My mom once gave six hundred dollars to a woman crying outside of a United Way so she could pay her rent and avoid becoming homeless. My mom didn’t have six hundred dollars to spare. She rarely had any money at all. For my big events — graduations, my 21st birthday — she’d write me IOUs that I’d save forever, never cash in.

She could entertain a crowd all night with her legendary stories. The time she was trying to enchant a date at a party without realizing her fake front tooth was glowing green in the blacklight. The time she forgot the word for “log” and called it “rolled wood.” The time she was running late to an important dinner and put her makeup on in the car, accidentally using black eyeliner to line her lips. “Everyone screamed with laughter,” she’d say, beaming.

My mom was generous, full of love, and hysterically funny.

I felt like the only person in the world who didn’t worship her. When I was a kid, I noticed my friends’ moms seemed to have control over life in ways mine didn’t. Those kids weren’t late to school every day, they brought packed lunches, they always had their homework signed. Their moms picked them up from school on time. I didn’t have the tools to explain why, but my house felt different. Wine was part of our life, but I didn’t yet connect alcohol with its ripple effects. At that age, all I wanted was to be like other kids.

It wasn’t until high school that I sensed what was happening was more than forgetfulness. My mom called me once when I was out with my friends, sobbing and upset because I hadn’t fed the dog. She’s crazy, I remember thinking at 16. If I got home late, I’d find her asleep on the couch and not be able to wake her up. In the mornings, it was me who woke her to drive me to school. Something was happening with her job that I could tell she wasn’t honest with me about. I began to pull away from her, lonely in my observations, and angry that she hadn’t met my expectations of what a mother should be. Into my twenties and thirties, my frustration grew at the same rate of her decline. The more she drank, the less she slept and ate and functioned, and the angrier I got, until there was no coming back from it.

But I never discussed my anger, or her drinking, directly with her. My mom always wanted us to be like the Gilmore Girls — best friends, soulmates, more like sisters than mother and daughter. She used to join me when I’d watch the show and comment, “I always thought we’d be like this,” and I’d say nothing. I convinced myself I was doing her a favor by letting her believe we were close. If I protected her happiness as best I could, maybe she’d want to be healthy.

Instead, I would talk to her about going to West Elm to look at a rug. I’d text her suggestions for 90-minute romantic comedies on Netflix. I pretended that wine wasn’t the wedge between us until the day a doctor with blue eyes above his mask told me my mom needed surgery to live, but she wouldn’t survive surgery because of the condition of her liver.

“What do you mean, the condition of her liver?” I asked.

“Advanced cirrhosis,” he said. “She would need a liver transplant, which she wouldn’t qualify for.”

The reason I’d resented my mom for 20 years was valid, it turned out. She’d been drinking herself to death. But being right had never felt worse.

Because now it was too late. I’d wasted a lifetime not saying what this doctor had said in 30 seconds. My mom was going to die that day and I’d never done a thing to stop it. In convincing myself I was protecting her, I was protecting myself from facing what was too hard to say out loud.

Only once did my mom and I approach the unspeakable subject of alcohol. I’d been trying to get pregnant for nearly five years. After every disappointing treatment cycle, she’d push me to try again, wanting me to have a baby so badly. Hardened by my anger, I’d wonder: why did she care? She couldn’t be a grandmother in the way I imagined a grandmother, like mine had been, someone who marched with me in the Fourth of July parade and hugged me so tightly it hurt. By that point, my mom slept most of the day. She didn’t have the strength to hold a baby.

She must have seen it on my face that time. “You know I’d never drink wine around your baby,” she said, out of nowhere.

“Okay,” I said. “That’s good.”

That was the most honest conversation we’d ever had and all I could come up with was, “Okay. That’s good.”

In her hospital room, I studied the line in her earlobes from decades of heavy earrings. I studied the lingering red polish on her toenails. Though I hated to be confronted with physical evidence of her illness, I memorized her body, knowing it was the last time I’d see her. I wanted to say something that would help her die happy, but at that moment, even with a lifetime between us, a lifetime of green breakfasts on St. Patrick’s Day and tomato soup when I was sick, all I could think was: how could you let it get this bad? How could you leave me here? How is that love? I was 34. I still had so much of my life ahead of me, and she wouldn’t be here to see it. It felt like given the choice between me and wine, she’d chosen wine.

I wanted to believe I wouldn’t inflict that pain on my child, if I ever had one.

“You were a good mom,” I said, and kissed her hand. “Thank you for everything.”

Six weeks later, I learned I was pregnant.

Before she died, I’d begun the lengthy process of a frozen embryo transfer. During the dark weeks that followed, I kept up with the shots, the doctor’s visits, crying into my mask as the doctor measured the thickness of my lining. My grief was so physical I doubted the transfer would work. When my doctor gave me the surprising and beautiful news, I called everyone in my life — my aunts, my dad, my friends. But I couldn’t call the one person who deserved to know she’d been right. I did need to keep trying. The loss of her felt like a hole I could not fill with anyone else.

All my life, at hello and goodbye and often in between, my mom would kiss me all over my face. Dozens of kisses in a row, smothering my cheeks, my hair, my neck, leaving smudges of red lipstick on my skin. She’d hug me and hum in my ear, mmmph, like I was something delicious. I can still hear it. Mmmph.

My daughter is now two. At good morning and good night, and all day in between, I kiss her all over her face. Dozens of kisses, smothering her. Her puffy cheeks, her warm neck, her soft curls. Sometimes I leave behind lipstick. Mmmph, I hum as I squeeze her. I feel my mom as I say it.

My mom and I will never know each other both as mothers, but now that I am one, I understand her better. She wanted me to have a baby so badly not because she wanted a grandchild, but because she didn’t want me to miss out on the joy she’d experienced having me. She kissed me all over my face because she could not believe I existed. She kissed me because she could not help herself. She kissed me because there is no better feeling in the world than telling your child you love her. If my mom could not tell me the truth about some things, I am thankful she told me that.

I can’t change the fact that my mom and I never had an honest conversation about alcohol. For the rest of my life, I will feel angry with both of us for lying to ourselves and to each other. I will wonder whether honesty could have saved her. All I can do now is appreciate that her drinking was separate from her love for me. One could not erase the other. If my mom made any choice at all, it was withholding her truth to protect me from what she could not change.

“I’m in heaven,” she used to say, sitting with a glass of wine in her blue chair, with an Arizona monsoon outside, kitchen door open, gas fireplace burning. Beaming. “I’m in heaven.”

I have never felt closer to my mom than I do now. I’m in heaven, too, only I’m alive. Every night, I put my daughter to sleep in her nursery. She hugs me in the dark as I kiss her marshmallow cheek.

“I love you,” I tell her with a kiss. “I love you.” Kiss. “I love you.”

With every kiss, I am at the side of my mom’s hospital bed. I am telling her: we cannot go back, but I am casting your love forward, mother to mother to daughter.

Taylor Hahn is a writer and lawyer based in Los Angeles. She is the author of A Home for the Holidays and https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/678953/the-lifestyle-by-taylor-hahn/” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>The Lifestyle.

P.S. Three women describe their complicated mother/daughter relationships, and “I kept wondering: do I drink too much?”

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