Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: I’m Just Happy to Be Here
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1979?
WEBSITE: https://www.renegademothering.com/
CITY:
STATE: CA
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2018071358
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2018071358
HEADING: Hanchett, Janelle
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100 1_ |a Hanchett, Janelle
670 __ |a I’m happy to be here, 2018: |b title page (Janelle Hanchett) back flap (Janelle Hanchett created the website Renegade Mothering in 2011. She holds a BA in English from University of California, Davis and an MA in English literature from Sacramento State. She lives in northern California.)
PERSONAL
Born c. 1979; married; husband’s name Mac; children: four.
EDUCATION:University of California at Davis, B.A.; Sacramento State University, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Blogger, writer.
WRITINGS
Author of the Renegade Mothering blog.
SIDELIGHTS
Janelle Hanchett is writer of the Renegade Mothering blog which she created in 2011 and has since attracted thousands of readers. On the site she talks about unconventional parenting. Hanchett published her memoir, I’m Just Happy to Be Here: A Memoir of Renegade, in 2018, in which she addresses her marriage and motherhood at a young age, raising four children, addiction and recovery, and guilt for abandoning her children. Hanchett holds a master’s degree in English literature from Sacramento State University.
In her memoir, Hanchett talks about being a mother at age twenty-one after knowing the father for only a few months, adjusting to her new life and identity, feeling bored and directionless, and seeking relief in alcohol and drugs. For ten years she struggled with cocaine binges, hangovers, postpartum depression, borderline personality disorder, and therapists. She gave her children to her divorced mother to raise and eventually became sober through the help a fellow recovering alcoholic. “This memoir is different from most of the memoirs you’ll find…She expounds on the nature of postpartum depression and the helplessness of it. She shares soul-shattering moments of letting her loved ones down and the consequences of her actions,” Paige Wallace reflected online in Woodstock magazine.
Hanchett acknowledges that she is a rare situation in which an addicted mother is not redeemed by her children. Like her irreverent and humorous blog, she reveals she feels like an outsider in parenthood and questions the sanctity of motherhood as a cure-all. After her long journey, she replies, “I’m just happy to be here.” In an interview online at Mutha magazine, Hanchett told Marissa Korbel: “We need to talk about the fact that love is not necessarily enough to cure the disease of addiction. And that it isn’t necessarily that we don’t love our kids. I really believed that story needed to be told, and it was impossible for me to tell that story without talking about my children, because you know, how do you write motherhood without mentioning your kids?”
“By turns painful and funny, the book explores the pressures of modern motherhood while chronicling one woman’s journey toward acceptance of her own limitations and imperfections. A searingly candid memoir,” according to a Kirkus Reviews writer. A Publishers Weekly Online reviewer commented: “Hanchett offers a startling account of her struggles with alcohol and drug addiction in this raw and riveting memoir,” and added that readers will cheer during her triumphant recovery.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2018, review of I’m Just Happy to Be Here.
ONLINE
Mutha, http://muthamagazine.com/ (May 1, 2018), Marissa Korbel, author interview.
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (January 8, 2018), review of I’m Just Happy to Be Here.
Woodstock, http://www.woodstockmagazine.com/ (April 12, 2018), Paige Wallace, review of I’m Just Happy to Be Here.
THE PLAYERS
Attempting to write 4-sentence summaries of human personalities is an absurd and unreasonable task, but I shall do it any way to provide a little background. Besides, absurd and unreasonable have never really been deal-breakers for me.
304852_10151048917233860_2137311768_nFirst, there’s Mac. He’s my husband. He’s 36 years old. I have loved him since the moment I laid eyes on him, about 17 years ago as he sat on the floor of my living room, surrounded by my roommates, stoned and drinking Captain Morgan. When I saw him working at his dad’s slaughterhouse, covered in goat blood and cursing unruly chickens, I knew he was the one for me. After we had our first kid, I spent 3 to 7 years sure I married the wrong dude, but then we turned some corner and I found myself enjoying him, our marriage, us. It was actually kinda surreal. I had resigned myself to marriage as hell. I’m still not totally sure where he came from as by all appearances he seems an impossible juxtaposition. He’s a tattooed ranch man – a gentle ironworker – a “tough guy” who doesn’t mind some pastel pink on occasion. If anybody ever asked me for marriage advice (not a likely event) I would tell them “marry somebody you love and respect but don’t fully understand.” It seems to hold up. Despite our best efforts to blow up our marriage, we’re still here.
