Hillbilly Elegy

looking at her furniture and remembering
the time I hid behind it during one of her
fights with Bob. It meant trying to
understand how Mom could be such a
contradiction—a woman who sat
patiently with me at the hospital for days
and an addict who would lie to her
family to extract money from them a
month later.
I knew that my increasingly close
relationship with Aunt Wee hurt Mom’s
feelings. She talked about it all the time.
“I’m your mother, not her,” she’d repeat.
To this day, I often wonder whether, if
I’d had the courage as an adult that I’d
had as a child, Mom might have gotten
better. Addicts are at their weakest