One of the most gut-wrenching decisions you have to make about helping someone is knowing when to stop helping them. Letting someone you love hit bottom is a difficult thing to do. It’s rough, because if you decide to let them go, there’s always the risk you might lose them forever.
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Hitting bottom is a phrase you hear a lot in addiction and recovery circles. To me, based on my own experience, hitting bottom means coming to the end of yourself, being truly humbled and on your knees. We all have tricks and tools and schemes that we use to navigate this world. Even as our problems mount and our circumstances deteriorate, we tell ourselves lies about how we’re the ones doing the right thing, that we’re playing the game and playing it well and all our problems are someone else’s fault.
Hitting bottom is when all those tricks and tools and schemes have stopped working. Hitting bottom is when all the things you’ve used to prop yourself up in the past, whether it’s drugs or sex or alcohol, simply don’t do anything to erase the pain anymore. Hitting bottom is the moment when you can no longer lie to yourself, when the scales fall from your eyes and you have to confront the truth about who you are and the pain that you’ve caused, both to yourself and to others. Hitting bottom was the place I came to in Austin when, after thirty-seven years of self-medicating and white-knuckling my way through so many seasons of anxiety and depression, I finally had to admit to myself that I was wrong about so many things, and that I desperately needed help.
Many people have the presence of mind to seek or accept help well before they get anywhere near hitting bottom. I was not one of those people. Neither was my mom. For decades, she’d been navigating life, barely staying afloat with all her tricks and tools and schemes, drinking to dull the pain, hitting the clearance sales to get her little dopamine boosts. Ultimately, the thing that kept her from cratering completely was having enablers; family and friends who she could consistently depend on to either forgive or forget her transgressions, allowing her to never fully feel the consequences that should have come with her actions. Nobody had ever let her hit bottom. At a certain point helping becomes enabling, and we were already well past that point when my mom was caught committing federal mail tampering and identity theft to try to get out of a DUI arrest.
In the years after our Thanksgiving blowout I’d kept up a firm boundary between my mom and myself. For most of that time I managed to maintain a reasonably healthy relationship with Gary. Then, at a certain point, he started asking me for money, which I knew was going to happen because my mom was horrible with money. No matter how much Gary made, she would find a way to spend it all. I helped them out with some of the bills in months they were behind. I also gave them a car as soon as I could pay it off. I did it because I thought it was my responsibility, until I realized it wasn’t. Children are not responsible for their parents. Yes, we should be there for our parents when they’re elderly and infirm, but it’s not our job to be there for our parents when our parents are acting like children and refusing to be responsible for themselves. Eventually, I wrote Gary back and made it clear that I couldn’t give them any more money until we all went to counseling and my mom got help for her financial problems.
After that, Gary started drinking all of my mom’s Kool-Aid and finally succumbed to her toxicity. They went to war against me. I would run into people, old family, friends, and neighbors in LA and back home in Ventura. They’d tell me they talked to my mom and were worried because she’d said the most horrible things about me. “Oh, that bastard Zac. He’s all Hollywood now. He’s forgotten his family.” It destroyed me knowing they were saying all that to friends and neighbors I’d known my whole life. I just had to trust that people were smart enough to understand when they were being gaslit. Still, it was hard.
Then one day, out of the blue, I got an email from Gary. It was less an email and more a novella. If I’d printed it out it probably would have run about forty or fifty pages, single spaced, and it was essentially a manifesto about why I was a terrible son and not a good person. The first thing that struck me about it was that it had a preamble—like, an actual preamble that was labeled “Preamble.” It was like reading the United States Constitution. Below that there was a table of contents and the document itself, which was broken down into sections: “Section One: Why You Are Not a Good Son.” And below that, each section was broken down into subsections: Section 1.A and 1.B and 1.C. I have no idea how long it took him to write this thing, but it was amazing. And it was nuts.