That was more than 4 sentences.
photo(41)Our first child is Ava. She’s 16 years old. (<<
From the creator of the blog “Renegade Mothering,” Janelle Hanchett’s forthright, wickedly funny, and ultimately empowering memoir chronicling her tumultuous journey from young motherhood to abysmal addiction and a recovery she never imagined possible.
At 21, Janelle Hanchett embraced motherhood with the reckless self-confidence of those who have no idea what they’re getting into. Having known her child’s father for only three months, she found herself rather suddenly getting to know a newborn, husband, and wholly transformed identity. She was in love, but she was bored, directionless, and seeking too much relief in too much wine.
Over time, as she searched for home in suburbia and settled life, a precarious drinking habit turned into treacherous dependence, until life became car seats and splitting hangovers, cubicles and multi-day drug binges–and finally, an inconceivable separation from her children. For ten years, Hanchett grappled with the relentless progression of addiction, bouncing from rehabs to therapists to the occasional hippie cleansing ritual on her quest for sobriety, before finding it in a way she never expected.
This is a story we rarely hear–of the addict mother not redeemed by her children; who longs for normalcy but cannot maintain it; and who, having traveled to the bottom of addiction, all the way to “society’s hated mother,” makes it back, only to discover she will always remain an outsider.
Like her irreverent, hilarious, and unflinchingly honest blog, “Renegade Mothering,” Hanchett’s memoir speaks with warmth and wit to those who feel like outsiders in parenthood and life–calling out the rhetoric surrounding “the sanctity of motherhood” as tired and empty, boldly recounting instead how one grows to accept an imperfect self within an imperfect life–thinking, with great and final relief, “Well, I’ll be damned, I’m just happy to be here.”
Renegade MUTHA: Janelle Hanchett Talks About How She’s JUST HAPPY TO BE HERE with Marissa Korbel
I first heard Janelle Hanchett as a guest on the One Bad Mother podcast, speaking about her four children and her blog, Renegade Mothering. At the time, I was losing my mind trying to take care of my one baby. I could not imagine going through this four times, let alone with other children underfoot. And I hadn’t written a word in over a year. I was impressed at her multitasking, her energy, and her creativity. Like so many others, I fell in love with her writing voice—which, I later learned is just her voice—funny, smart, sarcastic, and never seems to take herself too seriously.
I’m Just Happy to Be Here is exactly the memoir readers of Renegade Mothering will enjoy. Janelle traces her trajectory though early motherhood, active addiction, and finally, a hard-fought recovery through a twelve-step program. She’s inspiring without being sickly sweet; fierce and straightforward, and I read her memoir so quickly, I had to go back and take notes.
Janelle spoke with me recently from her home in Sacramento, California, where she lives and writes. – Marissa Korbel
MUTHA: I think one of the things that’s unique or particular to your story is the way that you navigated your addiction and then your recovery with your children. Was that challenging to write about? Did you talk to your children about that before you wrote about them?
JANELLE: I didn’t just because I’m not sure what I would say. It was difficult because I wanted to write this book about motherhood and addiction. I see a big hole in the way that we talk about motherhood and addiction. It seems like the story goes that a woman is an addict. Then she is saved through the love of her children. She sees the positive pregnancy test and she’s rocketed into sobriety, or she looks at those newborn toes and is permanently altered and never drinks again. I think that is absolutely wonderful, obviously, but as a mother who went down to the bottom after having children, and was not able to get sober even after they were gone from me for two years, I really felt like we need to talk about the fact that love is not necessarily enough to cure the disease of addiction. And that it isn’t necessarily that we don’t love our kids. I really believed that story needed to be told, and it was impossible for me to tell that story without talking about my children, because you know, how do you write motherhood without mentioning your kids?
MUTHA: You can’t, right.
JANELLE: All of those questions of how to navigate the privacy of others while also being true to the story were very, very difficult. What I tried to do was only include the stories and the moments that I felt were absolutely critical for the book and the story.
MUTHA: The challenge of memoir writing, I think, is seeing what belongs to you, and is your story, and then what is someone else’s.
JANELLE: Exactly, and I tried to be really ruthless with making sure that I stayed in the space where I bumped up against the people in my world without careening over into their side. I was trying to tell my story and the truth of that story as I saw it while interrogating and questioning my own perception. I’m not necessarily right. That’s just how I saw it.
In doing so, I hoped to write really compassionately and have a multifaceted way that I addressed people. I had to just trust that.
MUTHA: The adults that you write about including your husband, your mother, your grandmother, you really do a great job of giving them all the human complication of moral ambiguity in places.
JANELLE: Absolutely.
