Drugs and alcohol have ruined my life. Now, when people normally say that type of thing, they have gone through some long battle with drug/alcohol addiction and all that other stuff. But not me, I have lived with alcoholic parents for fifteen years and I don’t think my life will ever be “normal”. But sometimes people think this is normal. And it depends on how you look at normal. Because coming home to a knocked out mother with broken who knows what all over the floor every single day is my normal. And having no dad because he left me and my mom when I was thirteen, and I have had to get my own job so that my mom and I could survive for two more years, that is my normal too. But, if you are talking about almost every other 15 year old, then their normal is coming home to a nice sized house, with their own room and then having a nice dinner, and then finishing up their homework so that their parents can give them money and they can go to the movies with their friends, and then coming home and complaining about how hard their life is. Yup that’s normal too.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP!! That’s the sound I wake up to every morning, and it usually follows with me slapping my hand all over the place trying to find the snooze button while I am half asleep, and once I succeed I usually sleep in for another 25 minutes until I hear my mom wailing from the other room WILLIE!!!!!! WILLIE!!!!!!!! My name is Walter, and I don’t know if she calls for Willie every morning because she misses my dad, or if she is so drunk that she forgot my name. But I usually go to her anyway. This morning she was just “reflecting on the dark and broken past that she calls her own” (or at least that is what she calls it when she is trying to make people feel bad for her). This morning I just made her breakfast and then left for school. I ran to the bus and I found a seat in the back by myself.
After about 5 minutes we pulled up to my school which has a sign on it that says “W STE N TEN ESSE HIGH SC OOL HOME O THE BAD RS” ( which is supposed to say, WESTERN TENNESSEE HIGH SCHOOL HOME OF THE BADGERS) I had three friends at school, Audrey, Payton, and Nick. But, Audrey moved away, and Nick went to a better school. So now it is just Payton and me. Payton and I are “friends” but we are not really close or anything, we don’t really hang out outside of school. He is huge into sports – especially football and he wants me to join his team so that we can be Walter and Payton the football players – and I would totally join hockey, if I had enough money to, but I have to help my mom pay for our apartment and I have to pay for my school. We went through our normal school day, homeroom, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th. Nothing special about it, except for the detention I got in 3rd, which is kind of a weekly thing anyway. I came home, and found my mom passed out on the floor of her room. I just let her be and I turned on a hockey game (Predators vs. Penguins) and tried to start my homework, but I got distracted and ditched it. The predators won 3 – 1 and then after I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner I went to bed. The next morning I woke up and my mom was still in bed with two empty bottles on her side table. Sometimes I wonder what went so wrong in my mom’s life that would cause her to be so miserable and make the stupid decision to start drinking. I mean, my grandma and grandpa always seemed fine I never understood what led her to make those decisions, and I also wonder when it started. I would just ask my mom IF:
1.
She was a somewhat decent person, and
2.
If she ever had enough brain power to answer the simplest questions, that you can’t possibly get wrong unless, you are my mom.
I went to school, and I really didn’t want to go home and face my mom, so I walked home instead of taking the bus and stopped at a tiny little store that was called Lisa’s lil’ market. I walked in and right away Lisa said, “Hey Wal how’s Rachael?” “Um…drunk what else is new?” I responded. “Ya, well you never know, things could get better.” “Ya I know.” I said with a sigh. “But what if it doesn’t?” “Well sweetheart, you just have to pray about it.” Now, I never really got the whole praying thing, how it worked and all, but I also thought, how does this person who I am praying to love me if He would let me have a mom who is an alcoholic and a dad who left me?

After about an hour and forty-five minutes of talking with Lisa and trying to finish some homework so that I could deal with my mom when I got home if I had too, I left and she gave me a bag of trail mix and a small water bottle for my walk home.

When I got home, my mom was going crazy knocking stuff all over the place and when I walked in the door I ran over to her and she swung at me but missed by a mile. I grabbed her wrists, and she tried to fight back, but my mom was pretty small and not very strong. She didn’t know at all what she was doing, so it was pretty easy to hold her where I had her. I looked her right in her eyes and said, “Mom, you have to stop, it is just me and I am not gonna hurt you so you have to calm down.” My mom let out a squeal and then she let out a loud jumble of noises that I think was supposed to be words. I made my mom go to sleep and then once she did, I stayed up for about 2 more hours and then I went to sleep too.

