Loving an addict

I read an article this morning that a mother had written about the fact that her daughter was a heroin addict. She talked about how she had always had an idea in her head of what an addict looked like…and that her daughter was the furthest thing from that image. I know exactly how that feels. Until addiction touched my family, the stereotypical image of a “junkie” is what I saw when I pictured a drug addict. I pictured a scary looking man, dirty and disheveled, living behind a garbage dumpster, never in a million years did I think that the picture would be of my daughter.

My daughter was one of the most beautiful babies I’d ever seen. In fact, I used to ask people; friends, relatives, strangers even, if she was really as beautiful as I thought she was or did I think she was simply because she was my daughter. In reality it wouldn’t have mattered either way. She could have looked like a toad and I’d have thought her the most beautiful baby….lucky for her, she didn’t. I used to think she was a colicky baby, but in hindsight I think it was my inexperience as a mom that led to awake nights and tummy-ache filled days. I didn’t know how to read the signs she was giving me. How could I? This really was my first rodeo. After a few months and a little practice at reading those adorable facial expressions and being able to differentiate between her different cries (and she had a few), we both got our shit together and she was an easy baby. From the get-go, she was a performer. She loved to recite lines from movies that would delight her grandparents, “Tut-tut, looks like rain” and she’d engage in “this little piggy” for hours and hours. Not once when trying to comb through the mangle of beautiful blonde curls or wiping of crocodile tears coming from those blue-gray eyes did I ever think that she might one day grow up to be a drug addict.

As a child she was fun-loving. She got a long well with her classmates, made friends easily and was a peace keeper among her peers. It wasn’t uncommon for her to allow her friends to take advantage of her rather than to cause a fight. Her teachers loved her, even if she talked a little too much in class, an affliction that is in her DNA. For all intents and purposes, she was a happy, well adjusted, good kid. Again, no signs of this awful disease rearing its ugly head to give me, her father, her friends or the other hundreds of people that adore her any sign of what was to come.  By junior high though, things were changing, in her life and her life at home.  She began to keep to herself more, a product of being a tween, or so I thought. Then we discovered she was cutting herself. That was one of the worst days of my life. Laying in bed, crying, wondering how I could have not known that my daughter was struggling so much that she’d find comfort in physically harming herself. Wondering what the demons in her head were caused from? Hoping beyond all hope that the counselor she was working with could help her. Things got better, or so I assumed, as she stopped cutting herself. But, things between her father and I were deteriorating and being my daughter, my first born, and someone I considered as my best friend, she probably heard more of what was happening than the child of separating parents should, from both sides. I can only imagine how difficult our divorce was for her, her brother too but she was the older one, the one that we both expected would help us out with her brother. She worked her way through high school, not really putting a whole lot of effort into it, but who was I to talk? In high school all of my report cards and parent/teacher reports said the same thing, year after year, “Andrea is a bright student that just doesn’t apply herself.” It would appear my daughter inherited that from me as well.

Shortly before she graduated, she found out she was pregnant and chose to reveal this to me in the middle of Walmart – apparently she felt I’d take the news better in a public place. I was devastated for her, and I won’t lie, mortified that at the age of 40, I’d be a grandmother (I still struggle with the G word), but it didn’t keep her from finishing high school and the beautiful, amazing, intelligent, loving, sweet child that came from it, well, lets just say I’d sooner die than not have her in my life.  After high school she drifted between a few jobs, not really sure what she wanted to do with her life.  She separated from the baby’s father and moved back home with me. I didn’t notice anything off for a few months, but when I did notice, things were bad. Unfortunately, they were about to get way worse.

