3 AM. A bowl of fresh strawberries sits atop a kitchen counter…fresh, bright strawberries; those impossibly sweet ones from the farmer’s market. Glaring down on them, a mother, sleepless and fitful, awaits a bitter-sweet relief when her little girl (or, not so little anymore) finally comes home. Meanwhile, hours away, Lizzy T.’s abusive boyfriend has been ferociously attacking her with nasty words, vicious name-calling, before throwing her out of the car, speeding off, and leaving her stranded—alone, in the dark, at the top of Coldwater Canyon. So, Lizzy walks. She walks all the way home.
Finally, home. Mother and child regard each other…mother picks up a strawberry and looks to her daughter. “You’re like this sweet, sweet strawberry,’’ she says, breaking, holding, until she closes her fist and crushes it to pulp. “That’s what he does to you. He takes everything soft and sweet and good in you, and he crushes it.’’
In this moment, something changes for Lizzy. Something ruptures. Exhausted, heartbroken, she sees herself perhaps for the very first time. She doesn’t see something, difficult to love, or too damaged to save; she sees a young woman being sapped, psychically milked by the very instruments she once knew so well to offer relief.
Once upon a time, she knew herself mostly by what she could offer to other people. That little girl was a rescuer, a caretaker, seeing that everyone else was ok. She cared for people, mothered her friends, and made herself useful. If she could not be admired, she could be needed. But what about Liz? Who was she? What was she then, and how did she get here? Today, Lizzy introduces herself plainly as a woman, a mother, and an addict in recovery. At 40 years old, she is doing something she’s never done before: discovering who she is.
Lizzy’s childhood may have seemed to shimmer outwardly to some, but in reality, it operated mostly within contradiction and emotional flatlining. Moving from a WeHo apartment to a house in Beverly Hills in the 2nd grade was a culture shock. She accounts for her parents being “emotionally divorced’’ for most of her memory, despite their staying married for twenty years. The house hosted combat, tension, and division. Lizzy was caught between an apparently thoughtful, emotionally inquisitive mother and a loud, blunt, temperamental father. A shift from early attachment to mom then later alignment with dad was partly spurred by rebellion, partly by pain. Lizzy resented being placed in therapy at such a young age. Her mother’s “efforts” felt intrusive and embarrassing. She and Dad bonded by dismissing to the point of ridicule what her mother represented. Although she would come to understand her mother differently in the years to come, teenage Lizzy chose distance.
She chose further freedom still at 14, when her parents divorced, by staying with her dad. She had learned that home was something to navigate, and social life outside offered its share of unsettling lessons as well. Her struggle with weight throughout adolescence shaped Lizzy deeply, inside and out. Becoming painfully aware at a young age that affection can become conditional, she began to notice that she was treated quite differently depending on how she looked. This particular lesson, this learned awareness, was the dawn of a deep sensitivity and profound discomfort in her own skin.
Drug use as early as her teens offered a highly effective solution. She was drawn to the relief—the promise of weight loss and momentary euphoria. Adderall escalated to meth and meth escalated to heroin. She describes these as her first real experiences of “an easier, softer way.” By these newfound means, she could be thinner, more confident, and socially acceptable, perhaps even wanted. These substances were the first tools that seemed to seriously work in a years-long search for a shortcut, a magical fix that would make Lizzy feel okay.
By 17, she had already seen juvenile hall and her first treatment center—shortly after she moved out of her father’s house to be with her gang-affiliated boyfriend. The volatile, obsessive hallmarks of the drug-entangled relationship encrypted a pattern that would come to define much of the next two decades of addiction, dangerous dependency, and self-erasure…but one steadfast desire remained intact through the tumult of cycles of treatment and relapse, abusive relationships, periods of stability…through moments of clarity and long stretches of collapse. Even as she worked as a drug addiction counselor during a brief stint of sobriety, she ultimately relapsed and disappeared into a 14-year bender. Through it all, a lingering essence prevailed. One sure yearning shone through a dark life narrowing around men, drugs, and escape. What remained, what prevailed, what shone through bright, was a part of Liz in her deepest becoming: motherhood.
Liz became pregnant more than once. Her story as a bearer of children sometimes ended in loss and unimaginable grief. Once, it did not. She wanted sobriety when she became pregnant with her son. She wanted a different life. Six months pregnant, frightened and somewhat ambivalent, Liz “white-knuckled’’ her way through treatment yet again.
“All I ever wanted was to be a mother.” Therein lies the most enduring verity of Liz’s story, but it is also the bastion of some of her deepest pain. The challenges of her addiction kept her from being the mother she knew she could be. Recovery has positioned her to face this honestly. “It’s hard to admit that by not being present for him, I didn’t [learn how to] do all the things I was supposed to do.” What is one to do? Find hope. The pressure to perform well and accurately weighed greatly, but she found something that would alter her trajectory profoundly, a place where people are empowered to execute not performance, but practice. She found Beit T’Shuvah.
Raw, emotionally wrecked, and just released from jail, Liz walked up the steps to Beit T’Shuvah. She could hardly sleep or keep from crying. When she closed her eyes at night, she still saw the concrete slab above her jail bunk, with tally marks etched into it by the woman who slept there before her. At Beit T’Shuvah, a softer pillow held her head, and a provocative force intercepted a familiar routine—a plan to do what she’d always done, finish 90 days and leave. Something here was different; here she found something unexpected, or something found her: safety in community. “The community here feels safe. Every time I’ve had a hard day, someone notices. Every. Time.”
Sit down with Liz, and you’ll feel a warm, nurturing softness. Even in isolation and avoidance, Liz’s instincts are clear. Motherhood, devotion, and her essential, effortless brand of love endures through pain, abuse, and addiction, and at Beit T’Shuvah, she is seen not for what she can carry for others, but for who she actually is. Genuine visibility has changed something in her.
For the first time, Liz is beginning to believe she has value beyond what she can provide. She is beginning to trust that she can be part of something—that she can stay—that she can be depended on—that she can build a life rooted not in survival, but in presence. And her desires now are not abstract. She wants to take her son to school and pick him up. She wants to be there for the ordinary moments, the lunchboxes, the school forms, the daily decisions. She wants to give her parents peace. She wants to learn how to care for herself with the same tenderness she has always extended to everyone else. She wants to become the mother she always meant to be.
Recovery for Liz is not becoming someone new, but returning to something true. Returning to a self not pulverized, only buried. Here, a powerful and compassionate woman, soft enough to be hurt, and therefore still very much alive enough to heal.
“If you feel like no one cares about you, it’s not true. If you feel like this is just how life is supposed to be, it’s not true. It really can be different. You have to put the work in.”