The next day, there was a new girl at school. She was tall and had brownish hair with blonde highlights. She didn’t wear any makeup but she was still pretty. Almost like she shined from the inside out. I didn’t know her name at first because all she was referred to was, “the new girl” but I later found out that her name was Nebraska. She was confident. A quality that I may never have. She was different and she was different in a way that I didn’t know or understand yet. By the end of the day I had discovered that she was in half my classes and that she had already begun making friends. When I got home my mom was actually pretty sober and she was actually able to have a conversation. I walked in and all my mom did was glance at me and then looked back at the little TV that sat on what used to be my dad’s dresser. All she said was, “Can you make dinner Wal? I am so tired, I had a rough day.” Then with my big mouth I said under my breath, “Well if you would just suck it up and learn a better way to deal with your problems than just chugging down all the junk that you put in your body and took care of yourself then maybe you wouldn’t be so tired.” My mom kind of snapped when I said that, because I am still learning the art of saying things under your breath. “I can put whatever I want in my body and you don’t get to tell me what I have to do because I am making the right decisions for myself. I am the one running my life not you! You don’t know what I have gone through, you don’t get it, and I am making the right decisions for myself so stop trying to run my life!” “Well mom maybe if you respected and do what I want, than I would start doing the same to you. And all that I ask is that you try a little harder to be there for me, and start acting like a mom. I have been raising myself since the day I was born and I am sick of it! Maybe I am 15 but I still need help sometimes. I don’t know how to do everything on my own, and I am still learning and if you could just learn to be a tiny bit supportive, and not be drunk all the time than maybe I could be more independent and leave you alone!” “What do you want me to do?!” she asked. “Be a real mom! And be there for me! I am ALWAYS there for you, even when your drunk I still help you, when I have homework and I have to go to work, I make sure you are okay before I go or at least as okay as you can be because you are so out of your mind drunk that you don’t know which way is up or down!” Then she walked over to me and smacked me in the face and said “be quiet and go make dinner.” What she said hurt me about 48 times more on the inside than it did on the outside. But I held in all the emotions and heated up a can of chicken noodle soup and split the soup and then heated up two bread rolls, after I got us glasses of water. I gave her the food and she didn’t even make eye contact or thank me for the food that I paid for with the money I make at my job. But it’s okay because I’m used to it. I don’t know why I was so bothered by this whole thing tonight. This happens all the time.

I woke up the next day and my mom was still asleep but she wasn’t drunk, just tired. I went to school and Payton wasn’t there, which isn’t unusual because if Payton wants to skip school, Payton skips school. He kind of does whatever he wants to do. I would skip school too, but school is a six and a half hour excuse to get away from my mom. But, since Payton wasn’t there today was one of those days that I like to call my only days. It’s only me. No one else. Only me at lunch. Only me working on homework in study hall. Only me walking in the halls. But today I kind of had a surprise buddy. I was sitting at lunch by myself, minding my own business, eating a piece of bread and drinking some water, and Nebraska came and sat next to me.
“Hey” she said.
“Um hi” I said
“I’m Nebraska.”
“So I’ve heard” I responded, “I’m Walter.”
She leaned closer to me and said in a whisper, “Why are you sitting alone?”
“I’m not anymore” I said. And all she did was smile the most contagious smile I had ever seen.
“So, do you always sit alone?” she asked after a few seconds which I thought that was kind of a rude question but I didn’t care because somehow coming from her it wasn’t rude. “No” I said, “my buddy Payton isn’t here today normally he sits with me.” “Walter and Payton, like that one football dude?” She asked. I looked up and smiled because anyone who even knows his name knows that he was not just “some football dude”. “Do you like any sports?” she asked. I responded with one word, “Hockey.” “Nice,” she said “me too that’s my favorite sport, I tried playing it but I couldn’t even skate let alone shoot a puck.” She said with a laugh. I must have looked insane because somewhere in the sentence about her liking hockey I just kind of was stunned, and she looked at me and laughed. We started talking about hockey and I found out her favorite team was the Chicago Blackhawks. We just kind of talked about hockey and other random things for the rest of lunch.

I decided to walk home that day and somewhere in the time it took to get from Lisa’s store to my apartment, I suddenly realized that I had done something that I didn’t ever think I would ever do. I made a friend in about 10 minutes.

I got home and my mom was sitting at the kitchen table and it looked like she was really deep in thought. Sometimes I wonder what it’s like in my mom’s brain, because she thinks a lot and some of the things she says after she is done thinking actually make some sense. My mom was in her interview clothes and I knew that is why she was sober yesterday, because she was preparing for an interview. Which isn’t anything new for my mom, she goes for interviews and sometimes she actually gets the job and then she holds them for about a week and the company finds out about her alcohol addition and then she is gone from that job. I said hi and she told me that she would be going somewhere (even though she didn’t tell me where) in about an hour and that she would be gone for a few hours. When she left I sat on our little torn up couch and started my homework. Then I heard on the answering machine of our house phone that Payton had called and he said, “Hey Walter, sorry if today was an only day for you. I forgot to tell you that I was going to Alabama for a few days for a football training thing. I will be back in a week.” So I had a week of only days to look forward too. But that’s okay, Payton went on vacation one time and that wasn’t so bad. I finished up my homework watched part of a hockey game and then went to bed.

