Four Years Without My Mother

My mother packed my entire life into bin bags and left them in the shed.

I still think about that moment sometimes.

Over fifty bin bags filled with my belongings, sitting in the shed outside the house I grew up in.

There was nothing left of me inside.

No traces.

No bedroom.

No feeling that I belonged there anymore.

It felt like I had been erased from my own family.

I never imagined I would go nearly four years without properly seeing or speaking to my mum.

Especially as an only daughter.

No matter how chaotic my life became, some part of me still believed my mother would always be there.

So when she stopped speaking to me, blocked me, and emotionally disconnected from me completely, it felt like the biggest heartbreak of my life.

People talk about heartbreak in relationships.

But there is something deeply painful about feeling abandoned by your own parent while you are already struggling to survive yourself.

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The Silence

At the time, my alcoholism had completely taken over my life.

I was mentally unwell.

Emotionally unstable.

Fixated on alcohol.

Living in survival mode.

And I do understand now that my addiction affected everybody around me, especially my family.

But back then, all I could think was:

How could my own mother give up on me?

I could not process it.

I kept hoping she would suddenly call.

Message me.

Turn up.

Tell me everything was going to be okay.

But instead there was silence.

And the silence hurt more than arguments ever did.

When she blocked me, I started hearing other people in recovery share similar stories.

I realised addiction does not just make you lose friends.

Sometimes you lose family too.

And after losing two dads in my life, my mum was really the only close family member I had left.

So I truly never believed she would completely cut me off.

I did not think she would give me what people call “tough love.”

But that is exactly what happened.

I call it the period where my mother disowned me.

And hearing other people’s stories in meetings became one of the only things that gave me hope.

One of my closest friends in recovery shared about how she had lost contact with her daughter for years because of addiction, and eventually they found their way back to each other.

Their relationship was so loving and close that I clung onto that story desperately.

I wanted to believe maybe one day my mum and I would reconnect too.

But honestly, in 2022, I had almost completely given up hope.

I genuinely believed that if reconciliation ever happened, it would happen when my mum was on her deathbed.

That is how impossible the situation felt to me.

My mum has always been emotionally very closed off.

Cold, almost.

As a child, I was never hugged much.

Affection was never something that came naturally in our house.

So part of me almost expected rejection emotionally.

But this still destroyed me.

There were so many moments where I thought:

I give up.

I give up.

I give up.

I cannot even explain how hopeless I became.

There were days I genuinely believed I had lost my mother forever.

One time when I went back to the house, my mum barely even acknowledged me.

She treated me almost like a ghost.

Like I was not even there.

The person I was with at the time later told me he had never witnessed anything like it before.

And honestly, neither had I.

It was one of the most painful experiences of my life.

Because no matter how old you are, there is still a part of you that wants your mother.

Especially when your life is falling apart.

Birthdays passed in silence.

Christmases passed in silence.

My mum did not message me.

Did not call me.

Did not wish me happy birthday.

Did not wish me merry Christmas.

Nothing.

And when you are already emotionally fragile, silence like that becomes deafening.

Especially from your own mother.

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A Rock Bottom

The saddest part is that the moment she emotionally left me was also the moment I needed her most.

I had reached such a dark place mentally that I ended up in psychiatric care.

And in my mind, I could not understand why my mum disappeared at the exact moment I felt most broken.

That pain nearly destroyed me.

It made me want to drink more than ever.

I wanted to completely numb what I was feeling.

I wanted to escape the rejection, the abandonment, the grief, the shame, the loneliness.

Alcohol felt like the easiest way to silence all of it.

One of the moments that hurt me the most happened last year when I was in rehab.

My mother had flown to Thailand because her own mother — my grandmother — had passed away.

And I was not even allowed to attend my own grandmother’s funeral.

That pain is very difficult to explain properly.

I was already in rehab.

Already emotionally broken.

Already trying to piece my life back together.

And while my family were grieving together, I felt completely shut out from all of it.

I remember thinking:

How have things become this bad?

Not being there for my grandmother’s funeral felt like another layer of loss on top of everything else I was already carrying.

Addiction does not just take away your health or relationships.

It steals moments you can never get back.

And grief becomes even more complicated when you are carrying shame at the same time.

Part of me understood why my family no longer trusted me fully.

But another part of me was still just a daughter and granddaughter wanting to be included, wanting comfort, wanting family during one of the hardest periods of my life.

Instead, I felt completely alone.

That was one of the moments where I truly realised how far addiction had separated me from the people I loved.

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Survival Mode

During that same period, I also ended up in a deeply toxic relationship.

I was emotionally abused.

Controlled financially.

Manipulated constantly.

Eventually physically assaulted.

I remember the moment clearly.

I was hit harder than I had ever been hit in my life.

And strangely, something inside me became calm afterwards because I knew instantly:

I have to leave.

And I did.

Immediately.

Afterwards, I essentially ended up homeless.

Everything in my life felt like it was collapsing at once.

My addiction.

My mental health.

My family relationships.

My safety.

My identity.

I genuinely did not know who I was anymore.

But one of the most important things that happened during that time was that somebody from recovery took me in.

A member from the recovery community gave me somewhere safe to stay.

And over time, he became one of my closest friends.

That period changed me permanently because recovery stopped being optional.

It became survival.

For the first time in my life, I had to put recovery before everything else.

Before relationships.

Before dating.

Before escapism.

Before alcohol.

Recovery became my entire focus.

Meetings.

Honesty.

Routine.

Trying to rebuild my life from the ground up.

I started speaking openly about what was happening to me instead of pretending everything was fine.

I shared about the addiction.

The abuse.

The loneliness.

The shame.

The fear.

And slowly, something inside me started changing.

Not overnight.

But gradually.

I started realising how much of my life I had spent running from pain instead of actually facing it.

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London

After everything collapsed, I made the best of what I could.

I moved to London and I put on armour.

To other people, I probably looked excited.

Free.

Independent.

Like somebody starting a glamorous new chapter in a big city.

And parts of me were excited.

But underneath all of that was somebody carrying an unbelievable amount of pain.

I tried to act strong externally.

I explored London.

Went to meetings.

Met new people.

Tried new restaurants.

Tried to build a completely different life for myself.

But internally, there was still a part of me grieving the loss of my family while trying to survive addiction and recovery at the same time.

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Getting My Mother Back

I only got my mother back in my life last year.

And honestly, it felt priceless.

People underestimate how powerful it is to reconnect with somebody you truly believed you had lost forever.

Walking back into the house I grew up in after all those years felt surreal.

It almost felt like time had frozen.

And strangely, my mum behaved almost as though nothing had happened.

We never sat down and had one huge emotional conversation about the past.

We never unpacked everything deeply.

Instead, we were just existing in the present.

And in some ways, I think that was the only way either of us knew how to cope with it.

I remember one moment very clearly.

My mum was speaking to somebody in the car about the situation between us.

Not in detail.

Just briefly.

But one sentence stayed with me.

She said:

“I had to run away from her.”

That sentence hit me harder than she probably realised.

Because for so long, I had only seen the situation through my own pain.

My abandonment.

My heartbreak.

My grief.

But hearing her describe it that way made me realise how frightening my addiction must have become for the people around me too.

Addiction does not just destroy the person drinking.

It exhausts everybody who loves them.

And although part of me still feels sadness when I think about those years we lost, another part of me now understands that my mum was surviving too in the only way she knew how.

Recovery gave me many things back.

But getting my mother back into my life was one of the greatest gifts sobriety has given me.