My Badass Mom

Everything I know about being a man I learned from a woman.

Doctors on Tuesday declared my mom “cured” from cancer. I wrote the following story about her for Men’s Health magazine about five years ago, as she was going through chemotherapy and radiation. I recently posted about her on my Instagram feed, and many people wanted to read the story. I figured I’d also share it below.

My mom got sober when my dad was in rehab. This was 1985. She was sitting in the bathtub sipping a vodka tonic and flipping through a paperback. It was the same book my father would be reading in his recovery program. She came across these lines: “Try to drink and stop abruptly. Try it twice.” After years of boozing and drugging, those words revealed an undiscovered truth: At 35, she, too, needed to clean up.

With their shared source of misery behind them, my parents found calm, and my mom soon became pregnant with me. But five months in, my dad, at 29, decided the party wasn’t over and that a pregnant, dry, drinking buddy was no drinking buddy at all. He walked out on his two-year marriage for good.

So there she was: alone, baby on the way, white-knuckling the wagon, no college education or money in the bank. The only things to her name were a failing women’s clothing store and our home — a bank-owned trailer on the side of a…