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  Her vice principal had let me know she had attitude problems with her teachers. I decided to take her to a psychologist, like I had taken Ryan, to try to get to the root of her problem. The psychologist felt that there was something going on but could not figure it out, though she was concerned enough to recommend Lauren come back and believed maybe then we would get to the bottom of Lauren’s behavior. My relationship with Lauren got worse as I took her to these appointments, but we continued going to counseling anyway. That school year, she failed most of her classes. I was concerned, but I didn’t press harder to turn her grades around because our family was already going through problems with Ryan, they were both seeing counselors, and I felt overwhelmed. I believed I was doing all I could to deal with the situation. I didn’t know what other steps to take.

  As I tried to keep us all together, Lauren began to spend more time with Christy, the new friend she had made in our neighborhood. I had mixed feelings about this girl. Christy and her brother, Danny, came as a pair. He had clicked with Ryan while Christy and Lauren hit it off, but I sensed the four of them together could be trouble. During the second semester of school, what I sensed might happen, did. Lauren and Christy got caught smoking and ditching school, and both continued to have attitude problems with their teachers. I tried to talk to Lauren about this, but she was only rude to me. She would deny that she was agitating her teachers. She actually claimed it was they who were out to get her. At home, Lauren began to stay out later than I allowed. If I got upset, she would just start arguing with me. I also started to notice that she had been steadily losing weight.

  I should have paid more attention to the weight loss because of the sign it was pointing to. Had I realized that drugs and alcohol were involved, it might have dawned on me that her using had become more important to her than her health. The behavior issues with her, though, were such a distraction that it was all I could do to deal with the daily challenges that were in my face. One night she didn’t come home at all, which scared me to death. The possibility that my daughter had been kidnapped, raped, or murdered made me sick to my stomach. I was angry and asked myself what she could have possibly been thinking to do something like that. I had to call the police and file a report. I didn’t sleep all night, and in the morning I had to make a difficult call to my boss. My life with the kids had escalated to a point where I could no longer keep hiding. Until Lauren disappeared, I had been able to manage our family without it affecting my work, but after she vanished it pushed the two worlds into collision. My boss had no idea when I told her that I was having trouble with my children.

  After I called my boss, I phoned the police again and called the psychologist that Lauren and I had been seeing. She recommended Lauren be hospitalized in an adolescent psychiatric hospital. I was sick with worry, and Lauren was still missing. Only Ryan was able to help me find her in the end, and it turned out she had run away with Christy, so I called her mother and we decided to work together to find the girls. Christy’s mom was extremely angry. We joined forces as allies at first, but it wasn’t long before she turned against me, blaming Lauren as the troublemaker.

  In the meantime I called the hospital. I made arrangements to admit Lauren as soon as I could get her back, but I had concluded by then that the girls were not going to be easy to find. It wasn’t going to do me any good to sit home day after day, waiting until Lauren decided to come home. I went back to work, but I felt like an emotional mess trying to function at my job. On day three, I couldn’t take it anymore. Christy’s mother and I got together again to search for the girls. We went to the house of a girl whom we heard Lauren and Christy had been hanging around with and knocked on the door. Her teenage brother answered and got nasty with us when we asked to come in and look around, which gave me the feeling that something was up. I listened to this feeling, pulled around the corner of the house, and staked it out.

  Within twenty minutes, a car pulled into the driveway. Out of the front door of the house bolted our two runaway daughters, hell-bent to enter the waiting car and continue their spree. I am sure they had been told we were close on their heels. I pulled up behind the car after I saw the girls make a run for it, so that the vehicle couldn’t back out. Christy’s mom jumped out of our car and started screaming at her daughter. The chaos got the attention of the entire neighborhood, which forced us to explain what was going on with our kids. I asked the neighbors to call the police, and within three minutes, a fire truck, an ambulance, and two police cars were on the scene. The girls were released to our custody. I tried to take Lauren to the hospital, just as I had planned, though of course word had gotten back to her, from Ryan, that she was headed for inpatient. Her first words to me when she got in the car were “I am not going to any fucking hospital!”

  She demanded that I stop at a gas station so she could use the bathroom. She screamed that she needed a cigarette and told me she wanted me to stop at the store. I had given in so many times in the past when she had demanded and negotiated things, but not this time. I suddenly realized I had turned a corner as I began to drive. My life had been consumed by this obsession over the drama with my children. Although I had made some efforts with counselors for them, I was at a point where I was ready to do whatever it took to get things turned around, no matter how uncomfortable that would make our lives. This was a major breakthrough for me. I kept silent as I drove Lauren straight to the hospital without any stops.

  She asked me to please not do it when I began to check her in, but I didn’t know what else to do. Lauren needed more help than I could give her. I walked her in, and then she was led away. I left the hospital feeling frozen, yet relieved. The staff had told me to go home and try to get some sleep. This is when I began to connect our story to the legacy of addiction. I came back the next afternoon to meet with the doctor assigned to Lauren, who began to complete a family history chart for us. I noted addictions in the lives of Rick, my father, my grandfather, and myself, and as I talked, the doctor just shook her head and said, “Wow . . . no wonder.”

  Lauren was brought in the room after that. She was extremely upset, sobbing like a baby, begging that I take her home. It was a welcome change to see her vulnerable, with her walls down. She threw herself on me and told me that she was afraid and that there were some very scary people in that place. Lauren promised that she wouldn’t run away again if I would only let her come home. I wanted to believe her, so I asked the psychologist what we should do. She said that taking Lauren home would be a bad idea. It was incredibly hard to tell Lauren that she needed to stay, but I did, and immediately this changed her whole demeanor. She became angry and sullen, the exact same Lauren I was used to seeing at home, which broke my heart.