I sat down and started reading. It was eloquently written and very intelligent, because Gary’s an intelligent person. I read about half of it and then I couldn’t get through anymore. Of the half that I read, it left me both laughing hysterically and sobbing uncontrollably because I couldn’t believe that they could think this of me. So I didn’t respond to it.
Then came the Dr. Phil and Oprah threats. They kept that up for a while. Ever since our big blowout, whenever my mom was trying to bait me into a fight, she’d leave me the nastiest voicemails, saying, “I’m going to expose you for the bastard son you are. I’m going to go on Oprah. I’m going to go on Dr. Phil. They would love this story.” First of all, it was kind of laughable that they thought I was so famous that the queen of daytime television would just be sitting around, waiting to get her hands on a big Zachary Levi scoop. I was a TV actor on a show that was never a hit; I was not Brad Pitt. Still, in my twenty-seven-year-old mind, it was concerning enough. I was at peace with my decision to let my parents deal with their own financial situation, and I believed that I was doing the right thing, but that didn’t mean that I’d be given a fair shake in the court of public opinion. “Ungrateful Son Abandons Parents in Need” is a juicy headline, and tabloid shows like TMZ are always looking for some kind of garbage to dredge up on a slow news day.
One can practice empathy without actually liking someone first. And through that practice grows understanding, and thus love.
I didn’t see or speak to them for five years and made peace with the fact that they weren’t going to be in my life. I never went out of my way to find out anything about them, but my sisters would pass me information here and there. There was never a whole lot to report because it was always the same old story: my mom’s drinking and spending and hoarding, she and Gary fighting like cats and dogs and threatening to leave each other, which they never actually did. But the big story, which consumed the whole family and which I couldn’t help hearing about, was my mom’s DUI.
Apparently, one night she was out driving while intoxicated—which she did quite frequently—and she got pulled over. The cop approached her door and asked if she’d been drinking, the usual routine. My mom said no, which was a lie. Then the cop asked for her ID. Since she was driving on an expired license, she said she didn’t have her wallet on her, which was also a lie.
So then the cop asked for her name. “If you don’t have your ID on you, I at least need your name to run you through the system.” At which point my mom, thinking she would just sweet-talk her way out of this and be on her way, proceeded to give the cop the name of her sister, my aunt Sally. Because my mom was a smart and wily person with a fantastic memory, she could recite all of Sally’s information off the top of her head: address, phone number, birthday, everything. The cop ran the name, pulled my aunt’s license up on his computer, and since my mom and her sister look similar enough, he bought it. Then he arrested her, brought her into the station, and booked her—as my aunt.
Gary then went down to the station to bail her out, and because Gary was the yin to my mom’s yang in this toxic codependency, he didn’t go to the officer on duty and say, “Listen, my wife made a mistake and gave you a false name. You have booked her as her sister. Her real name is Susy Pugh.” That would have been the right thing to do and it would have saved everyone a great deal of drama. But no. He bailed her out under her sister’s name and, in doing so, essentially corroborated that she was who she said she was.
Now sweet old Aunt Sally was going to be prosecuted for a DUI. So, in order to prevent Aunt Sally from finding out she was going to be prosecuted for a DUI, my mom started going by Sally’s house every day to sit and wait for the mail to be dropped off. Then she’d rifle through and pull out any court notices or anything else that might tip her sister off, as if that were going to stop the wheels of the judicial system from turning slowly, inexorably forward.
Eventually, because my mom was also lazy, she got tired of waiting outside for the mail carrier every morning, so she had her sister’s mail forwarded to her own house, where she could riffle through it at her leisure and then slide it back into her sister’s mailbox later that afternoon. So now, on top of drunk driving and providing false identification to a police officer, my mom was also guilty of mail tampering, which is a federal crime. And it was all to no end, because my aunt started getting phone calls from lawyers who’d pulled her name and phone number out of the public records down at the courthouse.
“We’d like to represent you in your DUI case,” they said.
“What DUI case?” she replied.
