4th

After my mom died, I read every journal and planner she left behind. There weren’t many. The entries were sporadic, sometimes leaping a year—or even five—with little information and a lot of space devoted to her weight and what she was going to do about it. Haha. We weren’t so different, me and this woman who shared half my DNA.

In one of the planners, I found an incomplete Fourth Step. My mom had been sober my entire life—she got sober before I was born—and by the time I was twelve or thirteen when she had started this Fourth Step, she had already been sober for fifteen or sixteen years. The Fourth Step is the part of Alcoholics Anonymous where you make “a searching and fearless moral inventory” of yourself: your wrongs, fears, resentments, and the damage you’ve done. A lot of people get stuck there. They write down what they can and then stop.

My mom had stopped, too.

That was where I learned she had slept with her younger sister’s college boyfriend—the sister who didn’t like my mom and thought she was much prettier because she was blonde. Which is funny, because I had also heard my aunt’s version: that my mom only claimed she’d slept with him to hurt her. After all, he only liked blondes like my aunt. He couldn’t have done it. He just wouldn't have slept with a brunette like my mom.

I never learned which version was true. But I believe my mom.

I also learned that, in her early twenties, my mom had worked in a nursing-home kitchen. One of the residents died after choking on a piece of hot dog. Almost two decades later, my mom still believed it was her fault because she hadn’t cut the hot dog into small enough pieces, even though she knew the resident was at risk of choking.

There was other stuff too, but the inventory felt awfully incomplete. She didn’t get into half the things I had seen.

Maybe that was the point. Maybe no one can make a complete inventory of a life—not even a person trying to account for all the ways she had failed.

Still, it was through the worst choices of my mother’s life that I grew to respect her. I learned to cheer for her—not because she had been innocent, and not because sobriety erased what came before, but because she kept going while carrying everything she believed she had done.

And somewhere in all that unfinished writing, I began to understand her: not as the mother I had needed her to be, but as the woman she had been trying, imperfectly, to become.