t told her parents that my mom had gotten drunk. They flipped out, and it caused a huge rift between our families. I could still hang out with Meagan, but never at our house; I had to go to hers. It made me feel ashamed, as if our house was too dirty for guests. But it wasn’t the house that was messed up. It was my mother.

  Over the next year, things really began to deteriorate. One day I was sitting in the living room watching television when I heard a terrible crashing sound. I ran out of the room and saw my mother crumpled up in a ball at the bottom of the staircase. I stood there frozen and in a flash pictured the worst: a fractured spine and my mother confined to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. But she used the banister to pull herself back up and wandered into the kitchen before I even had a chance to ask her if she was all right.

  To make matters worse, Mom and my stepfather split up for a while when I was twelve years old. Bob sold the big white house, the home that had been my rock. It had been the place that I’d lived at for the longest up to that point in my life. I had thought I was going to grow up there. We moved to a smaller rented ranch house, and Mom was now the only adult around, although she was hardly acting like one. By the time I entered seventh grade, Mom was drinking every night. Nicole was also aware of how rapidly things were declining, but she had such an active social life and played a lot of sports, so she wasn’t around very much to see the worst of it. But whenever she was home, the two of them were almost always at each other’s throats.

  One day, I got off the school bus and found the house empty. I was confused, since my mom was usually home from work by then. I didn’t know what to do so I just made some toast and plopped down on the living room floor to watch Nickelodeon. About an hour later, I heard a car screech into our driveway and two doors slam. My mother and a strange blond woman came bursting in through the front door. They were both obviously tanked, but Mom was in way worse shape than the other woman.

  “Joooooeeey?” she called out. “Mama’s home!”

  She and the woman tottered into the living room.

  “There you are! This is my friend Amy!” I vaguely recognized the woman. I’d seen her a few times before down at the salon.

  “Aren’t you just the cutest,” Amy said, and reached her hand out to tousle my hair. I ducked out of reach.

  There was something different about Mom that day. By that point, I’d gotten more and more used to seeing her drunk, but now she seemed even more messed up than usual. Her eyes were bloodshot and darting around the room. She seemed incredibly on edge.

  I turned off the television and went to my bedroom, slamming the door. I sat on my bed, confused and frustrated by what was happening. After about fifteen minutes, I heard Amy leave.

  I left my room and saw Mom pouring herself a drink, and something inside me snapped. “Are you kidding me?” I screamed. “It’s four o’clock in the afternoon!” I ran across the kitchen, snatched the vodka off the kitchen table, and tore out into the backyard. I ran as far back as I could and emptied the entire bottle. I heard my mom follow me out, but she just stood near the back door, yelling, “What are you doing?” over and over, as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Once the bottle was empty, I marched past her back into the house.

  “The joke’s on you,” she said. “That was Nicole’s vodka.”

  I didn’t care if it was Nicole’s. It was my mom who had been drinking it. I knew that my sister drank with her friends sometimes, but Nicole never got all weird like Mom did. I ignored her and started to go back to my room when I heard the front door slam shut.

  I peeked out the window and saw Mom wandering out into the neighborhood. I was worried she was going to get hit by a car, so I decided to run after her, but before I did, I called my dad. “Please come get me,” I said. “I think Mom’s gone crazy.”

  “I’ll be right there,” he said. “Go into your room and wait for me.”

  Instead, I ran out the door just in time to see Mom disappearing behind a house a few doors down. Thankfully there weren’t any cars in the driveway and it didn’t look like anyone was home, so I crept along the side of the house and peered into the backyard. My mom was flat on her back, crying, and holding a big stick straight up toward the quickly darkening sky.

  I walked over to her and tried to lift her to her feet.

  “Come on Mom, it’s time to go home,” I said.

  “No,” she said, shaking herself free, tears still streaming down her face.

  I sat down b
eside her and started to plead. “Mom, please. Someone is going to see you, and they might call the cops. Just come back inside with me.”

  “No, you’re ungrateful,” she said with a sniffle.

  “I’m just worried,” I said.

  “I’m going to die.”

  “Don’t say that. You’re not going to die.”

  “I am. And I’m going to come back as a little blue jay.”

  “Mom . . .”

  “No, listen. This is important. Once I die, whenever you see a blue jay, you’re going to know that it is me looking after you.” She waved her stick in the air again. “Just like that one.”

  I looked up but I didn’t see any birds anywhere. A huge wave of grief washed over me. She looked sad and pathetic lying there with tears in her eyes. I tried to remember the mom from my earlier childhood, the one who was always ready to hug me if I skinned my knee, who brought me soup in bed when I was sick, who always tucked me in at night. That woman was gone, replaced with this stranger who had my mother’s face. I wondered if it was my fault. Was I such a terrible son that she had to drink to escape her life? I started crying. I couldn’t figure out how it had gotten to this point. Just a year ago, everything had been perfect. My family was together, and my biggest worry was making sure I got home from school in time to watch Pokémon. But now my mother had developed this alter ego that came out when she drank. Since Nicole was hardly ever around, I’d become the parent at just thirteen.

  I heard a car door slam in the distance and my father calling my name. I got up, ran back to our place, and told him where she was.

  “Wait in your room for me,” he said. “Go on.”

  I stayed in the living room, though, and watched through the window as he went to fetch her. A few minutes passed before he appeared again with my mother half draped over his shoulder. I ran to my room before they came inside.

  A few minutes later, Dad knocked on my door and came in and said, “Look, Joey, your mom is going to go away for a while.” I wasn’t surprised, but I was scared.