Episode 4 - The One Where Mom Goes Missing

In this episode we swear a decent amount and give fairly intense descriptions of addiction

and parental neglect, but it's also honest and very real. You can find more information like specific content warnings in the show notes. And by the way, if you have a story of family secrets or darkly funny drama that you want to share, we want to hear it. Email us at [email protected].

Everybody knows what me is brought to you by the devious geniuses who invented the chia pet and that secret joy you feel when someone you hate catches an L. Hey, they had it coming, didn't they? Our show is recorded in front of a live studio audience. All right, in a minute we'll kick off our morning rush hour rush hour rush hour.

We play 60 minutes of uninterrupted pro-grock and clips of Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.

“But first, mom, have you been out here this whole time?”

I was looking for you. We're going to be late. Oh, absolutely not.

I was just making sure the fuel injector sprockets were all aligned.

You passed out in here last night, didn't you? No, nonsense, I am. Oh, maybe it's done. Whatever Keith Richards, you've got enough pharmacy receipts in here to redo the wallpaper in the living room.

Can we get going, please? I don't want to be late. With pleasure. Let me just start. Jesus, mom, you're driving like Stevie Wonder in a sleep mask.

We are at a hurry, aren't we?

“We don't want to be late for your big soccer, math, acting, headshots, acting, headshots.”

Are you feeling okay? Oh, of course. You miss the turn. I'm sorry, I just can't help but be distracted by how excited I am for you, Holly. You're so brave and motivated for a 12 year old.

Thanks, mom. It's just hard with everything going on with dabbing, sake, and your problems, and, you know, that's got this energy that people love. Sometimes I worry I might not have what it takes to live up to that, especially with all his theater and his music experience.

Oh, honey, no, there's room for more than one star in this family. I'm so proud of you, because you have more talent in charisma in your pinky toe than most people have in there. Captain Edward Smith, that thing in the road is looking awful close. Huh?

Captain Who? The guy who crashed the Titanic into the iceberg. Honey, are you okay? I think so. Oh God, it's the cops.

Honey, lady's okay, and man, anyone injured?

Now, we'll never make it to the photographer on time, because we're going to freaking

jail! No, we are making that hair shot. Headshot. A point, mid, no matter what. And man, are you able to exit the vehicle?

Oh, it's awful, officers are awful. My daughter, her big day. She is so much potential, she was going to be the next big thing on the silver screen. But never late, late, late for her headshot a point, mid, or future will be ruined, ruined!

“Oh, okay, so that's why you were driving like Stevie Wonder with a sleep mask on.”

You know I got to arrest you, right? See? Don't you understand my husband has cancer? This poor little girl's daddy is not long for this world, and all she wants to do is become a Hollywood big shot, like her dearly beloved father.

All right, screw it, you want me to help change that tire? Oh, yes, that would be lovely. Oh, my god, mom, you're right. There is more than one brilliant actor in this family. No, honey, I haven't a foggy idea what you mean.

But let's celebrate. Yeah, we are still 35 minutes late for the headshot stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In the sitcoms of my childhood, addictions started and ended with an 1/2 hour block of programming.

could be if you really went down that path.

“And it was always the kid making the mistake that could up end their teen life as they knew”

it. Like Carlton, overdosing on drugs, will had in his locker. I'm sorry, Uncle Phil, sorry, my son could have died because of you. I mean, look, you got to believe me. I didn't mean to hurt him.

Yeah, well, you did. You hurt him, and you could have hurt yourself. Or the era defining Jesse song, where a destined for stardom just formed Bayside girl group is almost taken down by caffeine pills. I'm so excited!

I'm so excited! I'm so, that's scary! Jesse Spano and Will Smith weren't even trying to party. They just wanted to keep up with their schedule, which feels less like a cautionary tale about drugs, and more like an early preview of a system where you work yourself to

the point of burnout just to succeed. Time out!

“Was this a sitcom PSA or a soft launch for the future of capitalism?”

I myself have even been compared to a teen sitcom character who could have gone down a similar path. It came up to me after a show last weekend, and it comes up to me really fucking radical self. And he goes, "Okay, I've got it."

As anyone ever told you, you look like if I Cardi was really into drugs. God forbid a sweet girl get a couple tattoos, or a couple dozen tattoos. But it's rarely, if ever, the parent fighting these kinds of demons. Because that would be too real. That would mean the child is in danger, and maybe shouldn't be in their care.

