My mom's in recovery. My mom was the addiction. Now we're learning to be a family again.

She missed my fifth-grade graduation, my first date, my college acceptance. She was there physically sometimes, but the person holding my hand wasn't really present. I grew up terrified that her mood swings were about me—that I'd done something to make her want to use.

As a teenager, I was angry at her in a way I couldn't articulate. I felt abandoned by someone who was supposed to protect me. That anger crystallized into shame: shame that my mom was an addict, shame that I wasn't enough to keep her sober, shame about what it meant about me.

I didn't realize I was carrying trauma until I was 23 and fell apart in a therapist's office.

When she got sober, I didn't know how to feel. Relief, sure. But also: now what? Eight years of resentment doesn't disappear because someone puts down the substance. Rebuilding trust isn't a linear thing. Some days I'm optimistic about us. Other days, old wounds resurface.

But something shifted when she apologized—not just for being an addict, but for the choices she made while she was one. She acknowledged that my pain was real, that her recovery didn't erase my experience.

We're rebuilding now. Slowly. She's showing up. Consistently. Not perfectly, but genuinely.

I don't have to make her recovery my responsibility anymore. And she doesn't have to be defined by her addiction or our broken history. We're just two people learning that families can break and still mend, that love can survive addiction, and that healing isn't about forgetting—it's about choosing each other anyway.

My mom is no longer the addiction. She's just my mom, doing the work.