CNF: No Regrets
by Alison Watson
I sometimes wondered if my mother regretted adopting me.
Over the years, I put her through so much: drug addiction, psych wards, suicide attempts. Bipolar Disorder, OCD. Despite all the trauma, she never gave up on me, even when other family members reached their breaking point.
Sometimes her attempts to help me were misguided, such as having my childhood piano shipped to me in New York, as if that was going to save me, or paying for me to move to rural New Mexico, thinking that New York was the problem.
But ultimately it was thanks to her support that I finally got the psychiatric help I needed. She paid for medications and psychiatrist appointments when I lost my insurance. She visited me in almost every psych ward I was incarcerated in. She believed I could get well, even when I didn’t believe it, myself.
“Please take care of Ali when I’m gone,” she asked my sister a few years before she died.
Then she succumbed to Alzheimer’s, and ultimately ALS. The little dynamo who had always been my best cheerleader faded away, leaving a corpse-like shell who seemed to have no idea what was going on around her.
In her final days, I sat by her bedside. By now, the ALS had rendered her paralyzed. She had a Do Not Resuscitate order, and had made it clear that she didn’t want a feeding tube. So, we watched her slowly dehydrate to death over a gut-wrenching two weeks.
Alone with her, unsure if she was still somewhere in there and could understand me, I spoke to my mother as I held her hand.
“You can pass without worrying about me,” I whispered. “I’m clean and sober a long time; I’m stable on meds. I’ll be okay.”
And even though she was paralyzed, somehow, she squeezed my hand.
Alison Watson is a memoirist who writes about overcoming mental illness, addiction, and being an adoptee. She is currently shopping her full-length manuscript, “A Psychotic’s Journey Through Eastern Seaboard Psych Wards,” with publishers. Alison’s work has been published in The Sun Magazine, Please See Me, Bright Flash Literary Review, The Writer’s Journal, and MoonPark Review (which nominated her essay to Best of the Net 2025). In addition to writing, Alison feeds her soul by working in an animal shelter. To read more of her writing, please visit her website, alisonmorriswatson.com.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “No Regrets”? A couple of years after my mother died, I began having comforting dreams about her. I believed she was visiting me in my subconscious, letting me know she was still with me. I was inspired to start writing about our love for each other, as part of my healing process. I was thrilled when the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts accepted my homage to my mother, “No Regrets.” But the editor wanted to cut my last line. At first, I had a hard time letting go of the ending. But I’m learning that sometimes writers can be too close to their own work, and it’s prudent to listen to editors who know what they are talking about. I do have a tendency to wrap up the endings of my stories in a nice bow. But I’m working on letting the reader draw their own conclusions. The most exciting aspect of being a writer is, there is always room to grow.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
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