Courtney Ruttenbur Bulsiewicz

Truth or Dare

When my middle-school friends and I dared each other, it would usually happen in the kitchen, challenging each other to eat things like a tablespoon of mayonnaise; raw coffee grounds; a spoonful of cinnamon; or a concoction of mismatch ingredients like potato chips, peanut butter, and mustard. Once we saw what we had to eat, we usually decided it would be better to spill our guts over a question: Do you have a crush on anyone in this room? What’s your most embarrassing moment? What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? There was always a lot of cringing, and a lot of laughter.

We were making something like orange juice, soy sauce, and pepper, when my mom slogged in, drowsy; she had been asleep for a while, but not even noticing the group of teenagers in her kitchen, she grabbed a can of cat food that was sitting on the counter, dug around the drawer below it for the can opener, spooned it into a bowl, and started eating. My friends chuckled a bit, but I was frozen. I called to her several times. She only came to when I touched her arm to stop the next bite. I walked her to her bedroom and pushed back my tears. When I returned to my friends, they said things like Oh my gosh, and What just happened, and there was a bit of silence while I tried to come up with a response. I knew exactly what happened. It wasn’t my mother who ate cat food as if it were pudding. It was a host of Ambien and opioids and liquor: a version of my mother I saw a lot during this time of our lives.

My mom was naturally a sweet, graceful woman with a loud kind voice and soft hands that never told her age and that traced my face at night to calm my fears. But the medicines that filled my mother’s body removed her from it. She wasn’t aware of who medicine and alcohol had made her. And if someone asked me a truth about my mom during that time, I would tell them there were nights she begged for a back rub to ease her pain—pain that prescriptions were supposed to suffocate, pain that no pills or glass bottles seemed to touch. She would lay belly-down in her bed, her T.V. blaring. I would sit on her butt and rub her back as hard and as long as I could, trying to push and pray away her ache, but never succeeding. Whatever concoction she had given herself would move through her and she’d start groaning, hollering, and kicking, not realizing I bore the brunt of her restless legs as her feet kept hitting my back. I learned to move out of the way.

Eventually, my mother’s doctors gave her an ultimatum: stop mixing drink with drugs or die. I thought her choice was so easy. Truth: keep up this lifestyle and kill yourself, or Dare: give up the addiction and live. I begged her to stop. I didn’t understand, didn’t realize that both choices would feel like death. I didn’t understand that her body would have to go through withdrawals, would have to learn to feel pain differently. This was nothing like the simple game I played, choosing between streaking or confiding my biggest fear, which was definitely losing my mother. There was so much more at stake. I think that’s why, for a while longer, she pushed the pain clinic for more pills and continued to buy vodka for her Coke.

When she eventually stopped the opioids, just like she knew would happen, the withdrawals hit and everything went pear-shaped. Her aches were worse than ever. She shook and cried all the time. I wondered if she made the right choice, if I had been wrong to wish so hard for it. If she would be able to pull through. If it would last. Because what I did understand from playing truth or dare with my friends is that even when we choose to spill our guts, sometimes we don’t tell the truth.

Courtney Ruttenbur Bulsiewicz’s essays and reviews have been published in Cutbank, Brevity, The Tusculum Review, and elsewhere. She lives in the Mountain West with her husband and two sons. Her favorite sweet treat is the classic warm chocolate chip cookie.