As a Christmas present to my mother, I promised her that we’d finally bring the kids down to Florida to visit her at her independent living facility in Jupiter. This would mean everything to her—a chance to show off her grandchildren to her friends at Mangrove Bay and the caretakers who worked there, the people who’d heard her speak fawningly about these grandchildren for so long, and who were also aware of the creep of sadness in her voice as she told stories about them because they also probably knew how against I was to the idea of bringing them into this place. 

When my mother would tell me about other grandchildren who would visit her neighbors I could hear the envy in her voice. “I would love it if you would bring the kids here at some point.” I would always placate her in the moment and say something like, “Maybe next year,” but never follow-through on it and if she ever pressed me on it I’d make her feel like it was a ridiculous thing to suggest and to please stop asking me about it. 

It also should be noted that most of the residents in her facility are in their late 80s, early 90s even. One woman just celebrated her 102nd birthday, which was front-page news the monthly newsletter. Within that context, you’ll also realize that most of the grandchildren are in their late teens and early twenties. Ours are six, seven, and eight. What would they do there?

And practically speaking, traveling with our three to Florida—even the less-desirable part—during Spring Break felt foolhardy, like trudging three kids to Times Square for New Years Eve, and it annoyed me that she didn’t see it that way. 

I also that I didn’t want to potentially scare them if they got spooked by old strangers in wheelchairs. I imagined a scenario where one or all of my kids would be horrified by some of the deteriorating physical conditions of the residents, some of them lurching around like zombies. Or worse they would be exposed to their desperation for human interaction, which had been my terrifying experience when I was about their age visiting my grandparents at nursing homes. 

When we first arrived and walked through the hallway, my youngest boy immediately said loudly that, “This place smells like old people.” And he was right, of course. I think if you’ve been inside one of these places you know the smell: the dried urine and out-of-date perfume; dying flowers in waterless vases. 

Even though we made the trip down there, my mother’s feelings were still hurt when I told her that we planned to stay in a hotel close by most of the trip. I explained to her that we couldn’t all stay at her place and it’d be too hectic in the morning. “Plus there’s a pool at the hotel with a waterslide,” I said. 

She insisted that was a waste of money. “There is a pool here.” 

I wished she didn’t remind me about the Mangrove Bay pool. A few years ago she told me one of the residents had a heart attack and died while doing laps in that same pool. I thought there were two deaths in the pool, but my mother insisted it was only one. She said the other one was a suicide and that an extremely distraught man jumped off the fourth floor on his first night there. I could have sworn she told me he landed in headfirst into the pool, but she corrected me. “He just splatted on the balcony.” 

All that aside, I felt like I’d spent too much time at her condo in Mangrove Bay in the past couple years. We went through a spell where it felt like my sister and I were down there once a month to try to convince her to move back up north to Jersey to be closer to her sisters sooner than later before my father’s dementia became too much for her to handle on her own. They stayed, though, and he died a a few months later. I spent a few nights in their apartment as we dealt with the aftermath on a pull-out couch that made my spine hurt for weeks. 

And two Thanksgivings ago my mother had become weakened and disoriented after a minor surgery. My aunt was concerned and suggested I stay with her a little while to monitor her progress. I ended up spending more than a week there, counting out her pills, changing her dirty sheets after she wet the bed, keeping her company as she slept for what felt like 15 hours per day. 

If you spend too much time in those places—too much time with your parents in those places—it leaves you  with a sunken, haunted feeling, and it took me some time to readjust back to the world of the living after that. The past few times I left there  I had a sick feeling that I’d abandoned both of them. But I also felt like I’d abandoned myself there. 

*****

When Julieanne told me that the only half-decent hotels available near Mangrove Bay were in Singer Island, I thought she was joking. “Do you know where that is?” she asked. 