The thing about growing up an abusive household is that everyone’s ego responds to that abuse in different ways. We all build up different strategies and defense mechanisms to protect ourselves. Though they had grown up in the same psychologically abusive household, Sally was nothing like my mom. She was the kindest and softest of all of the siblings. For years she’d worked as the receptionist at the main orthodontist in Ventura, the one all the kids went to for braces and retainers, and she knew all the families and all the parents. Everybody loved her. Where my mother had responded to Grandma Pat’s abuse by learning it and inflicting that same abuse on others, Sally’s response was to be eternally passive and kind. So when Sally discovered my mom’s charade, she wasn’t equipped to handle it. She didn’t know how to offer firm, tough love. Her husband tended to avoid conflict as well. They had the opportunity to press charges and put my mom in jail, but they didn’t. They let it slide. Even though my mom had been crazy and abusive most of their adult lives, Sally couldn’t bear the thought of what pressing charges might do to my mom.
Absent my aunt’s willingness to prosecute for the mail tampering and the impersonation, which were the more serious of the crimes, the police had no recourse but to give my mom a slap on the wrist for the DUI. She paid a fine and had her license suspended, and that was it. And, clearly, she didn’t learn her lesson, because less than a year later she was picked up for a second DUI, this time as herself, driving on a suspended license.
Still, I kept telling myself, it was not my problem anymore.
Until it was.
One day out of the blue, I got a strange email from Gary. “Whatever your mother is saying is a lie,” he wrote. “You can’t believe her.” Then he started rambling off all these strange requests, asking me to help coordinate getting him his clothes and belongings.
I didn’t respond to him. I called up Shekinah. “Why am I getting emails from Gary like this?” I asked. She didn’t know. My mom and Gary had threatened to leave each other so many times I don’t think any of us believed it would ever happen. But it had. Gary had cracked. He’d had enough. I have no idea what the last straw was, and I don’t care to know. I just couldn’t believe, after all of the horrible shit he’d said about me, after writing me a forty-page manifesto about why I wasn’t a good son, now he was the one leaving my mom high and dry, with no money and no roof over her head, and asking for my help in making his escape. It was crazy.
Over the next couple of days, friends of his started showing up at my house with armloads of his stuff to put in my garage. Over the weeks that followed, every few days there’d be a knock at the door. I’d open it, and there would be some middle-aged guy with random shit of Gary’s, some boxes or an old computer monitor for me to hold on to. Then, the next day some other guy would come by to pick it up. It was odd. And then, one afternoon, I was sitting at my kitchen table when I heard yet another a knock. I got up, walked over, opened the door, and there, with a massive U-Haul truck parked on the street behind her, was my mom.
“I’m here for emotional and financial support,” she said.
I stared at her, and she stared back at me. Then I took a deep breath, stepped aside, and said, “Ooookey dokey. Come on in.”
It’s hard to be mad at someone as nice as my Aunt Sally, but in that moment, I was definitely upset with her. I wished she had pressed charges against my mom. In fact, I had encouraged her to, because I wanted my mom to go to jail. I wanted her to hit bottom. With the crimes my mother had committed against Aunt Sally, I thought there was finally a chance to force my mother to look at herself in the mirror. Because I knew my mom. Getting a suspended driver’s license was not the bottom she needed to hit. But being forced to sober up during a stint in federal prison, having been sent there by her own sister, that might have made a difference. It might have saved her life. But that didn’t happen, and now here my mother was, darkening my door and forcing me to reckon with the same question Aunt Sally had faced: Was I going to help my mom, or force her to help herself?
I could have shut the door and sent her lumbering on her way in her U-Haul. Maybe I should have. But I didn’t. I’d given up on having a relationship with her because she’d always refused to take accountability for any of her actions. But I thought, maybe, now that she was in my house asking me for financial and emotional support, I might have an opening to push her in the direction of making healthier choices instead of simply cutting her off. We sat down at the kitchen table for a talk. For a while she softened up to me because she knew she needed me as an ally against Gary, who was now the bigger enemy in her eyes. But the moment I pressed her on anything serious, it all went sideways.