MUTHA: Like not always good and not always bad. You do the same with yourself. I’m tempted to say you’re hardest on yourself but I wonder if that’s a ruthless sort of integrity or investigation. Does that sound accurate?
JANELLE: That is exactly what my goal was, thank you. Yes. I love hearing that because it means I was successful and that meant a lot to me. I was constantly trying to give others the benefit of the doubt and always question and interrogate my own perception and own the limitations. And as an addict, I was so immature and judgmental and self centered for such a huge portion of my life.
MUTHA: I am not an addict, but I have had them around me. Many, many around me. I thought you captured that particular self-centeredness of addicts, especially when they’re active, that is so hard to break through.
JANELLE: And tolerate in others. We’re just intolerable. I wasn’t going to shy away from that because my goal in writing this book was not to get sympathy. It wasn’t to have people say, “Oh, poor you.”
And that’s not a judgment either on other addiction memoirs. I just knew that wasn’t the book I wanted to write. I definitely cringed, particularly the parts in rehab, because I was just such an asshole. It was just unbearable. I’m writing it now, nine years sober, with my sober eyes and I’m like, “Oh, fuck. This stuff.” I just kept reminding myself. I had a mantra, you know. I’d say to myself, “Well, Janelle, you’re either going to write the truth or you’re not.”
MUTHA: That’s a good mantra.
JANELLE: I really repeated that to myself a lot, every time I got scared and every time I felt like a fool and thought people are going to hate me. That mantra would realign me again to what I was doing.
MUTHA: Do you think that not living up to that cultural expectation that a woman would be saved by her family’s love drove you deeper? Like was there more shame and more guilt because you were being neglectful or because you weren’t doing this caretaking mom role the way that our society asks of women?
JANELLE: Yeah, I think it did. That story confused me. I couldn’t understand if the love of my children was supposed to get me sober, if that was supposed to be enough, why wasn’t it working for me? Because I knew I loved my children, and I kept trying to have that be enough. And when people came at me with, “Well, don’t you want to be a mother? Don’t you want to be with your children? Don’t you want to be sober for your children,” I would look at them and cry. Like, “Yes, of course I do.” Then I would find myself drinking again. It wasn’t until somebody explained to me, “Actually, once you have crossed the line into a certain point of alcoholism and addiction, it doesn’t give a fuck about how you feel about your children.” It will kill you. It doesn’t give a fuck about how you want to live, either.
Why is love not working? The conclusion for the addict becomes, “I must be morally bankrupt. I must not be capable of love if love is supposed to fix me.”
MUTHA: So if the narrative that you were given around love and addiction didn’t play out, you’re left with well, then what the fuck is wrong with me?
JANELLE: Exactly, what is wrong with me. When someone explained to me that addiction is a disease of the mind and body that doesn’t care who you care about because your brain is sick and it can’t see straight, it can’t weigh in that moment how you feel about your children or the pros and cons, and your brain has been rewired into addiction. Then I was able to make a little progress.
And I do want to say that the reason that that narrative bothered me so much was not so much from needing people to understand me, but the first time I read a blog post that said, “I was a terrible alcoholic and then I saw those two positive lines, you know, the lines on my pregnancy test and I cleaned up my act and never drank again,” I would just think about the children of alcoholics who didn’t get sober. And the conclusion that they must draw, which would be, I guess, my mother didn’t love me enough. That ripped my fucking heart out. I remember just crying thinking about that. I wanted to just say, “Maybe your mother loved you. Maybe she didn’t. I’m not here to judge mother’s love here. I’m certainly not here to justify or make excuses or glorify any of it in any way, but I would like to complicate that. It is a possibility that she loved you and couldn’t get sober.”
MUTHA: How do you navigate what I see as the mommy/wine culture. Everything about motherhood, the answer is wine, so how do you deal with that as a sober mom?
JANELLE: Well, to be really honest with you, I don’t mind when people drink around me. Most of my friends drink. My husband and I love to go hear music, and usually it’s in bars. My husband is also sober, so that’s convenient. To put it really bluntly, I’m really fucking bored by it. I think it’s a worn out thing. I get it’s a joke, whatever, like oh, motherhood is hard. Let’s go drink wine.
MUTHA: But is it a joke? It is a cliché and it’s weirdly become so common, like more and more women… There was a study in 2016 that showed women’s drinking increasing across the board. Binge drinking for women has increased, too. You take all of the pressures that women are struggling with, and then you compound that with motherhood and then now it’s like, “oh, ha ha, it’s so funny. Mommy can’t talk to you because she’s drinking her special mommy juice.”