It turned out that my week of only days had become my week of only days + Nebraska. Nebraska and I became closer in a week than Payton and I had in two years. She was so easy to be with and was so much fun we laughed a lot and I could just let go of all the stress that is created between school and my mom and I can just forget about all of it when I am with her. When Payton came back I still talked to Nebraska but it wasn’t the same when we were just alone.


People always asked if we “liked” each other since we spent so much time together. I loved Nebraska but not at all in the way that I wanted to date her or anything like that. I loved her in a way that I had never really loved anybody before.

One day Payton was hanging out with some other friends that he had and it was just me and Nebraska again. Somehow, we started talking about my mom and my situation and my life at home and all that stuff. Now this is not something that I talk about openly not really with anybody. In fact, I think the only person that I have talked to about it is Lisa. But I trusted Nebraska. Then, she started talking about herself. “I grew up in a christian home all my life.” She said. “I knew that God loved me and that was great, but I never really fully understood what that meant. I also had a twin brother name Michael and he had cancer from the time he was really little. As I was growing up, my parents would have us pray for him and they would always ask God to do his plan for Michael, which in my mind that he would be healed. Then one day he started not doing so good and he went into the hospital and after he went in, he never came home. We were seven when he died.” This was probably the first time I had ever seen Nebraska not with some sort of grin or smile on her face. “As I got older, I got really mad at God and I was thinking, how does God love me and my family if he let my brother die? And it didn’t make any sense. Than two years ago, God really grabbed my heart and turned it around and I really started wondering about him. So I flipped open my Bible and I read Jeremiah 29:11-14 and it said, “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.” That was so special because it comforted me that God really does know what he is doing and that he has a plan bigger than us all. And Walter, you need to know that God really will take care of you, and you can always talk to him no matter what you are going through he is always there and listening and planning his plan.” I thought about this and it was a lot to take in. If this was coming from anyone other than Nebraska I might not have believed it but I kind of did. And you really can’t radiate with joy the way she does without truly having joy and nobody can have that much joy after they have been so angry for so long like she was. But I still didn’t know.
For the next few weeks, we went back to our normal random talking and goofing around, but I hadn’t forgotten what she said. A few days after we had talked, she brought me a little Bible and told me that I could have it. I skimmed around it but I really didn’t get some of it.
I was still dealing with my mom, but ever since her new job, she wasn’t really drinking that much and the job lasted way longer than her other jobs. But other than the drinking we really didn’t talk much, and when we did it was pretty much all arguing. One day, I was reading my little Bible from Nebraska and I came across a verse that said, “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.” This was Job 42:2. The next verse I came across was, Jeremiah 1:5 which said, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”I was trying to decide what those verses meant when my mom came in and she started yelling at me because I wasn’t making dinner and she was starving. I tried to tell her that I was sorry and I started getting up to go make it when she said, “Do you not know anything? It we agreed that now that I am working you need to start taking better care of me because I have hard days at work!” I actually held my tongue. I literally held my tongue, because if I bit it, it was too easy to unbite it and start talking. “WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU DOING?!” she asked. And I just kept holding it and walked out of the room and into the kitchen without responding. I made dinner while I cooled down. I gave her the dinner of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a glass of water, and then I went for a walk.
It was November and so that meant that it got kind of cold in Tennessee and I just walked and walked and walked, and I didn’t have any idea where I was going, but I didn’t get lost, because I know my way around this area of the world, because this tiny area of the world is pretty much the same thing as my whole world. I just walked and I found a place that I kind of forgot about. About two years ago (when my mom started getting really bad with alcohol, because that was right after my dad left) I used to always come to this field that I was walking by and I used to lay down in the middle and stare up at the clear Tennessee sky, and stare at the sky for so long, that it felt like the sky had come down, and wrapped me in a blanket of darkness and stars, and all I could think about was how cool it was. I decided to go lay there again and it brought back the emotions from back then that had grown stale over time. I laid there, and this time I felt something that I hadn’t really felt before laying there. After I looked up there for a while I felt something come over me. It was the most powerful feeling I have ever felt. It rushed over me like a wave drowning me in the most beautiful feeling one could imagine. I felt a really weird feeling starting in the bottom of my stomach and rising up through me and it shook me from the inside out and it all started building up and up inside of me until something broke and then; a single tear. That single tear led to a thousand more as I realized and felt the power of God come and surround me. Come and whisper to my mind that I wasn’t alone anymore that I never had to do anything on my own ever again. And I cried and I cried and I cried until my body could not spare a single more drop of water. And then I closed my eyes and embraced the first ever moments in my life of relief. I walked home ready to take on the world.