From Chaos to Compassion

 

            The Williams household was a maelstrom of feminine drama, a single mom with three teenage daughters, all of whom were focused on, obsessed with, and devoted to social media. Every day was a mirror image of the day before and the day after, arguments for who had access to the bathroom first, yelling, name calling, breakfast and then departure for school. Mother Melissa collapsed on the couch when the girls all crossed the front door threshold to climb onto the school bus.

              “Oh, wow, the silence, the calm, and the peace of an empty house,” she muttered to herself. “Forty-five minutes, I’ve got forty-five minutes, that should be enough time to get a shower in before I start work for the day.” She pulled herself to her feet, shuffled into the bathroom for a lukewarm shower, a fresh set of clothes and hours of work on her laptop until the girls would burst through the door around three o’clock.

              Relishing the silence until lunchtime, she stepped away from her work, made herself a sandwich and a hard lemonade to help take the edge off. The alcohol slowly calmed her down, introduced a small slur in her speech, and eventually wore off before she clocked back in for work and a meeting with the rest of the team. Knowing what was coming next, the clock chimed three strikes and were immediately followed by three noisy teenage girls, chattering, complaining, and looking for a snack.

              Melissa worked for two more hours, while the girls lost themselves on their phones, lounging around in different rooms of the house. The hard lemonade from lunch had fully worn off, giving her a sense of disappointment, which immediately brought to mind the bottle of tequila she had hidden on the top shelf in the pantry. She peeked through each nearby room to see that all three girls had ascended to the second floor, giving her the chance to retrieve her secret stash and sit down on the couch.

              “Wow, why am I so warm?” she wondered. “Oof, I guess it is ninety-five degrees out, so that explains it.” Feeling awkward and uncomfortable, she stood up, sat the bottle on the coffee table, removed her pants and her t-shirt, retrieved the bottle, sat back down and began sipping the contents every few seconds, trying to keep track of how many shots she was consuming.

              The bottle was soon empty, and Melissa slowly collapsed into a heap to be immediately joined by the orange cat that frequented their home. She heard the sound of approaching feet to see her oldest daughter standing over her. “Emma, go make some dinner,” she said. “I am so tired after today, I just don’t have the energy to do anything.”

              “Yeah, sure Mom,” Emma answered to slowly walk into the kitchen, followed by the next oldest daughter.

              “Hey, Anna,” she said. “Mom’s been on the bottle again, so we need to make dinner. It’ll go faster if we work together. Let’s look through the fridge and freezer and see what we can find. I’m thinking chicken and rice would be good tonight.”

              Both girls turned to look back into the living room as the youngest girl sat on the edge of the coffee table looking down at their mother who had fallen asleep, with a puddle of drool on the pillow beneath her head. “Anna, this is not good,” Emma said. “It seems like Mom does this every night, at least for the past several weeks. Have you noticed how sad she seems all the time. I really don’t know what to do to help her. She is going down a dangerous path that will probably lead to her losing her job.”

              “That would be really bad,” Anna answered. “We need to keep an eye on her, what she buys at the grocery store, and probably start hiding her hidden stashes. She obviously has no self-control when it comes to liquor. If she can’t find it, she can’t drink it. We need to be aggressive in protecting her.”

              “That’s a great idea,” Emma said. “If she loses her job, we lose our house, we won’t be able to buy groceries, and we won’t be able to buy gas for the car. I don’t know what’s been happening with her lately, it’s like she deliberately chooses to make bad decisions when the good and right decisions are so obvious. Let’s try to get her to talk about what she’s thinking.”

              “Alright, dinner is ready,” Anna said. “Go get Clara so we can all eat together. I’d be surprised if Mom was able to walk in here and actually eat anything.” The three girls sat alone at the kitchen table, while Melissa snored and drooled for the next hour.

              “Clara, Anna and I made dinner, so you can clean up the kitchen,” Emma said. “I’ll put together a dinner plate for whenever Mom wakes up.” The hours ticked by, the girls were all tired, turned off the lights, and escaped to their bedrooms, worried sick about their Mother and if she would eventually wake up and eat something.

