OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA These days channel surfing leads us to “reality shows” of all varieties: People “surviving” to win money. People losing weight to win money. People with too much money, who are “housewives” that have $60,000 birthday parties for crying, frightened children. People who are buried alive in trash they have compulsively collected. People who bring us to tears as their homes are rebuilt, or as their loved ones are returned.

Possibly, for each of us, one of these life situations hits home. We need to lose weight, clean our homes, or, more gut-wrenchingly real—rid ourselves of life crushing additions.

Can any of these people change? Maybe on TV. But it seems too overwhelming when viewed close up in real life. Maybe that’s why we watch. Or maybe there are other reasons.

Personally, I find myself drawn to watch the programs about interventions on men and women whose health and family have been ruined by uncontrolled relationships with drugs and alcohol. My parents were two such people. My father died young because of what his lifestyle had done to him. But my mother, now that’s my story—a story of my own “intervention,” long before I knew such a thing existed.

Mother had been a drinker even while carrying me—so I’ve been told, and it might explain my 4-pound birth weight. She kept at it after I was born, so drunk she couldn’t hold a bottle to my lips at times; so my sister remembers.

But who was this woman? She lived through the Great Depression—worked at Ogden Woolen Mills, in the factory, and even modeled their line. The pictures of her in her 20s show a slim, tall, dark-haired woman who had it going on. She married the local heartthrob, who had looks, personality, charisma, and a drinking problem. She joined him in this as years went by, and it sank the future lower and lower for both of them.

When I was in grade school, to help support the family, my mother worked in a factory bagging and packing snack food. I’ll never eat a Frito without thinking about her in that uniform, going off every morning, rain or shine, for that low-wage job factory that was a step down from what her young aspirations had to have been.

Years later, as an adult, I had pleaded with her, berated her, abandoned her at times, in hopes she’d change, all the while feeling it was impossible. The doctor had told me that if she kept drinking her liver would fail, and she’d die very soon. At 64, this was too young. Just like my dad.

I was a single parent struggling through a divorce, with a small child, a full-time job. There was only so much I could handle. I had picked her up off the floor and carted her to the emergency room too many times. I’ll never forget sitting within earshot of the ER staff talking about the “drunk” that had just been brought in.

I remember my mother, as a good woman in my very early years, working in a factory, sewing clothes for my sister and I, and doing cartwheels on the lawn to the delight of my little friends. But that was before the booze took command.

I had talked about “rehab” to her before. The doctor told us about the ward at Memorial for just such treatment. But, of course, she said she “wasn’t an alcoholic,” ignoring the hidden vodka bottles in the laundry basket, the shoe boxes in the closet.

Then, one day she called me at work and said, “I went to the market and realized I didn’t know why I was there. Maybe I should go.” She meant to rehab.

Luckily, I worked in a family environment of supposedly grizzled newspaper people, who had seen the worst in their work, and understood my need to rush out of the office, straight to her house. One call to the doctor arranged her admittance. She got in the car with me. Then, half way there, she looked at me with wide, frightened eyes I’ll never forget, and said, “I don’t really need to do this, do I?”

But she went, and as they led her away, as my heart broke, my heart hoped.

My mother never had another drink. Not in 13 years, until cancer caught her unawares and took its toll. Every year she and I celebrated that “birthday.”

Those were the best years with her I could have imagined. I grew to know the strong, smart, loving woman I’d never known was inside that booze-soaked wreck. This past week was the 19th anniversary of her passing and I still miss her every day of the world.

No one is beyond redemption, and it doesn’t take TV cameras and professionals to turn someone around. Just someone who cares. That’s reality.