You'd think, "This sitcom is weird! What do you mean both parents who are once these loving picture-perfect mom and dad types just stopped showing up for their kids completely? Is there any world in which the kid can grow up and be normal if there's no one there to parent?"

But my mom, my beautiful, sweet, smart, caring mom, who came to every back-to-school night, championed my sister's love of piano, laughed along as I pretended to be a professional tap dancer, and encouraged my brothers' love of the outdoors while also managing his more reckless, tree-climbing tendencies. That version of her, the sitcom version, like my dad's version, was starting to fade.

And even though she was never the loudest one in the room, it doesn't mean we didn't

notice. Her unraveling just took shape differently than my dad's. It also feels like it mirrors who they were as people. My dad, the social party one, became an alcoholic. My mom, the more reserved, fly on the wall, quietly numbed out reality with drugs.

When dad was really bad, we did have mom.

“But like the worst periods that we don't remember, we had no one.”

From next chapter podcasts and companion arts, this is everybody knows but me, episode 4. The one where mom goes missing. Right as my mom's addiction really started to show itself, my dad was at its peak. In sitcom terms, my life was like one of those episodes where someone's juggling two

prom dates running back and forth, trying to hold everything together without anyone realizing what's happening. Yeah, exactly like that. See? I am relatable.

As kids, we knew something also wasn't right with mom, but at this point, that was all we knew. So it became this unspoken understanding that we'll just take care of everything ourselves. And when a child's brain is left to figure out things on its own, it doesn't come to the most logical conclusions.

It comes to the ones that feel safest in the moment. It had started a few years earlier, just before my middle school years, as a glazed, distant look in her eyes, and mysterious online packages being delivered every week.

We're talking pre-regulation when you could order basically any prescription drug on the

internet or over the phone, a classic case of technology moving faster than the rules, and it turned into, waking up every day, wondering if she knew what day it was, or if she even cared at all. None of us went to our dad for help at the time, and even scarier option.

once my sister was 13, I was 11, and my brother was 6.

We were left completely, and I mean completely on our own. I would have my friends over, I would have boy sleep over, because like, nobody was telling me, "Shack shit." This was a period in our lives where we had no rules. Uncompletely ungoverned.

No rules. Also, mom was like, "How are we feeding ourselves?"

“I remember eating a lot of expired food.”

Yeah, I have... Craft macaroni and cheese. We had a lot of Hungry Man's a lot of cheese dinners. We basically had lived off the Languazines and Hungry Man. Puzzles?

Puzzles? Puzzles? Oh my God. My super-puzzles? I love super-puzzles.

I love super-puzzles. I love super-puzzles. A visceral, I won't eat wilted lettuce. I won't. If there's...

Really, what do you guys are exactly?

I mean, I figured, but we would, I mean, the milk was always expired, so you

could never drink the milk. Like, you learned that lesson once quick. Yeah. The vegetables were always bad if we had them. Anything that mom did try to cook was undercooked.

So I don't like cookie dough or anything either, because I associate it with somebody who has underbaked something to try to unsafe degree because they're high. Yeah. You remember when the whole pantry got insects? Oh yeah.

Oh my God. Little blind buds. Oh yeah. Everything was like spoiled. Yeah.

But then when everything up, I just remember so many times eating something and being like something was off about this. And then I would look at the box and see that it had been expired for a long time.

“And I was like, well, what else was supposed to eat?”

My dad was the only one working. And unbeknownst to him at the time, my mom was spending all of our money on drugs. And those years when my dad was living separately in his tiny shoebox apartment that would have made mill house van houten's old man proud, everything moved together like a blur. Every day was bad.

And looking back, my nervous system was on overdrive. It was truly too much to process in real time. So we split our lives into school and home. School wasn't on fire. School was normal.

I loved going to school. I remember really being able to go to school and turn it off and then come home and be like, like coming. It's like the knowledge of coming home being like, I hope my parents, I hope she's alive when I come home.

Coming home was not the fun part of the day. Yeah. Totally. At home, my sister would occasionally go to the market with money she found, so we'd have something to eat that was an actively growing fur.

We took care of ourselves and had no structure. No one setting any rules. I remember feeling jealous of my friends when they were grounded because it meant someone was paying attention and cared enough to step in. I watched moms on TV, like Vivian Banks, command respect while gently, emotionally protecting

their children. Those who boys haven't stolen a thing from anyone, this has got to be the biggest amateur operation I've seen since my very own empty.

“And I remember thinking, that's what a mom is supposed to do.”