              Anna popped awake at midnight to the sound of her mother rummaging through the kitchen and grumbling to herself. She slipped out of her bedroom, snuck into Emma’s room, woke her and shared an idea she had been ruminating on for several weeks. “Emma, wake up,” she said. “I was thinking that we really do waste a lot of time on our phones and social media. We should try to focus our attention on Mom and on other people around the community that need help. Doing good for others seems like the right thing to do. Let’s start tomorrow after school.”

              “Uh, yeah, okay, that sounds good,” Emma said. “I guess we can bring Clara home after school, get Mom into a good head space, and then find other people we can help. There are a lot of old people on this street who probably need help with keeping their homes clean, cooking meals, and having someone to talk to. You hear a lot of stories about old people being lonely. Who knows, maybe we’ll make some new friends, and learn something new."

              The next morning transpired like all other mornings. The girls made it through another day of school, brought their youngest sister home, rummaged through the pantry to find a bottle of Scotch which they hid in the upstairs bathroom. “Clara,” Emma said. “You stay here with Mom and talk to her a lot. Anna and I are going down the street to help Mrs. Johnston with cleaning her house. If Mom asks what we’re doing, tell her that we left to help out an old person without household chores.”

              In what became a routine three days a week, Emma and Anna began to develop a reputation around town for being those two nice Williams girls who are always willing to help anyone who needs it. They spent more hours cleaning kitchens, cleaning bathrooms, running laundry, and cooking meals for the elderly than they ever could have imagined. They made a point of being home by six o’clock to confirm that their Mother was not passed out on the couch.

              Most evenings they walked into a home that was quiet and peaceful to a home cooked meal and a Mother who was coherent and concerned about their activities. The next day after school, Emma and Anna took a day off to clean and organize their own home, while their mother finished her last two hours of work.

              “Oh, girls,” Melissa said. “I’ve been hearing stories around town about you two helping many of the old people around town. That is really good, I’m proud of you. It is certainly better than losing yourselves in social media on your phones. I’ve heard these stories from at least six or seven different people. You are creating a really good reputation for yourselves; people are saying good things. Good job, keep it up.”

              Four weeks, then five weeks, and then six weeks passed doing their volunteer activity, which eventually turned into the elderly occasionally offering them moderate payments for their work, which allowed them to buy themselves special treats at the local grocery store. After dinner on a Friday evening, the three girls walked to the local coffee shop, bought four iced mochas and returned home to surprise their mother.

              “Hey, Mom, we bought you a surprise,” Emma said. “Some of the older people have been paying us a little bit each time we do some work. We thought you might like a coffee tonight.”

              The four of them sat down together on the couch to watch a movie, enjoying their dessert like drinks, eating popcorn, and laughing at the latest Pixar release. The movie ended, Anna and Clara cleaned up while Emma helped her mother upstairs into her bedroom, making sure that she had no access to alcohol or any other substances.

              She looked into her mother’s dark, empty, and sad eyes, wondering if there was anything she could do to pull her mother away from this horrible edge of depression she seemed to be drifting toward. She tucked her mother into bed, turned off her light, shut the door, and descended the stairs to help finish cleaning and organizing the house, wanting to present their mother with an orderly home when she rose the next morning.

              As they finished cleaning the house, Emma pulled Anna and Clara to the foot of the stairs. “I’ve begun to realize that we argue a lot, we yell a lot, and I’m certain that this is really making Mom’s life pretty miserable. Let’s work hard at not being like that and instead try to do more to make her happy and less overwhelmed by everything that needs to happen around here. We know how to clean, we know how to do laundry, and we know how to do yardwork. We’ve been doing all this for other people, so let’s start doing this for Mom as well. She works hard, she has a lot of responsibilities, and we need to do more to help her.”

              The next Monday ended with the girls returning home from school to find their mother working on her laptop. “Oh, girls,” she said, “we’ll be having many visitors tonight for a barbeque. A group of elderly ladies stopped by a couple of hours ago and wanted to do a community get together, as a way to say thank you for all that you’ve done for so many on our street.”

              “Oh, wow,” Emma said. “I did not expect anything like that to happen.”

              “So, stay off your phones,” Melissa said. “In fact, put your phones in your rooms so you’re not tempted to be distracted by them. Spend your time being social with our visitors and see if we can learn more about our neighbors, our community, and what other good things we could be doing for them.”