Addicted Like Me Read online

  I was eleven years old when my mother died. I was left alone with my father, and I truly don’t think he had a clue what to do with me. I was sent away during the first summer after my mother’s death to stay with relatives, where I overheard many discussions about my future. They spoke about where I would live and who would take care of me. I ended up staying with my father in the end. Unfortunately, he was an emotionally immature and angry man. He had no idea how to communicate with an eleven-year-old child. My father had rarely done any parenting while I was growing up, always on the outside of our inner family circle. Sometimes, I wonder if it might have been so difficult for my dad to take care of me because of his own abandonment. Nobody cared for him when he was left in the situation I was left in following my mother’s death. Perhaps he didn’t know how to go back to that place in his life.

  The only thing we had in common was the fact that we were both devastated by the death of my mother. My dad coped by getting drunk and yelling. I pulled within myself to cope. Since my dad rarely made it home after work because of his drinking habit, I spent a lot of time alone in the house, in my room vacillating between sadness, loneliness, and fear, never knowing if or when my father would show up and start screaming at me. What had once been a home filled with a vibrant family now felt like an empty shell. My mom’s family had distanced themselves from us by then, due to their own grief, and I felt so isolated by this distance. That’s when the addictions began. I recall starting to eat when I wasn’t hungry to try and feel better, which seemed to numb the pain. The legacy of addiction that had belonged to my father and grandfather was becoming my beast, too. I blocked out a lot of what happened during those years, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get away from feelings of shame.

  My father constantly raged at me. I remember one night he came home and got me out of bed on a school night, at two in the morning. He was angry because the medicine chest in the bathroom where I kept my makeup was too messy. He threw all of my makeup away and made me sit at the kitchen table with him, where he screamed at me and would not allow me to speak. He told me I was a slut because I wore makeup. He told me that I was worthless and would never amount to anything. My dad pounded his fists on the table and said that my mother would be sick if she could see what a mess I had turned out to be. None of his kids had gotten a higher education, he told me, and by God I was going to be the one to go to college. The things he screamed at me were full of contradictions. My father yelled for several hours that night, repeating the same issues while I sat silently in a chair.

  If I started to speak during his rages, my dad would scream at me to shut up. My father was a master at using my shame to punish and control me. The result was that I ended up feeling guilty about everything, including my own existence. I let the family illness of addiction consume me to escape the shame I felt heaped upon me by my dad, and just to escape from myself. I was ashamed of who I was. These outbursts happened often with my father. I remember fluctuating during them from feeling afraid to feeling hurt to feeling giddy, like I was floating around the room, and sometimes I just wanted to laugh out loud because it all seemed so ridiculous. I had to control myself, though, no matter what I felt, because I would have really gotten it if I showed my emotions to my dad.

  I saved my sorrow for school, where I remember I would make my way through the hallways on days following my father’s rages, dragging around so much shame, guilt, hurt, and fear that I felt like a walking, open sore. My father never let my wounds heal. At the time I did not realize that this was what I could expect out of life as the years would go by, and I would marry a chaotic man who also opened the wounds I nursed and caused them to fester. The only time I can remember feeling any type of hope or peace was when I would go and sit in church sometimes by myself. I felt comforted in church, thinking that somehow, someway, things were going to work out. Then I would return home, and that hope would vanish.

  I came home to find every kind of explosion you can imagine over the years, like the time I walked into my room and found my dresser drawers dumped out on the middle of the floor. My father had been going through them, had decided they were too messy, and had dumped them out to punish me. I have no idea what he was looking for or why he did it. I never knew what was going to happen next with my dad. I felt like I was betting like he used to on the odds that he would roll a good pair of dice, but it rarely happened, if ever. What I began to understand about the stories of my father and my grandfather is that their stories were about detachment. Each man detached from his emotions by using alcohol to numb the pain caused by living. By the time their beast found me, I had also detached from my life. Everything in my world just seemed to be happening somewhere outside of myself, which is why I was able to overlook the effects of my addiction for so long, even after Jason’s death. I spent months recovering from this, even healing from my own physical injuries caused by Rick’s crash. I resorted to pilfering though people’s medicine cabinets after the doctor would no longer prescribe pain medication or tranquilizers for my hysteria, and I stole pain pills as often as I could find them. Rick’s drinking and pot smoking escalated at this time, and our lives spun more and more out of control.

  We grieved in very different ways for Jason. Rick was extremely emotional about the death and blamed himself. I was stuck in denial and didn’t want to talk about it. I turned to school. I threw myself into accounting studies and graduated with a 3.6 grade point average, though my marriage by this time was unraveling rapidly due to addiction, denial, guilt, and stress. Rick became romantically interested in a young girl. This was the knockout punch for me. She called me to say that my husband was in love with her, and that I deserved better. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  I never recovered from this blow to the marriage. I asked Rick to leave the house, which he did, and I knew the marriage was over. The day after Rick left, I discovered I was pregnant again. I reversed my decision and took him back, deciding to give the marriage one more chance because I didn’t believe I could make it without him, not with Lauren and my son, Ryan, on the way. I was scared, exhausted, and overwhelmed. Shortly after Ryan’s birth, Rick took a job in Arizona, and I hoped this would be a fresh start. We continued on for a few years together, but the marriage could not survive. It was extremely chaotic when we separated. Rick got heavily into meth use, which caused me to live in fear and anxiety over what he would try to do next. Before the divorce was over, Rick repeatedly threatened me, slashed my tires, stole my car, and beat me up.

