“Be all you can be.” We’ve
all heard the Army’s recruiting slogan.
A week from today my oldest baby (yes she is 26 years old but will always be my baby) will
come home after 62 days in the county detention center. To say it has been easy to leave her there
would be a lie. This has been the
hardest thing outside losing my daddy the day after my 19th
birthday. However, leaving her has
possibly meant the difference between saving her life and losing her to the
painful world of addiction.
Many have had suggestions, judgments and answers; others have
been loving, encouraging and supportive.
Either way I have had to educate myself about addiction and living with
an addict.
So what’s it really like raising a child with an addiction
problem?
To start with it means not having a “normal” life. Certainly it is not the storybook life we all
think about when we hold that little baby in our arms for the first time. No mother holds that precious life in her
arms thinking to herself “I hope this child grows up to be an addict.” No storybook life here. Being that parent means living that Army
slogan of “being more than you ever dreamed you could be.” Trust me most days it feels like you’re at
war.
When you finally wise up to your addict you quickly learn
survival skills. Not just physically but
most definitely you learn emotional survival skills. You learn to love someone that, by all
accounts, is un-lovable. Being close to
an addict is toxic, especially as a parent.
We are not immune to the disease.
We learn to deal with the
behaviors in a way that we protect ourselves and do the best we can to protect
our addicted child.
Despite the pain of loving my daughter, of feeling at times so
hopeless; as a mother I had to dig really deep to hold to hope when my heart
was being torn apart and everything seemed so hopeless. But you NEVER give up – not for your
child or yourself.
Over the past 55 days I’ve learned to find the way to survive in
situations that I had never dreamed I would encounter, like visiting my child
through a glass wall only once a week for 15 minutes. Or, 15 minutes phone calls once or twice a week.
Through some miracle you find a way to detach from the choices
your child has made that go against everything you ever taught them since they
were a baby. You learn to step back and
let your child deal with the consequences of their own choices even when everything within your being wants to fix it for them just "one more time."
Prior to the last 55 days my life consisted of living every
moment, whether awake or asleep, in this love/hate relationship with the
phone. If the phone would ring I would
hear her voice and know she is alive; or if the phone rings my heart would skip
a beat, my stomach would flip flop and my mind would wonder: Is this the call
that will tell my baby is dead? Either way this is torture for any parent and learning to live the Serenity Prayer becomes foremost in life.
For this parent jail is good, freedom is dangerous. My daughter being in police custody has
possibly saved her life. I choose to accept that God has given her the opportunity to change her life. A new beginning.
One week from today my daughter will come home and begin the
journey of her life. This blog will be
my journey as I walk the road of recovery by her side. You see I might have grown tired and frustrated; but I never
gave up HOPE.
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I
cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the
difference.”