JANELLE: If we take the joke part aside, or if we look at it seriously about what it’s saying, there are very real issues of misogyny. We fucking hate mothers in America and mothers are expected to balance it all. We’re expected to work, take care of the house, be skinny, be beautiful, be perfect. If we’re blotting out the misery of our existence with alcohol, I think we should ask ourselves why. If the only way we can tolerate our lives is to drink, I think we should perhaps interrogate that a little rather than laugh at it.
MUTHA: Well, you captured that impossible expectation so well early in your book. I was getting so mad on your behalf because … You and your husband were both active addicts, and you’re both working. But you’re going to work, you’re coming home, you’re doing the dishes, you’re taking care of the baby and he’s like, on the couch.
JANELLE: Right, yeah. I know. When I was pregnant, he was 19. I was 21. We’d known each other three months. He went from his parents’ house to my house. He didn’t really know how to be a grownup or a father, even though he was always very loving and very kind. I did all the fucking housework. I had a job. I did everything. It was an incredibly unfair division of labor and I was going nuts. I used my daily booze to hold my life together. It sort of blotted out this intolerable, overwhelming existence. So it isn’t funny. I’m with you. And it’s not a new narrative. Think about that Rolling Stones song, Mother’s Little Helper about speed and mothers. Mothers blotting out the reality of their fucked up lives because of misogyny and the patriarchy? That’s an old, old thing.
It does make you wonder why is this something that we all accept as reality and why do we promote it instead of investigating it or changing it?
MUTHA: Right, why is this job so bad that you have to be drinking or high to do it?
JANELLE: Why are we not questioning the institutions that have made motherhood what it is?
MUTHA: Yes. You brought up patriarchy and misogyny. I’m curious: How did your feminism come to you, and when?
JANELLE: Well, so I grew up in the Mormon church, but also sort of half out. Half my family was not Mormon. My mother was in the Mormon church but. She was a single mother, who definitely had us listening to other music, and had us doing things outside of the church. We never fully fit. Both my parents were Republican. I remember being in college as an undergrad and taking a gender class or something and arguing with the professor who was saying that motherhood is not biological, like mothering instincts are not biological. I argued with her. I was so pissed. What do you mean they’re not biological?
I definitely didn’t grow up with a feminist… well, it’s sort of complicated. I didn’t grow up with a distinct radical feminist left, but I had parents who questioned everything. My mother was a huge natural birth advocate and was in the La Leche League. She was constantly questioning the institution of birth and the way mothers are treated in the hospitals. That sort of thing happened a lot. I think my feminism was really established, as sad as this is, in grad school because I studied with a rather radical professor who introduced me to queer and Marxist and feminist theory. That was when I really started understanding the construct of gender and the role of the patriarchy and how those power structures are formed. I think that was when I became rather rabid.
It took education for me. It took actual education.
MUTHA: I think that’s most people. It’s not a viewpoint, even though it is part of the cultural mainstream, it’s not a viewpoint that’s really part of your average womanhood. You have to be kind of a dissenter. There’s the part in the book where you’re talking, I think, to a psychiatrist and they are diagnosing you with different personality disorders, PTSD, and maybe bipolar. And you also say, “Yeah, but I am also an active coke addict.” So where did you land with that? How did those diagnoses work for you once you became sober, and now nine years in?
JANELLE: I was trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with me because I couldn’t stop drinking. I could see that I couldn’t stop drinking. That reality was not lost on me, so I sort of started exploring what the hell’s wrong with me. Why can’t I stop drinking? I went into psychiatry seeking an answer for why I couldn’t quit. I gathered quite a few diagnoses, as you observed. They diagnosed me borderline, chronic depression, bipolar, but all while I was a coke addict which I really never understood because I was like, “No, no. I’m a cocaine addict. Of course I have mood swings.”
MUTHA: Yes.
JANELLE: That was very bizarre, but they gave me all the pills anyway. I took them because I wanted to be better. Then a couple of them said PTSD from sexual abuse as a child, which I didn’t really go into in the book because for legal reasons, actually. Talk about misogyny and sexism. It wasn’t my legal team’s fault. They were trying to protect me, but it just says a lot when they were like, “Well, your abuser will probably come after you.”
MUTHA: Oh, God, I’m sorry.
JANELLE: Yeah, so I hinted at it, but it was very indirect. They never said, “You have PTSD because …” After I got sober, I did feel borderline. I believe that that was the only real diagnosis. I mean, depression, yeah okay, of course off and on. I still do have some seasonal depression that I’m able to manage because it is seasonal and I expect it.