“Mom,” I said, “if you want my support, you’re going to have to explain to me what’s going on. You’re going to have to reckon with why you are where you are right now. What has led up to this point? Like this whole situation with Sally and the DUI. Don’t you think that what you did to Sally was wrong?”
And I swear to God, my mom looked me right in the eye and said, “I was trying to protect Sally.”
I lost it. “Protect her?! From what?! From the fraud that you committed against her?!”
That was when I realized there was still no point in trying to reason with her. She had no remorse. She’d learned nothing. She’d rationalized everything. Less than an hour into trying to help my mom, and I was already done. There was no point in going down this road.
Fortunately, my mom wasn’t asking to live with me, which I wouldn’t have allowed her to do anyway. She had a friend, Joanne, who lived in a town called Santa Paula up near Ventura. Joanne was one of my mom’s old hippie-Jesus friends from back in the day, and she agreed to let my mom stay with her for a while if I paid her some nominal rent. So that’s what I did. I kept a roof over her head. That was as far as I was willing to go. I was ready to wash my hands of the whole thing once again.
Then, a few weeks later, the judgment for my mom’s second DUI came down. She had a choice: she could spend thirty days in jail, or she could check herself into a court-mandated rehab facility. The facility where the state wanted to send her was pretty bare bones, the kind of place they send the real hard cases, the indigent and the homeless. My mom called me up, crying on the phone, begging. “Zac,” she said, “they want to send me to this horrible place, but I know of this better place. It’s up in Seattle. It’s incredible. They’re good people. It’s a great facility. I gotta go there. I gotta go. It’s what I need to get better.”
I went online and looked up the facility. The place where the court was telling her to go cost a couple thousand dollars. The place that she wanted me to send her cost considerably more. Part of me resisted helping at all, as I wasn’t convinced that she would take any of it seriously anyway, and therefore my help would still be that of an enabler. But this was also the first time my mother had ever even been open to the possibility of accepting professional help, so I felt like I should at least consider it.
“Let me call them,” I told her. “I’ll talk to them, and if they really are head and shoulders above what this other place is going to be, and if you’re serious and this is going to help you, then we can talk about it.”
I got on the phone with the woman at the facility my mom had been talking to, and within minutes I could tell that these people had already been twisted up the same way my mom twisted everyone up. “Yeah, we’ve been talking to your mom,” the woman at the facility said. “And, oh my gosh, it’s heartbreaking and tragic what she’s been through and we want to help her . . .” And on and on and on, the same sob-story shit my mom had been peddling for thirty years.
“Oh, you guys have been so spun,” I said. “This woman is spinning you. Do you deal with these types of personalities very often?”
“Oh, trust me. We deal with all kinds.”
“No, no, no, no. Do you deal with master manipulators? Do you have people come through your facility who can gaslight you into believing what they want you to believe?”
“No, don’t worry about that. We’ve handled everyone and we have policies in place for—”
“No,” I said. “I need you to listen to me. I’m being serious. She will come up there and spin all of you around if you’re not careful. She’s a master manipulator. Please listen to me when I’m telling you this.”
If you can’t control it, don’t let it control you.
But this woman kept insisting. “No, no, no, no. We’ve got it. We’ve got it.”
Of course, they didn’t have it, and neither did I. Because even as I was warning these people that my mother was spinning them, I was being spun myself. What I didn’t know was that Gary had moved back up to Seattle and that my mom was trying to go back up there to find him and figure out what was going on with him.
Like I said, a master manipulator.
In my gut, I knew that the bare-bones facility was what my mother needed. Maybe that would have been hitting bottom. But I let my emotions get the better of me. I let myself get spun, by my mom and by people at the facility, who sold me on better doctors and first-class treatment, saying all the things they needed to say to get me to bite.
