I Opened My Eyes to My Mom’s Gambling Addiction

She lost everything, then she lost some of mine too

My apartment was a happy place when I was twenty-one. I’d just moved in with my girlfriend, and life was grand. Our little apartment was near the river, and trees surrounded our place. The handyman for the apartments was our biggest problem.

A quiet married forty-something, he put ladders outside our bedrooms and was a horrible peeping tom. He had a face like an owl, with a beard, mustache, and brown inquisitive eyes. He never set up his ladder outside the living room. Exclusively bedrooms. We were constantly watching out for that guy.

Other than that, life was somewhat normal. Kelli and I worked during the week, and drank to excess on the weekends, occasionally passing out here and there around the gazebo at the apartment, which we considered ours.

When Mom called and announced she was taking me to Reno to celebrate my birthday, I reluctantly decided to be excited. Saying no to my mom was never really an option. After my brother died, I felt obligated to say yes to whatever she asked of me. I tried so hard to make her happy.

So…Reno!

I was going someplace with lights, excitement, and gambling. I was an adult now. Adults drank, smoked and gambled, and I was pretty good already at the first two.

While I hated leaving Kelli on her own, it would only be a week.

And besides, Mom wanted to take me someplace. Just us! She still had the ‘marriage’ credit card, as she and Dad weren’t all the way divorced.

I felt somewhat suspicious of the invitation to Reno. As a forty-something, Mom was always up to something. Some new flirtation, or hosting an overnight guest at her apartment in town when I was there, which felt awkward.

Unseen motivations. Unconfessed desires. That was my mom. I was young and thought I knew what she was planning most of the time, but I had much to learn. Mom was a complicated lady.

But this time, she wanted to do something special for me. For me! As the middle child, I was the “junk in the trunk.” The one who didn’t need attention.

No one could compete, in Mom’s eyes, with my brother (who had died). My sister, owing to her emotional issues, required special treatment or she acted crazy. Screaming, crying, driving erratically. I was Mom’s little helper and careprovider, attending her whims. Now she had an idea and wanted to ‘treat’ me.

She said, “It’s your twenty-first birthday! This is a wonderful way to celebrate! Can you take a week off?”

Maybe it would be fun.

The Reno trip was smack dab between my brother’s death in 1979 and my dad’s horrible car accident of 1982, in which he nearly died. While I grieved nonstop in 1980 and 1981, things were calmish.

It was an odd lull in shit-hitting-the-fan for me personally. I never trusted these quiet times and felt they were the calm before the storm. For perhaps a year, I’d been tense. Now I was settling in to this peace, reflecting back and thinking maybe, just maybe, the chaos was over.

• I wasn’t sixteen, hiding in my bedroom without a lock, listening to my parents argue and slam around the house.
• And fortunately, I wasn’t nineteen, lying on the patch of grass my brother died on, sobbing into the dirt until it was cold and dark outside. Cars driving by slowed down. People in town would say, “I saw you. Are you okay?” No, I wasn’t okay.
• Neither was I twenty and dating Patrick, the ruthless and cold-hearted abuser who held me upside down and spanked me hard, because he could. I was in such bad emotional pain I didn’t care at first, then I found myself furious and cut ties fast.

I was freshly twenty-one, in a secret relationship with my girlfriend who was smart, funny and gorgeous. I had a fantastic job and was earning great money with the state of Oregon. We had a cat, and read the Sunday newspaper together. It was not quite two years since my brother’s death, but I was learning to be happy again.

Ironically, I worked in an Occupational Therapy setting, and the macrame and weaving, which I assisted with, was calming me tremendously too.

It was with all this stability going on that I decided to go to Reno with Mom. It wasn’t for me, It was for her.

We arrived in Reno, Mom and I. It was a long drive, and Mom gassed up often as we were in Dad’s farm truck. Dad loaned her the truck because her car was in the shop, so her move was to drive it from the farm down to arid, hot Reno. The truck limped its way there and looked out of place in the hotel parking lot. Dad would shake his head at this, but Mom’s crazy-town antics no longer surprised any of us.

I went along for the ride, and thought I was protecting her. I never really could. South we went, through California and then cutting east to Nevada — to Reno, the ‘biggest little city in the world,’ its sign said.

The night we arrived, we went to bed, exhausted. I woke at 1 a.m. and Mom wasn’t there. I worried. Where could she be? I found the room key, and dressed fast. I’d find her. Was she okay?

I found her sitting in the hotel lobby, gambling on one lonely slot machine.

“Mom?” I said.

“Oh, hi, honey. I couldn’t sleep.”

Mom didn’t sleep much for several days.

For the next week, we moved from casino to casino, and typically she found her chair and I found mine. We plugged quarters into the machines. As it turns out, I’m not at all into gambling. I was babysitting Mom, who went glassy-eyed, smoking as she gambled. Staring. Talking to the machine! I was bored.

And all this money? Who could afford to throw hundreds of dollars away like this?

I didn’t understand plugging so much into slot machines.

Mom flitted here and there. It was time for special sandwiches, and we ate well. Then, it was back to the machines. After the first day, I was looking for a phone to call Kelli. I wasn’t used to being inside, around artificial lighting, machines dinging nonstop, and my mother had become oddly uncommunicative — staring at the machine, smoking and drinking, encouraging me to ‘keep going.’

When once every three hours, one of us won money, the machine would ding and flash and change would pour out. Mom didn’t run to my machine. She needed to stay at hers!

If not, someone else would ‘take it.’

I was bored and wanted nothing more than a swim, a walk in the woods, or a cigarette under the stars somewhere.

Years later, long after my parents finally divorced, I was visiting Kelli in a downtown Portland apartment. I was home from overseas, and to make my parents proud, had shared that my husband and I were doing quite well financially.

That week, Mom called me, desperate. She wanted to know if she could borrow $2,000.00.

I suspected she was driving to the coast to gamble. Way too much water had passed under our mother-daughter bridge for me not to know.

In spite of this, I met her out on the street and gave her my credit card, and permission to get a cash advancement on it.

She had begged, standing in the rain that night, a cold November. She was dressed beautifully, as always. I was a thirty-something money-maker, in a leather jacket with long hair — and a credit card she needed.

She was in her mid 50s then, and wasn’t there to visit me. She needed money, as she had a financial issue and she needed to resolve it immediately. So she said. The wolves were at the door.

I would live with the consequences of that night for the next five years as she paid the card off.

Later I found out she went to the coast and gambled to try to win back her half of my parents’ beautiful farm property. She’d taken her share of the divorce proceedings and gambled it all away. She lost everything. The final 2,000.00 from my credit card was a desperate final attempt to win it back.

Some years earlier, she came to visit me in Eugene, where I drove her around in the countryside.

I showed her a hiking trail just out of town, and asked if she’d like to take a short walk with me under the oak trees. Her quick refusal and look of utter boredom made me realize how different we were.

That night, Mom and I slept on my futon in the tiny house I rented as I went to university. I heard her little breaths and her coughs — years of smoking had given her COPD. Yet here she was, my mom, in my little ramshackle house set in the nature of rural Oregon. I loved her, and she was making an effort.

I fell asleep listening to her breathe as I had that night in Reno, with a sense that I might wake up and find her gone.

Thank you for reading.