Once I got sober, I went off all medication. I no longer qualify as borderline, either. I don’t have enough personality symptoms to even have that personality disorder, which I think is pretty fascinating. I don’t think I have a diagnosis other than alcoholism recovery.
MUTHA: You struggled with postpartum depression with the children you had in the book. Did that come back with any of your subsequent pregnancies?
JANELLE: No. I didn’t have medication or depression.
MUTHA: When you got to twelve steps, and that seems to be the program that worked for you in the end, did you struggle at all with how at the beginning of the book, you saw yourself as individual and special. Did you struggle with that concept of the repetitiveness of alcoholism?
JANELLE: It was very difficult for me until I reached that ontological bottom that I described. My teacher, Good News Jack, used to say, “We’re all in various stages of my case is different.” That’s one of the things that addicts hold onto, or that I did at least: this idea that you don’t know me. If you knew my life, you would understand why I live this way. That became an instantaneous, impenetrable border to help because you can’t penetrate that. If you’re coming at me with solutions and I’m sitting there going, “Well, you don’t understand me,” you can’t help me. Therefore, I get to keep living the way I’m living. That defense was smashed when I got desperate enough.
MUTHA: Do you feel like it was that you were at the right place or do you feel like it was the twelve steps particularly, or do you feel like it was the confluence of both things?
JANELLE: I had been going to meetings for two years and couldn’t get sober. It was an internal shift. The meetings were always the same. I changed. That was very clear to me because I was going to the same meeting hall for two years. It was also confluence. Jack just happened to be sitting outside and heard me telling my story to somebody and offered his help to me. That was just luck, I suppose, that I just happened to have this teacher come along who could really speak to me in a very unique way.
A lot of people would have met Jack, and his message would not have resonated with them because he was very harsh. He was very direct. I needed that because I was very egotistical. I was a know-it-all. I was super self centered. I needed somebody to bust through that ego and not bullshit me or cater to what I wanted to hear. That’s, of course, not a universal story.
I’ll never fully understand how I got so lucky, and how that worked out. There was an internal shift where I ran out of ideas for what to do about my alcoholism and I knew I was dying. I had tried everything I could think of to combat the problem and it all failed. Then I became open to other ideas.
MUTHA: I wish you all the success with the book. I know a lot of people will be helped by it and also a lot of people will enjoy it because it’s very funny. That’s not always true with these kinds of books. Congratulations, because it’s very funny.
JANELLE: Thank you. Well, I had to. I had to write humor in there. It’s fucking funny, the whole thing. Alcoholism is not funny. It’s very serious, but it’s also fucking funny. I mean just we got to laugh at ourselves.
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Tags: 12 steps, addiction, alcoholism in motherhood, Books, coke addict, I'm just happy to be here, interview, Janelle Hanchett, Marissa Korbell, memoir, ONE BAD MOTHER, PTSD, ptsd and preganancy, Renegade mothering, teen pregnancy, twelve steps, young mother
About the Author
Marissa Korbel
Marissa Korbel
Marissa Korbel’s writing has been published by Harper’s Bazaar, The Manifest-Station, and The Rumpus, where she writes essays monthly for her column, The Thread. She works as a staff attorney for a nonprofit in Portland, Oregon, where she lives with her partner and their toddler.
AUTHOR TIFFY THOMPSON | PHOTO DAVE LASTOVSKIY
JANELLE HANCHETT’S ‘I’M JUST HAPPY TO BE HERE’ IS A DEVASTATING PORTRAIT OF ADDICTION & MOTHERHOODPOSTED ON MAY 1, 2018
After coming off a three-night cocaine binge to host her son’s first birthday party, Janelle Hanchett sobbed. Riddled with self-disgust, she vowed that this would be the last time. Little could she anticipate that the bottom was a long way down. For some addicts, having a child quells the use. But for others, new motherhood is kerosene for a fire already begun.
After becoming pregnant at twenty-one by a man she’d known three months, Hanchett had embraced new motherhood with fervour. But as the banality of life set in and the pressure mounted, she turned to wine for relief and escape. After the birth of her second child, her longing for redemption was soon thwarted by a descent into full-blown alcoholism.
In her stunning memoir, I’m Just Happy To Be Here, Hanchett has painted an honest, unflinching portrait of motherhood, addiction and recovery. Through her wickedly funny and devastating candour, Hanchett shatters the veneer covering the parts of ourselves–our selfishness, arrogance and conceit–that we try so hard to conceal. I’m Just Happy To Be Here is about love, life, pain and loss. It’s about the ties that bind, and how one woman found her way by giving up the wheel.
