Don’t turn your nose up at mom’s love

“It’s not for the world to know,” he tells me, depressed, lying like his dying dad with a sheet over his nose, “because you stink”.

I’m standing next to his bed and we are talking about the call he still hasn’t made to rehab “but thank you for saying it. I need it”.

Yes, I stank of a glass or two of cheap wine. And yes, I remember the night I told dying Beloved, after a glass or two, furiously, “you’re dying, but not dead yet. Get up. Move”. He did, like his boy 13 years later, the little-boy thing of shrinking under a sheet covering his nose with a “you stink”.

So, I stink as a mother, I realise, crying into my toilet roll after watching Julia Roberts getting her Ben back. Call it art imitates life, but the movie Ben is Back ripped my heart out.

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Picture Sicily … or just a mother trying to save her drug-addict son. I’m going for my fourth rehab. And yes, it’s for the world to know … Because if we keep hiding it from “the world”; if we keep rolling our eyes at what our “woke” society say is a new cool, I am going to bury, if not one, but two of my four children. And I refuse to.

I’ll shout out to the universe “you’re precious”, even if you’ve lost nine teeth and can’t smile because you “don’t want the world to know”. I love you even when you’re a zombie and can’t put the A after the B when you talk to me. And I’ll still tell the world proudly, like you do – to your friends – “I want rehab.”

I won’t see you for six weeks and still have no idea of what you will go through. I hear “anger management”.

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Sigh of relief because knives are forever drawn; windows broken. Your choice, I know. But I thank you for acknowledging you need help. I thank you for just being the lovely boy we have raised over 30-odd years. You are still that boy.

Corrupted and dysfunctional as we are, you are still just that boy. I know I’ll have my Ben back. Hopefully forever. But that’s your choice. For now? I stink to high heaven. I’m a mom. But know, I love you. Always.