Let me just say, before I decided to write this blog I asked my daughter if she was ok with me sharing part of her story as it is very much intertwined with mine. She gave me that permission, as a recovering addict now it’s part of her mission to tell her story in an effort to help others, not just other addicts but others that love addicts. I don’t really need to get into all of the details of where her addiction took her or what drugs she used (too many to list), but what I do want to do is accurately portray how heinous this disease is not just on the addict, but those that love them. And now I’m going to say if you have comments about whether or not addiction is a disease, kindly keep them to yourself. I’ve seen far too many comments on social media about people’s ideas about addiction, and quite frankly, I don’t give a fuck what you think, especially if you’ve never had to experience what I have. It is only those that have been touched by addiction that can truly know not only what an addict goes through but also what someone that loves an addict goes through. So, if you have a differing opinion, good for you, it’s not my place to change that, however, I don’t need to listen to it either. So – if you wish to post it on your social media, feel free to do so, but keep it off mine. Thank you.

I digress….

My daughter’s addiction started the way most do, a pill here, a pill there…our pharmaceutical industry does an amazing job of ensuring that anyone that does not want to feel pain, never has to. I went to a doctors appointment for a sinus infection and was told they didn’t want to prescribe me an antibiotic because they were afraid I’d become immune to them, but if I needed something for the pain, so I could sleep, they could help me out with that. I left there with a prescription for an antibiotic and not for a painkiller, but I also was left wondering just which drug had the higher kickback to doctors? That’s likely the topic of another post. So, she started with pills, and it progressed within a very, very short period of time. Within 6 months she was relying on me, my parents, her other grandparents and her daughter’s father’s family to do the brunt of the childcare for her daughter.  We argued, she lied, I believed, we argued more. As I think back now on some of the lies she told me I’m amazed at the shit I believed. If anyone else had told me their child had said those things to them I’d tell them they were crazy to believe it….yet I did, hook, line and sinker. I would believe almost anything so that I didn’t have to admit that my child was a drug addict, until it got to the point that I couldn’t deny it any longer. She was given an ultimatum, rehab or the streets. The hardest thing I have ever done to date is to tell my daughter that if she didn’t go to rehab she couldn’t live with me, knowing full well that it meant she’d be homeless. Thank God she chose rehab.

I’d love to tell you that this one trip was all it took, that she got and stayed clean, unfortunately, that didn’t happen. She left against medical advice, in fact I picked her up, again, if someone else had told me they did this, I’d tell them how stupid they were, yet I did it. And within 24 hours, she was off and running again. She did one more stint in rehab before it got really, really bad. Bad to the point that she felt she was doing more harm being in her daughter’s life than good, so rather than screw her up any more, she was better off just leaving. Which is what she did. She left the state and followed a fellow addict to Florida. To this point watching her addiction had taken such a toll on me. I couldn’t concentrate at work, I had very little left to give her brother in terms of parenting. My world was consumed with her addiction…I knew I needed help. I returned to counseling and I attended Al-Anon and CoDa meetings. These 3 things saved my sanity. Learning the act of self care, understanding the meaning of detaching with love and figuring out how to continue to live my life without it meaning I didn’t care about her and what was happening to her were not only essential to creating healthy boundaries with her, but I also found recovery from my codependent ways with her.

When my daughter left the state, I would go for weeks without hearing from her. I was terrified that something horrible would happen to her, that she’d end up dead and I’d never even know it. Through my own recovery though, I was able to keep working, I was able to grow a healthy and loving relationship with my granddaughter, I was able to enjoy life on a day to day basis. I continued my friendships, I nurtured my relationship and I developed a spiritual center that helped me stay grounded in what I could control in life, her life was not one of those things. As I continued to focus on creating a healthier me, I began to sleep at night, I wasn’t all consumed with the worry that I’d never hear from her again…a fear that never went away, but it didn’t paralyze me any longer. Then one day, 6 months after she left, a miracle happened; she called me. She was finally sick and tired of being sick and tired. She’d called before asking me to send her money for a bus ticket home – something I learned very quickly was a ploy for money, not a call for help. This time was different. This time I could hear the defeat in her voice, the willingness to do whatever she needed to do to not keep doing what she was doing. She boarded a bus to the airport, had to sleep overnight in the airport, and got on a flight the next day home.