Janelle Hanchett. Photo: Sarah Maren Photography
We talked with Hanchett about the book this week.
SDTC: What was the hardest part of the book to write?
JH: Definitely the parts where I was really in the throes of alcoholism as it affected my children. When I took Ava to the birthday party when I wasn’t sober, or when the kids went away. The hope I felt surrounding my son’s birth that this was going to fix everything, how grateful I was for him, and how beautiful his birth was, and then knowing what was going to come just a few months later–that was excruciating to write.
How did it feel to include those grim details–like driving intoxicated with your kid in the car–knowing that people were going to read it?
I wrote the entire book pretending that nobody would ever read it. That was the only way I could get it out. If I had been thinking about it being read by an audience, or on a bookshelf at Barnes & Noble, I would not have been able to write it.
I created this sort of vacuum that worked really well–probably too well–because when I turned it in, it dawned on me that it was going to be a book in a bookstore. I had a couple days of panic, but in hindsight, that was a great way to do it.
Were you tempted to gloss over parts, and did you leave parts out?
I wrote about 100,000 words, and the final book was about 89,000, so I cut about 11,000 words. I wrote the whole thing for myself, and then I went back and looked at all the stories. I ruthlessly examined if the story was necessary for the narrative. If it didn’t serve a distinct purpose, I cut it.
I was not interested in shock factor or voyeuristic disaster porn of let’s see how low Janelle could go. That was never my objective. At the same time, I wanted to show the realities of addiction and alcoholism in an unflinching way. I feel like it’s a subject that’s under-addressed as it relates to mothers.
How did you want to address this whole notion of addiction as it relates to motherhood?
I’ve been writing my blog, Renegade Mothering, for over seven years. I’ve landed on various blogs and books from women talking about addiction and motherhood. I’ve noticed the story goes like, “I was an addict/alcoholic, then I stared at my newborn’s toes, or I looked at the positive pregnancy test, and I loved that child so much that I turned my life around and never drank again.” While that is a wonderful story, and I’m happy for people who have done that, it isn’t everyone’s story.
One day I was reading a blog where that was the exact story and I started reading the comments. Many were from children of alcoholics that didn’t get sober. I read what they were writing and saw their pain. I thought to myself, my god, when they read that, they must think to themselves, “Did my mother not love me?” That ripped my heart out. It just tore me in half.
Love is neither the solution nor the problem. And arguing that it is is extremely problematic because an addict needs treatment. Once you’re in the throes of alcoholism, all the love in the world isn’t going to get you sober. That’s the sad and tragic reality that nobody wants to talk about. That’s what I wanted to do with this book: to complicate that narrative of “If you love hard enough, ladies, you can fix this.”
What did you tell your kids about the book?
There aren’t any secrets in my family. Ava (my eldest) remembers when I was gone. I’m not going to sugarcoat or pretend that it didn’t happen. There will never be a time where I will hide from my children what I was. When they are old enough to understand and read that sort of content, they’ll read it. We have an extremely honest, open, trusting family. But I don’t tell them things past their maturity level; they’d be horrified and don’t have the capacity to really comprehend that.
The popularity of your blog would suggest that we’re longing for a more honest and deeper discussion of what motherhood is all about. But it doesn’t seem to cross over into real life. You talk about this whole playground culture, where we talk with other mothers about sleep training and other surface things. Why do you think that is?
I think it’s probably rooted in insecurity. Nobody wants to admit they don’t know what the hell they’re doing, so we put on this front: “I’ve read all the books; everything is under control.”
I don’t blame or judge. There is a ridiculous responsibility placed on mothers, especially in the U.S. We hate mothers in America. We don’t get any paid maternity leave, there are women who are going back to work after four weeks with newborns, trying to work two jobs, we don’t have socialized medicine so we’ve got no healthcare, we’ve got an entire party trying to attack our uteruses (uteri?). So we send these women home with this baby, and we go, “Fuckin’ figure it out! Make money, get healthcare, do everything for your husband, take all the emotional labour of domesticity, don’t mess up, don’t be fat.”
We do a number on mothers, and if we start to admit this complexity and the ambiguity and all the pressure we’ve got, the floodgate would open. So we better talk sleep training so that we don’t talk about this real stuff, because this real stuff is heavy.
You talk about how you got to a point where drinking no longer brought you relief. What brings you relief now?