What am I mom used to do? But now my mom moved through life in slow motion, nodding off at the kitchen table or behind the wheel of a car. Her reflex is dull, words slurring together, stumbling into walls, falling asleep, mid-conversation. Living in this reality turned us into experts, like insanely good at reading the smallest

shifts in her behavior. We could tell how high she was within seconds. Even in public, when she was trying to hold it together, we'd clock it immediately. The eyes, the voice, the tiny physical tells. You don't learn that unless you have to.

I'm sure there are times that she looked a little spacey and there are times where it was like, oh boy. But like, is someone going to do that? I was at my eighth grade graduation, grandmother was there. There were other people around that, like, should have could have noticed what was going

on. And didn't. For whatever reason. So people will make so many rationalizations in their head about how other people are behaving, whereas, like, we would hear her open her mouth and go, mom, would you take

the lips mask? Because she would smack her lips, and then she would dry mouth all the time.

And so she literally could just open her mouth for one second and be like, okay.

You can see the eyes, too. The yellow face. Yeah. But that's what happened here. Graduation.

Yeah. I just wanted to be there for as little time as possible. And I just, I remember, like, I had done my hair and, you know, it was just not a font.

Well, mom, it was two years later at my graduation, my eighth grade graduation on drugs.

And you feel? I remember she, it was waiting, like, wherever you're not, obviously, like, with everybody.

“So I just remember carefully, continuously looking back wondering, like, where's mom?”

Where's mom, is she coming? Is she coming? Because, like, some, grandmother was there, somebody else was there already, and mom was not there. And I was like, I knew why.

Like, she's at home. She's on drugs. Honestly, it's like the visual, too, of, like, seeing

her, like, try to get, like, get her and self in a car and drive and knowing that she's

doing that. And yet, I was still wondering her, still, like, mad that she wasn't there, didn't want her there. Yeah. And then I am, like, looking, looking, looking.

She's not there. I'm just heartbroken.

“I remember being on stage, ready to walk across, and I see her show up.”

And I can tell just by looking at her how high she was. And then just being, like, my heart sank and just being, like, how could, why couldn't you just not do this today? I became really good at compartmentalizing and in a strange way, it mirrored addiction itself. The skill to keep things hidden, to knock it caught, to not have it all come crashing down

and out of your control, control, that word, I just wanted a sense of control. Has a kid with no real trust and adults and no idea how to ask for help. That secrecy just became another part of our attempt to control our reality. But there were some moments we couldn't hide, moments where we had to act. I don't know exactly how many times we called 911, but I know it was more than once.

And it was usually when there was a shake up in our routine, which typically was as follows. Wake up for school, go into her room, check if she was breathing, check for a pulse, and go about her day. And sometimes she wasn't breathing, or her pulse felt too faint. So we'd call the paramedics, wait for them to arrive, and then we'd walk to school and just continue the day, while wondering if at any moment someone was going to pull us out of class

and tell us she was going. If you're wondering how no one stepped in, how the cops didn't intervene, I've asked myself that a thousand times. After talking to my family members, learning more about addiction and observing how that

“can play out in the world, I think it was a mix of things.”

She was a stay at home mom, it started as prescription drugs. Addiction has a way of isolating people before anyone sees how bad things have gotten,

and systems don't always work the way you think they will.

That's also another thing I've learned from TV, white suburban moms get away with a lot. In the 90s, the version of suburban moms we were shown didn't really allow for much beyond mom, but as TV evolved, so did that archetype. It still exists, of course, but suddenly we were seeing another version of white suburban life that existed.

The kind where you could get away with more than others, where no one looked too closely, and were even the worst things imaginable could be happening behind closed doors and still nothing. I can't believe you tried to kill me. Yes, well, I feel badly about that.

Desperate housewives was a masterclassimist. Free crime imaginable on one street. Weeds felt like the flip side of my reality, like, oh, this is what it looks like when the suburban mom is the one dealing the drugs. Child Protective Services already came to our house once after a teacher reported suspected

abuse. I remember being terrified, whether it was fear or instinct or something we learned without realizing it, we told them everything was fine, and they believed us, but you have to remember, or rather, I do, that we were kids, and there were versions of our parents and there we loved deeply.

Even in the worst moments, I still wanted my mom. I still wanted my dad.

It was like a hydro, because you would take the drug, you would try to find them all the time,

you'd find them, you'd put them down the toilet, you'd always down the toilet, which

sorry, water system, but they would be hidden everywhere and you'd uncover them and throw them out and hope that that was a day of not the they were just everywhere.