Singer Island was where I went to rehab for two months during the fall of 2015 and then where I returned to a shitty condo right next door to the rehab for four months in the summer of 2016 afterward for an intensive outpatient program that I never completed. That “island” is another dark Florida shadow in my brain and one I think about often because of how much time I’d wasted there. We’re talking huge chunks of weeks spent moping and angry, all alone besides a group of my other shipwrecked-looking neighbors, most of whom were still very active alcoholics. I was there to reset my life, build a strong program, figure out who I was supposed to be as a sober person, but I never committed to doing that. 

The drive between Singer Island and my parents’ Jupiter residences (they lived in a different, non-assisted living condo a couple years before they both got old and sick) was one I had made dozens of times, usually in some elevated state of duress after one of us had said or done something cruel to each other. 

And coming or going, no matter what, I’d marvel at how many Publix super markets there were within that 10-mile stretch. There are six of them in Jupiter alone. There are two more that are on the outskirts of Singer Island. A quick search online tells me that Florida has 60% of all the Publix super markets in America and that number still seems low. 

I told Julieanne that every time I pass a Publix it makes me uneasy, a reminder of that long stretch of personal upheaval I’m still processing, sometimes healthily, but sometimes not. As we drove by what felt like the fourth one in under ten minutes on the way back to Mangrove Bay, Julieanne saw what I was talking about. “There are so many of them.” 

One night while we were there, we decided to leave the kids with my mom for a minute and go grab some “real” ice cream, since my mother only had the lactose-free kind.  As we stood under the grocery-store fluorescence scanning the Ben and Jerry’s flavors, it was eerie how this was all so familiar. Like, it was easy it was for me to remember the types of marbled bread and sheetcakes available in the bakery when we went over there. And the deli counter was still open close to 8 p.m. 

I had a flashback of of waiting with my golf-tanned father for the three giant hoagies he ordered and him hawkishly reminding the poor woman  making the sandwich not to put onions on it and to toast the bread if possible. I also remembered the fight we had in their condo afterward and how I grabbed him by the throat and held him over the couch. And how after that he said he never wanted to see me again.

*****

I told Julieanne that I wanted to go hit one of my old meetings while I was down there, but I wanted to give her the option to ask me not to since I know handling three kids (and my mom) on what is supposed to be a vacation isn’t easy, even if it’s only a couple hours. But, of course, she told me to go, take all the time I needed since we’d now established that being down here in this particular part of Florida was probably a bigger deal than I had made it out to be. 

I headed over to a 12 p.m. Saturday meeting at The Club Oasis meetinghouse off of A1A. When I was in treatment, Club Oasis was the place they’d drive 10 of us to in drab, clunky vans twice per week.

The night meetings were always full of locals and very intimidating. I went to my first men’s meeting there and a raggedy sun-bleached speaker on the wrong side of 60 kicked off the discussion by warning the group that—and I apologize for the crudeness of this statement—“pussy is a drink” and it we need to remember that every day in order to stay sober.

When I pulled into the parking lot, another rush of memories returned—the sound of the gravel popping underneath the tires, the wooded picnic area where the chainsmokers would congregate and sometimes hold outdoor meetings. 

I went in, found an aisle chair in the back of a second row away from people. In my memory the inside of Club Oasis was blue, but it turned out it was beige.  I look at the standard AA signs on the wall—“Courage”; “Easy Does It”—and remember staring at them and all those triangles in those lonely, miserable days of early sobriety. I remembered the gavel at the big office desk, the plastic container full of 4th Edition AA books, dog-eared, some with the blue and yellow jacket covers, some not. 

I was always afraid to raise my hand in the room, announce my day count, simply because I was afraid someone would sidle up to me, ask to be my sponsor. I didn’t want a sponsor. I didn’t want any phone numbers. I remember thinking many times in this room, “I’m not supposed to be here,” and that there was some room elsewhere for people like me, someone uniquely qualified to heal themselves without all the silly cultish horse shit this place peddled. 

But here I was now a decade later—“A.J., alcoholic. Visiting from Los Angeles”—feeling a sense of relief and wonder about all that had transpired. 