I have a pretty active spiritual life. I don’t go to church but I pursue spirituality in other ways. Alcoholism is a complex disease of the mind and body, and it gets treated in many ways. One of them, for me, is trying to be of service to others. Trying to stay in gratitude. Trying to help other alcoholics. That helps me a lot because it gets me out of myself.
Alcoholism is a very narcissistic disease. It turns us into extremely self-centred, small-minded and egotistical human beings. Being of service to others brings me relief from the mental noise that often led me to drinking. And writing–that’s been the way I process and deal with the pain that exists internally.
Do you worry about relapse?
Always. That’s why I continue to treat my alcoholism as if I’m a month sober, not nine years sober. I’m always concerned. I see people dying of this disease–they relapse after five, six, ten years. They lose their families, or they don’t make it.
In December 2016, my maternal grandmother was murdered by my cousin. That was the hardest thing I’ve endured in sobriety. That was the first time where it felt like I might not care, that I might actually be willing to drink and deal with the consequences just to have the oblivion that it may offer. So I went back full-force into everything I knew that helped me.
I don’t screw around. If I find myself getting uncomfortable–feeling fear, anxiety and resentment–I address it quickly. I get back to doing those things that bring me relief, that bring me serenity, that remind me that I’m an alcoholic and to drink is to die.
Janelle & her family today
What brings you hope now?
I am excited that we’re here, and our family is what it is. I still can’t believe it. I look at my family and I’m just overwhelmed with the beauty of that. The other night I talking to some addicts and I came home and it was total mayhem: the husband was yelling at the kids to pick up the dinner mess, the three year old was having a tantrum on the floor, the seven year old was running around with a scooter, the teenager was on her phone. It was like a movie.
I looked at this picture and was like, “Holy shit, how lucky am I to be here?” Somebody like me usually ends up in the gutter, or jail, or separated permanently from her family. I got this second lease on life. I know it can happen for anyone. That’s what gives me hope: just living this normal, standard life.
What do you hope readers will take away from your book?
I tried to really tell the truth of the experience as I saw it. I didn’t want to sugarcoat, I didn’t want to shirk, I didn’t want to paint myself as a victim or a hero. If there’s one thing I want people to take away, it would be along those lines. We can exist in that space. We don’t necessarily become better versions of ourselves just because we have children. And we can function in a beautiful way right from that place of who we are.
Interview has been edited and condensed.
I’m Just Happy To Be Here is out May 1. Order it here.
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Hanchett, Janelle: I'M JUST HAPPY TO
BE HERE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Hanchett, Janelle I'M JUST HAPPY TO BE HERE Hachette (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 5, 1 ISBN: 978-0-
316-50377-8
A popular blogger's tragicomic account of how early motherhood and marriage propelled her into a cycle of
drug and alcohol addiction from which she narrowly escaped.
Hanchett, the creator of the Renegade Mothering blog, was a senior in college when she discovered that she
was pregnant by Mac, a 19-year-old rancher's son she had been dating for three months. Feeling she had let
down a family that believed she would "do something impressive in life," the author gave birth to a baby
girl, married Mac, and settled into uneasy domesticity, which she made more manageable by "remain[ing]
drunk about 40 percent of my waking hours." Eventually diagnosed with postpartum depression, she tried to
ease the tedium and isolation of stay-at-home life by taking a job as a receptionist. Instead, she found
herself drinking more heavily and fighting with Mac, who drank in codependent solidarity with her. She left
Mac and then returned and became pregnant again, vowing to make her family life work. Instead, she and
Mac continued drinking and doing drugs together. After a psychiatrist diagnosed her with borderline
personality disorder, Hanchett began what would become an ongoing search for a "rehab that would cure
me." But she found no relief. Her clinic stays became islands of temporary sobriety in a life that seemed to
become increasingly dedicated to self-destruction. Her body and marriage on the verge of irrevocable
collapse, the author unexpectedly found salvation in the counsel of a fellow recovering alcoholic she named
"Good News Jack." His brutal honesty forced Hanchett to realize that in order to rebuild her life, she had to
let go of reason and put her faith in "the pulse holding the stars...[and] the thing that makes me alive beyond
breath." By turns painful and funny, the book explores the pressures of modern motherhood while
chronicling one woman's journey toward acceptance of her own limitations and imperfections.