“Yeah, Matt, what am I, the thing, like a nightmare memory for me, I just remember being”

so upset with her about it was something, the things that caught me the most mad was when she would do something where she'd forget to pick Carson up from school or like those were the things that got me mad, and I just remember being so mad and she was in the back bathroom, and she had a drug bottle in her hand, and I was like, "Mom, if you take that pill, you take it, you don't love us, you are taking it and you are looking me in the face

and saying, I don't love you." And she just, boot, hand-fold, right, and I was sobbing, I was just so engraged, and I just felt so, let alone and let, I just was like, "Okay, she doesn't love us." Like, your kid, you don't understand what addiction is at all, and like these were real consequences in our life, you know, it's hard to untangle the fact like, there's real

things to be mad about, even though the addiction wasn't her choice. When you're a kid, like my sister just pointed out, you don't know that's not how addiction works, it's not a choice, it doesn't mean they don't love you.

I still wish my sister had never felt like she had to question that love.

My therapist would tell me, "I need to let go of the things I can't control, though."

“Something I have an issue with, but in the face of this kind of crisis, the only way you”

have any control over your life, the only way you can take back power is by laughing in the face of everything. In the Osborne House, do you remember all the phone calls we would get? No. Oh my god, we could.

People would call the link, she would order drugs, like over the phone or through the internet, and we would get these people who would call to like, "Selma, more drugs, somehow." All the time, and like, but my memory of it is your friend Hector and engaging them in the internet, like really inappropriate, but pretty funny for us at the time. Because they would call and Hector would just be like, "Oh, you're fat boy."

And like, start, kind of like, "I got her to do this now." Phone sexing with the drug people that were kind of someone drugged. Oh my god. And then like one guy actually started like engaging back, and we were like, "We got hanged this one, we got hanged this one, we got to retire this bit."

“Yeah! Oh my god, I didn't remember that until right now.”

But those really called people that mom bought drugs to you, right? They would call our landline all the time at our house. Oh my god, what a bold move of a drug dealer. Core memories.

I'm always fascinated by how our brains decide what becomes a cornerstone of your life and holds on to forever.

And what it talks away because you need to keep moving forward. This moment somehow got tucked away. And it's wild because my friend completely unknowingly was giving us a way to reshape something that was actually really dark in a sum fucked up sitcom subplots we could laugh at. We did get some regular kids and anagons, or our version of them. Like my friends and I having Ouija board nights trying to speak to the dead.

Or swapping out our neighbors' lawn to core with other houses, hoping to start a few suburban neighborhood feuds. Meanwhile, my sister and I, two teenage girls who could technically do whatever we wanted. We're taking our mom's car before my sister had a driver's license, or even knew how to make a left turn for drugs. No, thanks, drinking, how on our original, no, to get food or see a movie, once we knew she was passed out for the night. Let's be real.

We were teens doing the least concerning things in that house. At that point, my dad had been out of the house for a few years, trying to overcome his own addiction, followed by being diagnosed with terminal cancer, and grappling with his secret twins at my siblings and I knew nothing about. Can you believe that's a sentence?

I've spent a long time trying to understand why he didn't do more, holding onto that resentment.

How did he not see what was going on? But I also didn't know the cacophony of emotions he must have been dealing with. Or how his brain was probably trying to triage everything at once, the guilt, grief, anger, hopelessness, like minded. Not that that excuses anything, but this was a lot for everyone. He did show up for one particular moment.

The time my mom went missing.

“Oh, I bet you thought the title of this episode was a metaphor for losing yourself to addiction, huh?”

I mean, it is. But when has this story ever been that subtle? I was with Skyler and Hector. Mom was supposed to pick us up from Universal Studios, because we had gone to see as an eighth grade, and we had gone to see my boyfriend at the time's band play a little show.

And Mom was supposed to pick us up, and it's 10 p.m. no mom. No, we have our shitty flip phones or something, no word for mom. It's 11 p.m. no word for mom. But I just don't know if you're like knowing in my gut, like, like, standing there trying to save face to your friends when you're like, did my mom just like crash her car and die?

Because she's on drugs, and she never showed up, and I think it got like past midnight,

and we're 13, 14, standing on the fucking sidewalk of Universal Studios City Walk.