Picking her up at the airport was one of the best and most terrifying experiences of my life. Seeing her was wonderful but seeing her was awful. She was pale, she was sick, she was a shell of the kid I once knew. Gone was the light in those blue-gray eyes I remembered so vividly from her childhood, she looked like she hadn’t slept in days and seemed just as scared to be home as we were when she was gone. But, there she was and she was ready. The next two weeks were tough while we awaited a bed for her in a facility. I watched the physical affects of withdrawal ravage her body, leave her begging for relief and make her tired to the point that she couldn’t drive for fear of falling asleep. The day that I brought her to that same facility she’d been at twice before I knew something would be different this time, I prayed it would be different and I vowed that if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t let things get to where they had before, not this time.

Things were different; this time she worked hard, this time she looked at events that took place in her childhood that caused the pain she so desperately wanted to numb, she looked at issues within our family that she wanted to escape from and she looked at her…seeing herself for the very first time as an individual that deserved love, first from herself and then from others. She graduated from the facility after 35 days and she glowed. I often tell people that she looked like she was lit from within, and she truly did.

As her mom, after all these years of experience, I can so easily tell when she’s caring for herself and working on her disease and can just as easily tell the moment it stops. When she’s clean and working on herself we can talk about her disease, we can talk about how it hurt others, we can talk about how she looked, the lies she told, the pain it caused. We are truly friends when she’s clean, we enjoy spending time together, we’re silly, we’re affectionate, we’re inappropriate, we’re like sisters, goofy sisters…and the first thing she does when she’s using is stays as far away from me as possible. When she’s using she’s distant, she’s angry, usually at me, and she’s deceptive. I don’t love her any less when she’s using, but I really don’t like her. I’m thankful that she’s in recovery, I won’t say that it’s all smooth sailing for her, it’s not. Each and every day she has to work on her disease or it too easily rears it’s ugly head, but she knows this and for at least today, she’s working on it. That’s really how recovering addicts and their loved ones have to look at life – just today. As long as she’s clean and sober today, that’s all that matters. To worry about tomorrow before it gets here just creates worry for nothing. If tomorrow she decides to pick back up, then I’ll deal with it tomorrow, but for today, I’ll take today.

There was a time when I worried that I could have done something different to prevent this addiction from taking hold of her. I wondered if people viewed me as a bad parent because I didn’t do something right. I hated to think that they viewed her as less than because of her addiction. The thought of people looking at my daughter and thinking negative thoughts broke my heart. It took a lot of counseling, lots of discussions with other parents and a whole lot of self-reassurance that I did the best that I could as a parent and that people would judge her and me regardless. That the only way that judgement would have power was if I allowed it to. I knew my daughter, I knew what type of person she was or was not and in the end, that’s all that really mattered.

My goal for writing about this is not to shame her, in fact I celebrate her. I celebrate each and every day she faces these awful demons and decides to fight them rather then letting them win. I have told her on more than one occasion that she is the strongest person I know. I’m not sure that having faced all that she’s faced; assault, shame, ridicule, blame, abandonment, and many more trials, that I’d have the fortitude to pull myself from the depths of what she’s seen. To have been to hell and back, with Satan still licking at your heels and to be present, to be an active parent, a loving daughter, a dependable employee and a kind human being takes a special kind of person. In the same way that I couldn’t foresee my daughter being an addict all those years ago when she was born, I also had no idea of the warrior she’d turn out to be. Am I ashamed of her for where’s she’s been? Nope…as hard as it was to see and to live through, it’s all part of her story…and it’s part of mine. I’m a healthier person today because I had to face what I did with her addiction. She is this amazing warrior princess today because of all she’s seen and done.  I will continue to pray that she stays clean and sober and will support her in that process. While there are no guarantees that she’ll stay clean, I can continue to celebrate her each and every day that she is….and no matter what tomorrow brings, I will always love her regardless.

I Rise ~ Andrea