  I didn’t feel the weight of the disappointing circumstances I had created for myself until so many of them were heaped upon me at once. I had truly developed an emotional numbness that was a coping mechanism. To the outside world, I suppose I came across as insensitive because of this detachment, but dealing with real life and real emotions was just too painful an activity. The only way I could be happy was to self-medicate, so that is what I did. In recovery work for this habit, as an adult, I began to put the stories of my father and grandfather together with my behaviors. Growing up affected by their alcoholism molded my character in their likenesses and also taught me to make the decision they had both made to deny the sensation of pain.

  I hated that my father was an alcoholic, yet I also chose to abuse alcohol and drugs. Minutes after high school graduation, I bolted from his house, yet I also chose to be involved in a lifestyle that created relationship problems because of the other addicted people in my world. I felt a huge wave of shame and humiliation when I began to see these parallels between my father, my grandfather, and me. How could I have made so many destructive choices? I had just wanted to feel better, like they had, and yet I had played a role in the wrecking of my relationships, just like they had. Maybe, I sometimes still think, had I not been drinking that day, Jason would be alive. Perhaps my dad thought the exact same thing about my mom, believing that had he been there she might have hung on a little bit more.

  The legacy of addiction that I inherited from my
father and grandfather was also repeated on Rick’s side of the family. Although I never saw his parents drink, I knew that both of his grandfathers had drinking problems, and one of them had owned a bar. It seemed that the disease had skipped a generation and now grew in Rick, which led him to make destructive choices when it came to the kids and me. After we divorced, he constantly put them in danger. One weekend, when Lauren and Ryan were visiting with their dad, I got a call from Lauren. It was a Sunday afternoon, and she said I needed to come pick them up because Rick was passed out. They could not wake him up and didn’t know what to do. At the time, Lauren was eight. Ryan was six years old. “My God,” I thought, “these are babies. What the heck was he thinking?”

  I was frustrated and upset as I made the drive to deal with the situation. This type of thing became a pattern, and I became concerned about what the children were being exposed to. I had hit rock bottom with the addiction and insanity in our family when I was with Rick, and when I was thirty I decided to return to church, where I began to realize that I was screwed up and it was time to get help. Because I seldom experienced acceptable behavior growing up, I thought unacceptable behavior was normal, which led to chaos and confusion in my life and relationships. In my initial recovery work, I sought help around the issues I faced as a result of having grown up in an alcoholic home. Early on I recognized how destructive the consequences of addiction were on the kids when they spent time with their dad, and I knew that my recovery was a critical factor for us in my attempt to create a stable home environment. Although I made the decision then to stop using illegal drugs, it would be twelve more years before I would fully realize the extent of my own addiction and become totally sober.

  Rick and I had a joint custody agreement where I provided the primary residence, so it wasn’t a choice of whether or not they saw their dad. Rick got to have them every other weekend and for six weeks during the summer. Lauren and Ryan didn’t disclose much about what went on when they were with Rick unless they had to, and there were many things I wouldn’t learn about until much later, which only served to substantiate my fears. At the time, I was afraid for their safety every time they were with Rick. Being the custodial single parent carried a lot of responsibility. I needed Rick’s help, and I remember thinking that it just seemed so unfair that I couldn’t rely on him. Between his beast of addiction, my need to work to support the kids, and the decisions I had made to work on my own recovery through meetings, I was overwhelmed and exhausted by the time I had to face the disappointments I had created.

  Then, there were the letters to Lauren and Ryan that arrived from Rick through the years. These were postmarked from various jails and prisons where he had been sentenced, due to arrests for driving under the influence. My heart would break for my children as each letter arrived for them. The legacy of addiction continued for us all in these notes, in which Rick repeated promises I knew he could not keep, like that he was truly going to be there for the kids and make up for the times he had let them down. The sad thing is that I think he meant every word he said. He just couldn’t deliver.

  The exposure of the kids to our family story of addiction only increased after Rick married his third wife, Sylvia, with whom he opened a new chapter in the book. She was violent to the children. Lauren was twelve and Ryan ten years old when I had to come and rescue them from her abuse. About three weeks into the summer I received a panicked phone call from Lauren, claiming Sylvia had gotten physical with them. They had escaped the apartment but needed me to come and pick them up. On the forty-mile drive to rescue my kids, I was practically hyperventilating. When I arrived, Rick was standing in front of the apartment complex where he and Sylvia lived, and though Lauren and Ryan were there, too, all Rick could say was that he didn’t really know what was going on. He just shrugged his shoulders, walked off, and shook his head.

