'After I overdosed in Japan, my mum met me at the airport. She was swigging gin.'

The following is an excerpt from On the Way to Wonderland by Alice Crawley, a book about her journey from financially f*cked to freedom.

It was 1996 and I had returned to Canada right after my epic overdose in Japan. My mother greeted me at Toronto Pearson airport in the back of a limousine, swigging back a 26-ounce bottle of Gordon’s London Dry Gin. My hypervigilant antennae were always on high alert around my mother, and I quickly noted that the bottle was already half empty and it was only 4pm. I was in mild shock while also bordering on wanting to crack up with laughter at the absurdity of the situation.

The first words out of her mouth stung like a poisonous dart: “It would have been a lot cheaper if we just shipped you back in a body bag.” Not exactly the warm and welcoming embrace I’d hoped for after a near fatal overdose in a foreign country. Good fodder for my next therapy session, I thought, or another story for my book – I had been banking those from around the age of seven. I was no stranger to her sadistic sense of humour – she might as well have said, “Off with her head!”

Let’s face it, I was well committed to getting off my head. I’m sitting there thinking, FFS, this is serious, Mother. But this was the only way she knew how to communicate what I knew to be one of her greatest fears – through her drunken and sardonic humour. Mom had a golden rule, which she reminded us of at least weekly; none of her children were allowed to die before her because she couldn’t live with the guilt. This always felt a bit heavy over Sunday spaghetti night, but she was never one for light conversation.

I always sensed that buried below decades of delusion, she knew our family was deeply dysfunctional. She would have had some acceptance, surely, that I didn’t overdose in Japan because I was sick of eating fish and rice every day. It may have contributed, but only slightly. She got it. Nothing needed to be said. Nothing could be said.

As we rode home in silence, I stared out the window. I felt numb as I reflected on all that had happened over the past few months leading up to my overdose. This was the end of one of the most interesting and complex eras of my life up to that point. Now, I was back in the lion’s den and had already been exposed to the first ferocious bite, in the back of this Lincoln limo, which, it must be noted, had awesomely comfortable leather seats. My Mom may have been a nightmare at times, but she still had a lot of class. 

I had to accept that coming back to Canada to get therapy in English was the safest option for me to get well. In the mid-1990s the full wave of native English speakers hadn’t flooded Japan yet. English- speaking therapists were hard to come by and fumbling over a dictionary to find the words for ‘emotionally f**ked’ wasn’t going to cut it. I also knew that I had to face straight into what needed to be healed. Living in Japan was an amazing experience and a fantastic distraction for a few years, even if it did feel like being in outer space at times. It’s not surprising that it was the catalyst for one of my major breakdowns.

One of the great things I learned about being forced to go back to Toronto is that we must face our past in order to heal it. I had to acknowledge my past before I could offer it up for healing. This has been critical to the rebuilding of my own self-worth.

We don’t want to be defined by or limited by our past, yet there is incredible learning, empathy and awareness to be gained from appreciating our roots and where we’ve come from to catapult us into better versions of ourselves. Yes, we need to let go of our past but first we need to face it. We can’t let go until we engage with it. That doesn’t necessarily mean extensive sessions of psychotherapy. Granted, I did go through that process, but it’s not for everybody. I likely funded a few fancy properties for the therapists along the way, but it was money well spent, despite it being an expensive way to go. Sometimes it is as simple as taking a look at where you’ve come from so you know what you’re dealing with.

The irony for me was that this woman, sitting wasted next to me in the back of the limo and who had installed and triggered so much pain in me over the years, was also the woman who taught me to see the funny side of life. She was also the one who I inherited my warrior spirt from. She was the strongest woman I knew in my early life, tough as nails. She could always make light of an intensely heavy situation.

Before my time, she had left a deeply unhappy marriage to her first husband in the middle of the night during a snowstorm in the middle of f**king nowhere Kenora, Canada. She came back 10 minutes later. He said to her smugly, “I knew you’d come back,” to which she briskly retorted, “I forgot my cigarettes!” She grabbed her ciggies and then stormed off into the night, never to return. It’s not hilarious that she abandoned my older sister that night too, but even my sister agrees everyone was better off in the end and, you have to admit, it’s a classic exit. 

Maiden of the Martini 

While I considered my Mom ‘The Red Queen’ for many years, after much therapy, healing and letting go, I lovingly started to refer to her as the ‘Maiden of the Martini’ because no one rocked a martini like my mother. 

“Never kill yourself at night, darling,” I remember Mom saying to me at the dinner table after her third martini, “always sleep on it to see what happens the next day. Even if it’s only curiosity that gets you through.” I was seven at the time. Once again, a little intense on a Tuesday night over shepherd’s pie, but my mother was one for stern words of wisdom, especially after her third martini. She danced with her demons, too. 

My mother was born Lesley Anne Cook in 1932 in a little town called Capel Curig, in North Wales. Her parents wanted a boy and having settled on the name Leslie, which at the time was a distinctly male name in the UK, decided not to change their choice of name just because a girl arrived. It was always difficult for her to shake the sense that she would have been more appreciated by her family if she had been born a boy. This belief that she, and my sister and I, were somehow tagged as inferior because we were female, was a bitter undercurrent that affected the self-worth of the women in our family deeply. I was conflicted about this for some time because, although my mother’s projected self-hatred was the source of great suffering, I was also clear that she had inherited it from her parents. 

I don’t know that she even wanted to be a woman. She resented the gender-stereotyped expectations put on her and was always saying after several martinis that she was born in the wrong generation. She was the alpha of the house and ruled her kingdom with fierce intelligence and a ferocious sense of humour. 

