Her adult daughter came to me and though she said she wasn't begging for me to keep her mother's weekly visits, she was begging for me to keep her mother's weekly visits. She said that she was afraid her mother would "disappear" for five days again, which really means, go get high or drunk or some combination of both. She was fearful for her mother's life. She said that the visits made her mother happy and she didn't want that to stop. She said that if we took the visits away, her mother would stop trying.
I tried to explain that we really couldn't do anything with mom until she got sober, but it wasn't sinking in. And just the sight of this daughter, as injured and hurt as she was from her mother's past, and how she herself was injured by her mother's lack of sobriety, and yet fighting for her mother, broke my heart. No matter what our parents do to us or not do for us, we are loyal to what we think they are capable of. This young woman loved her mother. She may have loved her two year old half sister as well, but not enough to put her needs ahead of her mother's.
And no matter how much I try to explain that I have to keep the 2 year old safe because she cannot protect herself, the older daughter didn't get it. And if I put myself in her shoes, I see her point. Because we all want our parents to be what we need, even if they are not even in the neighborhood.
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