The topic for that day was, believe it or not, gratitude. People shared about their gratitude journal practice, some even read directly from their morning pages. One person spoke about how they weren’t in a grateful mood that day and in those moments their sponsor had instructed them to simply say prayer and thank God for their legs, and the the courage to change the things they could.

What is “change” anyway in the contest of recovery? In the Big Book it describes this as a  “psychic” but the adjective du jour these days is “cellularly” and when I sat in that seat, no longer squirming, I realized the overwhelming psychic, cellular—SEISMIC—change that had occurred for me. So I shared about it.  

I told everyone that a decade has passed since I sat in this seat the last time. That I used to hate this place, and how I thought it was painted blue. I said I would never raise my hand and how miserable I was. I told them that I used to sit in the back, with my arms crossed, boiling with self-pity, longing to be somewhere else, longing for a home I never really lived in. And then I watched the room nod and light up when I told them who I was here with—my wife, my three kids. I told them how special it was that my wife didn’t even flinch when I told her I wanted to come to this meeting. I told them that I was here to visit my mother and that, for the most part, we were on good terms. 

I was then hit with a wave of something. Gratitude feels too small, lazy even to describe what I felt: perhaps it was magnanimity. It’s a fascinating phenomenon in this program when the true change that happens is the willingness to give it away so freely to others and that sharing about it in a room that was not like this beige, drab one would perhaps be construed as arrogance, or foisting a redemptive arc upon people for the sheer velocity of the ego-boost it would bring. But that part of me was left behind, somewhere in this room perhaps, still climbing these walls trying to get out. I said a prayer for that version of me, expressed gratitude for his legs.

*****

As we said goodbye to my mother, I took several photos of her embracing the kids under a sagging elm in the parking lot outside Mangrove Bay. The kids are huddled around her and her head is hung low, a pose that tells me she understood the enormity of the moment and that there is a very good chance that they won’t visit her here again, simply because I had given her that impression for so long. 

I wondered why I had thought this way—why had I not seen my mother as a human who just needs the same love and connection the same way as everyone else does? 

Regretfully, any time she’d hinted about us coming to visit her in the past eight years, I treated it as grievously inconsiderate. Didn’t she understand? I had work, Julieanne had work, the kids can’t get sick on an airplane again, the pandemic—a list full of extremely legitimate but also entirely pathetic excuses not to come see her. 

This time around, up until a few days before we left, I considered canceling our trip because of all the TSA chaos, but also hinting that the war in Iran was enough of a deterrent not to travel. I rehearsed the conversation I would have with her a couple of times in the shower, gravely explaining that “The world is just too dangerous right now.” 

I never once considered how that would just sever her heart. Or actually I did: I’d done enough Al-Anon work to know it’s important that I put my needs and comfort first, especially after decades of feeling both neglected and trampled by my parents for so long.  

Then, as I examined that picture, I realized that some of my personal healing had perhaps made me a little rotten. I needed to understand that my mother does not exist to inconvenience me. She never made unreasonable demands on my time—only a wish. A wish to feel love from my children, the kind of love that had most likely eluded her the same way it had eluded me until they arrived. And now we had a chance to change all that, to make this place a happy one after all.

This story was originally published in The Small Bow on April 05, 2026.

If you want more long-form, you’ll probably dig Sundays because we have more like the one you just read (usually written by me or Ben Gaffaney) and also a complete recovery rundown full of books, and poems, and workout routines, and self-reflection, and self-flagellation, plus the occasional dreamy song added to the revolving TSB playlist.

But if you don’t want any more extra email and just want to support us because you love what we do, you can just leave a TIP right here.

CHECK OUT THE LATEST PODCAST WITH RAINN WILSON:

Another way you can support us? Buy 70 coffee mugs. Check out the Small Bow merch store. We’ve got two mugs and one magnet right now. More stuff on the way.