Society expected her to be a teacher or a nurse for a short period of time and then she was barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. She deeply resented this, but it was part of the deal with my Dad. Kids were a non-negotiable for him. Raised in foster homes in the UK in the 1940s, having lost both his parents at an early age, he was determined to raise his own family. Mom wanted to seal the deal but always felt ambivalent about having kids, and that came through loud and clear. 

She had some seriously skewed but heart-warming philosophies, such as Three Martini Decisions. She believed her best life-changing epiphanies came after her third bone-dry martini of the night. She’d pour a couple of straight shots of gin in a glass, clink the vermouth bottle against the glass and say, “and a kiss of vermouth.” So yes, what I’m saying is that my mother made her most important decisions after six shots of gin. 

It’s a strategy of sorts. She would have an absolute ripper of a night on the gin and be so sick the next day she’d swear off gin for life (like any seasoned alcoholic swearing off alcohol every morning when they are green around the gills from a hangover). When she went on-the-wagon that meant she only drank wine and beer. It usually involved four to six beers before dinner, two to three bottles of wine with dinner, and then maybe three or four ports after dinner. Her on- the-wagon program would usually last anywhere from five to seven days and then she would say, “F**k it” and get back on the gin full throttle. Bless her cotton socks. 

One of her Three Martini Decisions was when my father had just been fired as the vice president of a major Swiss reinsurance company. She was so angry about it she stormed into the Eaton Centre, a major shopping mall in Toronto, and spat on every box of Swiss chocolates she could find – just to make a point. That was Anne Crawley – making us proud. The Red Queen, as my sister and I called her for many years, had a way of eclipsing everything and everyone around her. 

We’re All Mad Here

Growing up in our house was a colourful combination of chaos, confusion, entertainment, high adrenaline and surprises. It’s no wonder that when I was studying Samurai philosophy in Japan, the motto “expect nothing, be prepared for anything” resonated with me. It’s also no wonder that my mother went to university for the first time in her fifties to get a degree in medieval warfare. There was a warrior streak on my mother’s side of the family. She was a medieval bad-ass, and she was determined to make her mark in a male-dominated world – which she did. 

She wrote papers and delivered talks on 15th century weaponry. That’s about as eccentric and bad-ass as it gets. To reference the immortal words from Pulp Fiction, she did indeed know how to ‘get medieval on your ass’. In style, wearing a Gucci outfit and toting a flask of gin, she sure as sh*t channelled some Middle English battlefield energy. She was a warrior. 

She also openly declared on a fairly regular basis that she deeply empathised with Sylvia Plath, the world-renowned novelist and poet who suffered severe depression and underwent electroconvulsive therapy. 

Spoiler alert: Plath took her own life in 1963. Reading her award- winning autobiography, we get some insight that in addition to suffering from mental illness she also experienced deep frustration at being forced into gender-based stereotypes – having children despite wanting to live a free-spirited life as a brilliant and prolific writer. 

The tension of the opposites I always held was knowing, from an early age, that my family was a circus and while they were the source of some of my greatest pain and trauma, they were equally the source of invaluable inspiration. 

The horrors that happened to me behind our closed doors at night were the deepest wounds to heal. Out of respect for my family members, alive and no longer alive, I don’t wish to share any details, but I will say this: when your body is violated at any age, particularly from a very young age (in my case, it started when I was four), it messes with your head in a major way. 

When I started my therapeutic training, I remember learning that clinical specialists in America estimate 85% of eating disorders stem from sexual abuse. I believe it. It made sense to me because I know exactly when the abuse started as it was in direct correlation to the time, I climbed onto the kitchen counter and started eating peanut butter out of the jar. 

Pushing down the confusion and terror with food was the only way I could cope. Having been so powerless at such a young age, it made sense to me years later that the only way I could feel a sense of control was through food; either eating too much, not eating at all or exercising it off. I knew no other way to express the pain. I was also shocked to learn that eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. I’ve heard anorexia referred to as ‘suicide by instalments.’ 

Sexual abuse is deeply devastating, and one of the consequences I experienced, which took a long time to arrive at, was the feelings of murderous rage towards this family member. The damage added insult to injury; I inverted the anger I felt towards them because I did not know how to express the pain, which translated into multiple self-destructive behaviours. 

It took years of therapy and healing work until that self-loathing left me and I was able to accept that I did not need to feel any shame or blame about what happened. I needed to let myself have the anger, come to terms with it and then find healthy, functional ways to let it go. 

I remember watching the Dalai Lama in an interview around this time and he was asked if he was angry about what the Chinese did to the Tibetan people. He smiled and simply said, “Anger is not functional.” But that’s the Dalai Lama. I aspired to that for a while before realising that I was setting my spiritual bar a tad high. 

I have made peace with everything and everyone from my past now and for that I’m exceptionally grateful. It has not been an easy road and it’s taken time. Forgiveness, particularly for hurts and betrayals which run deep, is a very personal process. I realised that for me, being free was only possible when I let those who I held hostage in my mental prison free, too. 

We all have our own way of getting there. Therapy, healing, meditation, time with the monks, time with friends, cultivating deep self-acceptance and forgiveness have all been a big part of the process for me. Ultimately, when we find forgiveness for the hurt, betrayals and suffering of the past, on the other side is freedom – and it has been a freedom more expansive and inspiring than I ever thought possible. 

Image: alicecrawley.com.

On The Way to Wonderland is now available for pre-sale, here.

Feature Image: Instagram @iamalicecrawley.