By Mandy Catoe
Most of us who are still blessed to have our mothers will likely buy a card this weekend and maybe take our moms to lunch.
Bobbie Johnston can't do that and hasn't been able to since Mother's Day 2008. This year she put pen to paper, wrote a letter and tucked it in the door of The News. She wanted to share her mom's story with someone.
Shortly after Mother's Day in 1984, Bobbie Johnston's mom loaded her daughter in her big old Buick Electra 225. She told Bobbie to get down in the floorboard and then she threw a green raincoat over her. Then the tiny woman, less than 5 feet tall in heels, ran to the driver's side, cranked up the big Buick and headed to a lawyer's office to get her daughter into drug treatment.
“She gunned it!” And I hung on,” Bobbie recalls.
She was being driven to safety by her mom, Anne Johnston.
“Anne with an E and Johnston with a T,” she would tell people in an introduction that rivaled James Bond's. Anne had worked for the FBI as a clerical worker in the fingerprint division in Washington, D.C. She was small in stature, but mighty in willpower.
It had been a hard 10 years. Bobbie had a drug problem, and it was killing both her and her mom. Her mother was visiting her one day at her Charlotte apartment when Nadar, a Middle-Eastern man, banged on the door demanding she pay a $2,500 drug debt.Money was no big deal for Bobbie, thanks to a trust fund she received when she was 16 from a rich aunt who owned an oil well. She easily could have paid the drug dealer off. Her mom knew that.
Bobbie had been using the trust fund to finance her cocaine habit. She would call the lawyer requesting funds for trips she never took and clothes she never bought.
That day when Nadar was demanding money and threatening her, she was scared and paranoid from drugs.
“I had to do something or I was going to die, either from the drugs or the drug dealer was going to kill me. I was a mess,” Johnston recalls.
While Nadar was using a pay phone on the street, Anne Johnston took control, grabbed Bobbie and the raincoat and ran for the Buick.
Soon the lawyer had arranged for Bobbie to be placed in treatment at an undisclosed location. She recalls sitting there in a big room with a shiny conference table as the lawyer, the trustee of the trust fund and a couple of other people talked about her in third person as though she were a little girl.
“I remember hearing them say, 'We need to put her somewhere.'”
The lawyer told Johnston to return the next day and someone from his office would take her to the treatment center.
The next day, Anne Johnston loaded her daughter into the Buick once again and drove her to the lawyer's office, making sure she kept that appointment. Mom bid her goodbye and the lawyer's assistant took her to the Lancaster Recovery Center at Springs Memorial Hospital.
Johnston laughs as she recalls that frightening time in her life. “I was dreaming of them sending me to sunny California, maybe the Betty Ford Center,” she says. “As I walked through the basement tunnel in the hospital, I knew for sure they were taking me to the nut house.”
Johnston was at LRC for eight weeks. Under the advice of the lawyer, her mom wasn't told where she was. Bobbie wrote her a letter during the second week.
Treatment brought Johnston face to face with demons, deceit, lies and scars from her 10 years of drug addiction, which began with a few beers and some pot when she was 15. When she found cocaine in her 20s, her life unraveled. Her mom, who had a heart condition, would often call asking for her help. “I ignored her phone calls,” Johnston says.
Her mom dragged her out of drug dealers' houses, rescued her in the middle of a riot at her high school, and threw her bongs and drug paraphernalia away.
Recovery involved Johnston getting honest with herself, taking a moral inventory and making amends to anyone she had harmed or wronged. The honesty part had been eating at her for a while. She was about to pick up her six-month chip at Alcoholics Anonymous and asked her mom to attend.
“I had to tell mom I was gay. I felt like a fake,” Johnston recalls. She wasn't ready to do that face to face, so she gave her mom a letter and asked her to wait until she got home to read it. Her mom tucked the letter into her purse and waited.
Anne Johnston believed in celebrating life's great moments with homemade cakes. Bobbie had told her not to make a cake for the six-month chip meeting. Her mom honored that request.
Anne got home and read the letter. A few hours later, Bobbie's phone rang. Her heart pounding, she answered.
“My mom screamed into the phone with a mean tone, 'How dare you!' My heart stopped, and then Mom said, 'How dare you not let me make you a cake for your six-month sobriety birthday!'
After a few seconds of silence, her mother said, “I fooled you, didn't I?”
Johnston says her mom struggled with her sexuality for a while. Bobbie's sister, Patty, supported their mom and encouraged her to not push Bobbie away. In time, Anne was embracing Bobbie's girlfriend as though she were her own daughter.
Her mom attended family night at the end of the eight-week treatment. “That night she said, 'I'm so glad to have my daughter back.' That was 32 years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday.”
Bobbie made a new life, a sober life, she says, here in Lancaster. She's retired now, living with her wife and two dogs, Chico and Sara.
She stays in touch with one of her Lancaster Recovery Center counselors, who confirmed much of Johnston's account but asked that his name not be used.
Anne Johnston celebrated her daughter's sobriety every year on May 16 with a homemade cake, until she began her stay at the Lancaster Convalescent Center a few years before she died.
Bobbie visited her mom often at the nursing home and made sure she was taken care of. Bobbie says her mom, wheelchair bound in the last years of her life, was known as “Speedy.”
Bobbie says the residents would ask her mom if it was true that she had worked for the FBI. “Without batting an eye, my mom would say, “If I tell you that, I'll have to kill you.' And then she would laugh that laugh of hers.”
This Mother's Day, Bobbie Johnston will spend time thinking of her mom a little more than usual. No cakes to celebrate, but lots of memories. She tells her friends to spend a little extra time with their moms and take photos and make videos, and not just on Mother's Day.
“My mom saved my life,” she says, “more than once.”
In her closet, that green raincoat still hangs.
5/8/16
(Photos supplied)
Contact Mandy Catoe at (803) 283-1152
Sent from my iPad
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