A searingly candid memoir.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
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I’m Just Happy to Be Here: A Memoir of Recklessness, Rehab, and Renegade Mothering
Janelle Hanchett. Hachette, $26 (320p) ISBN 978-0-316-50377-8
Renegade Mothering blog creator Hanchett offers a startling account of her struggles with alcohol and drug addiction in this raw and riveting memoir. Pregnant at 21, Hanchett married the father of her child, a 19-year-old slaughterhouse worker, and the two settled into his parents’ ranch outside Davis, Calif. Hanchett, raised (for a time) as a Mormon, didn’t do well with the church’s rules and regulations; she was bored with life as a stay-at-home mother and suffered from postpartum depression. She couldn’t shake her alcohol problem, despite seeking help, and she and her husband eventually became addicted to cocaine. Hanchett intersperses her account of these dark times with humor, calling out “Type II” moms who drink kale smoothies out of mason jars, or “Type III” PTA moms, around whom she can’t “drop the F-bomb.”After settling her kids with her divorced mother, the author briefly left her partner and moved into a trailer with another addict, eventually winding up in the hospital following a near-fatal overdose. Relentlessly battling her addiction, the author called on her love of family, as well as the sage advice of an “ex–gutter drunk” she serendipitously encountered outside a meeting hall. Readers will cheer Hanchett toward her triumphant recovery. Agent: Richard Abate, 3 Arts Entertainment. (May)
DETAILS
Reviewed on: 01/08/2018
Release date: 05/01/2018
Book Review: 'I’m Just Happy to Be Here' by Janelle Hanchett
Apr 12, 2018 03:14PM ● Published by Paige Wallace
In 2011, Janelle Hanchett decided she needed an outlet. She wanted somewhere to vent about motherhood and life, and she hoped to find others like her. Through this need, her blog Renegade Mothering was born.
“I am proof that not every woman enters motherhood in some gentle, planned, ribbon-and-ruffles way. Not every woman likes this crap. Not every woman fits neatly into this mold created and reinforced by irrelevant books like What to Expect. Not everybody is a good mother, all the time. In fact some of us are bad mothers most of the time.” (“Playdate in my trailer” Renegade Mothering, January 2011)
This blog led to Hanchett’s first novel, a memoir titled I’m Just Happy to Be Here: A Memoir of Renegade Mothering. The book delves deeper into the lower points of her life than the blog does, such as the removal of her children by her mother and the menacing and horrendous thoughts that ate up her consciousness and drove her to self-medicate with hard drugs and alcohol.
“I couldn’t stay and I couldn’t leave, and when the permanence of motherhood dropped on me, when I understood that no matter where I physically went I would not escape it, my panic was indescribable. I was a feral cat in the first moments of capture, scrambling and clawing and screaming as she realizes there’s no exit to her cage.” (I’m Just Happy to Be Here, 47).
This memoir is different from most of the memoirs you’ll find on the shelves of your local bookstore. Janelle Hanchett shares some of the most demeaning and embarrassing stories about her time as a drug addict. She expounds on the nature of postpartum depression and the helplessness of it. She shares soul-shattering moments of letting her loved ones down and the consequences of her actions.
As a reader, I seek out books that will resonate with me. I am not a former drug addict, nor am I a recovering alcoholic. I am also not a mother, and yet I felt this book on a deep, emotional level that I did not expect. Hanchett offers wit that will have you laughing on one page, and five pages later, she’ll lay down some raw truth that will have you reaching for your tissues.
Hanchett’s memoir comes out on May 1, but you can preorder it on Amazon or at Pleasant Street Books & Cards & Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock as well as, The Norwich Bookstore.
Book Review – I’m Just Happy To Be Here
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I’ve been a longtime fan of Janelle Hanchett’s blog, Renegade Mothering, so I already knew I’d connect with her writing style, and I was stoked to receive an advance copy of her book, I’m Just Happy To Be Here.
This beautifully written memoir is gut-wrenchingly raw and real, will suck you in immediately and have you fall in love with all the characters (especially Good News Jack). I worried for a minute that I wouldn’t relate to tale of a life nearly destroyed by depression and addiction, because I haven’t been down the same road. I was wrong. I’ve made plenty of bad choices that I didn’t think I should forgive myself for, so flawed characters and redemption are among my very favorite things, and this book made my heart ache and soar at the same time.
We don’t often see a mother being so brutally transparent about how uncomfortable she was in that role, how depression, boredom and loneliness took her down the road from alcoholism into full-blown substance abuse. This memoir chronicles her 10 year journey to rock bottom and back to sobriety and peaceful acceptance of the fact that she will never fit perfectly into the mothering world.
I loved reading it, and feel compelled to predict that you that you will see Janelle on Ellen DeGeneres in the near future, talking about shitting in a bag. (I first typed Oprah Winfrey and then had to google to see if she still has a show.) Also that I wish Leslie Mann was 20 years younger to play her in the movie.