I called my mom and told her I would pay for the treatment, but I told her that the price tag came with an ultimatum. “This is it,” I said. “This is the last stand. This is the Alamo. You either go up there and you do the work and you get healthy, or we are done. I will cut off my support for you. I will do it. Don’t think I won’t stop paying your rent. Because I will, and we’ll be done.”
“No, no, Zac, I’m gonna do the work. I’m gonna do the work. I promise.”
So I wrote the check, and I sent my mom off to rehab.
Two days later I got a call. “Hiiii . . . Um, we’re having a little trouble with your mom. She’s very noncompliant. She taking over her group therapy classes and not letting the therapists talk and getting the rest of the group to conspire with her and turn on the therapists. It’s been frustrating.”
“Okay . . . And?”
“Well, it’s unorthodox, and we don’t know how to handle it.”
“Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do about it? You’re the professionals. I told you this was what you were going to get. You told me that you could handle it.”
“Well, yeah, but . . .”
It went on like that for a month. My mom never turned it around. She even snuck off campus to get drunk, and I think she went looking to try to find Gary. Still, they didn’t kick her out—I guess they wanted to keep the money—and she was able to do enough to stay out of trouble with the court and stay out of jail. But they sent her back with a report card, and the report card was not good. She hadn’t done the work, and for me that was the last straw. I’d given her the ultimatum, and I’d meant it. I told Joanne that I would no longer be paying for my mother’s rent and utilities. And you’d think that Joanne, being my mother’s friend, would have let her stay for free. But she didn’t. She said that if my mom couldn’t pay her rent and utilities, she would kick her out of her home.
Naturally, everyone in the family looked to me to step back in and solve it, which made me furious. No one wanted to see her homeless, but no one else had the means or desire to help. My sisters, in fairness, didn’t have any money to help her out. But all of my uncles and aunts could have helped financially, and none of them did. Any of them could have taken her in, or put her up in one of their multiple properties, but they didn’t. And look, I don’t blame them, because she was a nightmare to deal with on a regular basis. Everyone kept turning to me because I was her son, and I was making enough money. It was a full-court press. “Zac, it’s on you. If you don’t pay her rent, she’s going to be homeless. You can’t do it. You can’t let her be homeless.”
“No,” I told them, “I’m sorry. I’m not going to help her, because I genuinely don’t think this is actually helping her. For her own good, she needs to be cut off. If she’s gotta hit bottom, then she’s gotta hit bottom. If you don’t want her to be homeless, you can step up and take her into your home or give money to Joanne or do whatever you want. But I will not do this anymore.”
Of all of us, Shekinah had always been the closest to my mom and had always been the most like my mom. And just as Aunt Sally couldn’t bear the thought of sending her sister to prison, Shekinah couldn’t bear the thought of our mother being out on the streets. She sat me down on the couch one night and she begged me, sobbing hysterically, tears streaming down her face. “Please don’t let Mom be on the street. Please don’t do it. Please don’t let Mom be homeless. I’ll go take care of her. I’ll drive up to her. I’ll bring her food. I’ll bring her medicine. I’ll do whatever it takes.”
Seeing Shekinah in so much pain wrecked me. I was fully prepared to take a hard line against my mom, but I wasn’t prepared to do it to my sister, so I relented and I gave her the ultimatum instead.
“Fine, I’ll pay her rent and utilities and living expenses,” I said. “The bare necessities. But you’re the one who’s got to be responsible for her. You’ve got to handle her. You’ve got to be the one who takes care of things, who makes sure that she takes care of herself.”
“I will,” she said. “I promise I will. I promise, I promise, I promise.”
So we moved my mom into a two-bedroom apartment in Santa Paula. I set up an account to auto-pay all her bills, gave Shekinah a stipend for everything else, and that was that. In hindsight, I still ask myself if I made a mistake. Should I have cut my mom off? Would that have helped her more in the long run? And the answer is that I’ll never know. All I know is that in that moment I wanted to believe that my sister’s love would be enough to save our mother’s life.
It wasn’t.