“I think it was like 1 a.m. and I remember Skyler's mom called a taxi first, and I come home and”

mom's not home. And like, oh my God. Yeah, I remember spending all night, all that night, like, worried and trying to figure it out. Because we actually had to, wasn't the phone wasn't on? No. Like, we had no way to contact her. And I don't know if Dad was, I don't really call Dad maybe, then.

Yeah, because I remember Dad coming over, eventually, and calling the police to file a police report. Yeah, and we found a police report. I think she's gone for, like, two days, two or three days. And they found her, like, barefoot. I remember then that they found her at the bottom of the hill of Studio City or Universal Studios. One of the gas stations near the, like, that hill that goes up to

Universal Studios, that they found her, like, barefoot and, like, slumped outside of her car.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I remember. Yeah, yeah, and, like, she's so, like, she's arrived.”

Yeah, yeah, like, that's crazy. Yeah. My mom went to her first rehab after that, paid for by my aunt Cecilia. I was about to start high school, and my home life was hanging on by a thread. You'd think reporting your own mom missing would be the kind of thing that forces a reset. The very special episode where everything slows down, and someone finally learns a lesson.

But no, while there were always stretches of sobriety with my mom's addiction,

life loved to prove things could get worse. And two years later, they did. At this point, my dad couldn't work steadily because of his illness, and my mom couldn't hold down a job either. It felt like her addiction had already taken a parent from us, and a sense of safety. And now it was taking one of the last things that made my life feel even remotely like a normal TV family, our house.

Who was I to assume we get to live in a big house with a TV room and a backyard with a pool and a slide. The full sitcom set up. Frank Grimes was right. Not everyone gets to be Homer Simpson. Would you like to see my Grammy award? No, I wouldn't. So we went into foreclosure. And I have to be honest with you. I didn't really know what a foreclosure was at the time. I knew it meant we didn't have enough money. I knew it was bad because it felt bad.

But I didn't realize until recently how much I had avoided actually understanding it. I didn't want to know how long we'd actually gone without paying the mortgage or that the process of moving our entire life out was probably as fast as a few days. But it felt fast. Like there wasn't enough time to grab everything. I remember we left the house in shambles, trash everywhere. We left things we loved behind, too. Close, books, beany babies. Things at

what life felt like inside it. And we weren't allowed to go back. Not even the next day.

There's something disorienting about understanding a memory years later. It can fill in the blanks you know you need, but it can drop you right back in it, feeling it all over again. After this series of lows, my aunt Cecilia started to come around

“more. The fact is the house got foreclosed on, because I remember going over there with Carson”

after the foreclosure. We climbed over the fence. Yeah, we went swimming. We dug up very

bushes. And he just sat on the side of the pool and cried because he loved that house and he won it. He said, I just went to the house back and I went my family back the way it was. Oh my God. Yeah. And then I have to look at you guys for a while, knowing I know there's twins in the picture. As Cecilia, I can't even, and I found them. Like the worst, like I'm betraying

you. And, oh gosh. But back then, I did not know how much crazier things could get.

“My dad would get even sicker. A secret would take shape. And my own version of rock bottom was still a”

head of me. I'm a song a man will sell them right. I'm a celebration of life. And I know I'll live for you to come. Everybody knows but me is a production of companion arts and next chapter podcasts. This episode was written by me, Holly Brown. The cold open scene you heard at the beginning of the episode is a fictionalized version of

“very real moments from my life, scripted by our lead producer, editor, music supervisor, and sound”

designer, Pete Musto. It featured Valerie Tossie playing my mom, Casey Rose as me, Max Wolfson as the radio DJ, Andrew Hall as the police officer, and Pete Musto as our show's announcer. Sound design for that scene was by Earl Davis. Our associate producer is Alanna Neffins, original theme music by Kyle Murdock. Our show artwork was created by Aaron Hill. Our video producer is Emily Reeves. Our videographer is Dalton Polivka. Our animator is Justin Cortese.

Our marketing team is Tink Media. And our executive producers are Jeremiah Tittle and also me, Holly Brown. New episodes of Everybody Know's But Me come out every Wednesday. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, youtube.com/everybodyknowspodcast or wherever you get great content like ours. Do you have a story of family secrets or darkly funny drama that you want to share? We want to hear it. Email us at [email protected] and make sure you

leave us a rating review or drop a comment telling us what you like about the show. Follow me at Holly Brown comedy and the show on all social media at Everybody Knows But Me. And come back next week to find out what crazy hijinks the Brown family is in for and hear more of the stories we tell ourselves to survive. Next chapter podcast.