  The kids told me that Sylvia had kicked Ryan and had thrown him up against a wall. They had told Rick what had happened, but he hadn’t believed them. I thought about my father and Nora, and how I would overhear her force my father to say that he loved her more than he loved me. I could never tell my father about the way Nora mistreated me, because I believe he would have sided with her, just like Rick had done with Sylvia, leaving my kids to live my story all over again. The jealousy of the alcoholic, abusive stepmother was playing itself out in yet another generation of our family. I filed a police report against Sylvia, yet I was told that without physical bruises on the children there was not much that the police could do. The police recommended that I file a complaint with Child Protective Services, which I did, but at this point I knew I could not count on Rick to be there consistently for Lauren and Ryan unless I wanted to subject them to more of the same.

  I know now that Lauren began smoking cigarettes shortly after her dad disappeared from her life. She became an angry young preteen. I had bought a home in a nicer part of town, an act I was very proud of as a single mother, to have come so far from my own story of addiction. This move caused two major changes for my children. One was that their favorite baby sitter no longer lived next door. The second change was that Lauren and Ryan had to change schools twice during this time, due to a job offer I received in Colorado. I decided to take the job, which caused us all to move a second time after our split from Rick. The first signs of trouble began brewing then. Lauren and Ryan began spending time with new friends, a sister and brother, Christy and Danny, who lived nearby. Not long after, Lauren started talking back to me, doing obvious things to provoke me, and becoming difficult to deal with.

  I didn’t know it was addiction with her at first. I remember believing it was regular teenager things. Once, she took the dog out for a walk and did not come back until late into the night. When I asked her what had been going on, she screamed at me, “Leave me the hell alone and get out of my face!” Lauren stomped up the stairs and slammed her bedroom door. But around the house, there were other signs. She wasn’t doing her chores, and when I would confront her about this, she would give me nasty remarks and attitude. It wasn’t like her to be so angry, so often. I was beginning to wonder what the heck was wrong. I was frustrated, because I really needed her and Ryan to be responsible; I needed their help, and it just wasn’t happening. I sometimes wonder if Lauren would not have become totally out of control at this point had I followed my gut and provided constant supervision, but then again I think maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. Addiction is powerful when it has been maturing silently in the next generation, especially in a hurting girl like Lauren, or a hurting girl like I had been, years before.

  CHAPTER 3

  OUR SPIRAL DOWN

  I KNEW SOMETHING was off when Lauren’s behavior changed. Still, it was challenging to figure out how to handle this suspicion. She was too old for a baby sitter by this time, but she did not seem trustworthy enough to be left alone. I counted on school starting up again to make her life busy and distracted, and I hoped things would go back to the way they had been with her when things were good in Arizona. That was before I had taken the job in Colorado that moved us away from the friends that each of us had counted on for support. I couldn’t have been more mistaken believing that distraction can stop an illness that is passed on through the family. It was about to flare up, not settle down.

  Lauren went into ninth grade at a high school near our home. Ryan went into seventh grade that year, at the middle school. He was doing poorly with his grades and started telling me he was sick many mornings and unable to go to school. Too often I let him stay home. I called the house frequently and stopped by to check on him on my lunch hour, but he was already doing drugs by this time and purposely evaded my calls and knew how to avoid me when I came over. Then calls from the vice principal started coming. I started by trying to talk to Ryan about it; then I yelled at him, grounded him, and even dragged him to school on days he wasn’t supposed to be staying home. I felt powerless.

  I couldn’t make a consistent change in Ryan, so I sought help and finally to
ok him to a psychologist. From there we were referred to a psychiatrist for an evaluation, because it was suspected that a psychological disorder lay at the root of his behaviors. The psychiatrist asked Ryan questions and concluded he had ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder). The psychiatrist put Ryan on medication, and I sent him back to school, where his attendance and grades improved considerably. I thought we had solved the problem as quickly as it had flared up. During this lull, Ryan called me up at work to say he had spilled a bunch of his pills into a mess of Kool-Aid, had to throw the pills down the drain, and needed me to get him more drugs. I really didn’t realize at the time that this story was a sign. We hadn’t scratched the surface of the problem at all.

  I had gone ahead and gotten Ryan’s prescription refilled because it was one of those stories I just had a funny feeling about but dismissed. It’s a fleeting thought that came back to haunt me. I found out he had been passing his ADHD pills around to friends so they could get high. I didn’t listen to my instinct or see my own historical pattern repeating in my kid. I know now that the feeling I had about Ryan’s story wasn’t odd. The feeling was familiar. I had lived the same story before, passing out pain pills I stole from my dad. I believe I chose denial instead of deciding to look deeper into what was going on with Ryan. I hoped that things would just get better on their own, which is almost always a mistake, because they rarely do and in our case did not. School administrators started calling about Lauren, who was about to take the starring role in our story of addiction.