  Before being discharged, Lauren spent one week at this hospital. I felt horrible to have left her in a place that she felt was scary. I felt like a train had run over me. I felt such a burden from the choice I had made, and still I needed to trust the professionals at that time. They recommended Lauren not return to the house after her release, so instead I arranged to have her stay in Montana, with Rick’s parents. I still called to discuss the kids with Rick; he went in and out of sobriety, and the responsible phases could sometimes accompany them. After talking the situation through with him, he agreed that sending Lauren to his parents’ house was a good option. She had always been very close to her grandparents, and especially her grandmother. They agreed to take her for a few months after we called to let them know.

  I picked Lauren up from the hospital when she was discharged, driving her directly to the airport, where I put her on a plane to Montana. She was relieved to be out of the hospital and excited to go to see her grandparents. I was just grateful that she was safe. Lauren did great in Montana as far as I knew, although I wasn’t getting the total picture. She didn’t want to talk to me when I would call her. She was upset over what I had done. Her grandmother told me this, and she sent photographs of Lauren that were shot by her grandfather. In the photos I could see s
he had gained some of her weight back and looked really healthy, but Lauren would later tell me she was bored in Montana. I didn’t see it. I saw a girl in the pictures who was happier than she had been before, which made me feel so relieved. Ryan was at home during this time. He made it through the rest of the school year with passing grades, and things were fairly quiet at our house until the next school year.

  The summer vacation passed more easily than I expected it to. I had been dreading that I would have to plan what to do with both kids, as Lauren would be back from Montana by that time because I couldn’t leave her with her grandparents forever. Leaving either of them home alone while I worked, however, was not an option, so I sent them both down to Arizona for summer break. Rick was living there, and the kids spent a good part of that summer with their godmother, Mary. The hope that this quiet summer would somehow last died away as soon as the school year began again, in Colorado. It didn’t take long before I was getting phone calls that Lauren had ditched school, was having attitude problems, and was failing her classes, just like before.

  I couldn’t figure out what was happening to my family that was causing all this chaos. I had tried the steps I knew were supposed to reverse behaviors and control uncontrollable kids. I enforced consequences as best I could, took the kids to doctors, and had used the help of an inpatient hospital to deal with the behavioral issues. None of this had worked. I was missing work often by this time to meet with school officials and counselors on behalf of Lauren or Ryan. I felt helpless. One night in my bedroom, I got on my knees and prayed for knowledge that would help and guide my family. I got my answer the next afternoon. A marijuana pipe was lying on my couch. I kept thinking I’m shocked! Even though the kids said the pipe belonged to Christy, clearly I knew that my kids were doing drugs. I felt overwhelmed by disbelief and disappointment. I thought we had gotten away from the addicts in our lives. I had worked so hard to change our circumstances through all of the counseling and recovery work. Creating and maintaining a stable home environment for my children had been my highest priority. Now the disease of addiction was right back in our lives and worse than ever. How could this possibly be happening? I had to wake up to the fact that nothing was out of the range of possibility. Everything I’d refused to believe about Lauren and Ryan’s behavior and all the insanity that went along with it was starting to make sense.

  I accepted the pipe story that Lauren and Ryan told me, that it belonged to Christy. She played along and said that the pipe was hers. Then she begged me not to tell her mother and said that she knew she needed help. I was easily impressed by these kinds of seemingly honest, heartfelt reactions. Rather than look for the lie in Christy’s story, I was hopeful that maybe if my kids could become as honest as she was, there might be progress for us all. The kids strung me along with this hope for a long time. I had taken Christy back to our house on the day I found the pipe to sit her down with Lauren, Ryan, and her brother, Danny, to ask everyone to be honest. I gave Christy and Danny my word I would not tell their parents and shared stories about what happens to kids that get hooked on drugs. I revealed things about my own past drug use and told everyone about the accident that killed Jason. When I thought they were on board, I even said that I planned to use my time to find recovery meetings for them all. I found out much later on that none of them really wanted help. They just wanted to appease me. It amazes me that I was so blind to the lies and manipulation, because I had done some of the same types of things to my dad when I was a teen.

  The irony of family addiction is that when you are faced with a loved one’s addiction, you go through the typical denial, anxiety, enabling, and fierce need to control that anyone does who is facing the situation for the first time, or has not struggled with addiction personally. I was going to save them all! Not. I was recovered from drugs at the time, but even I was not sober yet from alcohol. I was coming from my level of understanding at the time, which had not progressed to the point where I was able to admit that all of us were addicts: Lauren, Ryan, and me. Lauren and I remained in therapy, and after this pipe incident came out in one of our sessions, the counselor pulled me aside and recommended that I tell Christy and Danny’s mom. The counselor told me I really didn’t have the right to keep such important information from a parent, no matter what I had previously promised. So I followed through. Once I did, the kids were furious. Christy and Danny no longer trusted me, and Lauren and Ryan were especially angry, which only strengthened the addictive beast in them.

  I called my best friend, Shirley, who was back in Phoenix, when this happened, because I hoped she could give me some ideas on where I should go to get help. She told me about the Tough Love program. It helps parents deal with children that have behavior problems. Shirley had been using Tough Love techniques with her daughter, Lindsey, who had experienced similar problems to Lauren’s. I started attending weekly Tough Love meetings after I spoke to Shirley, and I learned I did not have to accept unacceptable behavior from my children. I learned techniques to draw boundaries between the kids and myself and how to run the house as a parent, not a friend. Of course, when one person in a family starts to change for the better, everyone else gets crazy. Lauren and Ryan started staying out later on school nights as a way to react to the fact that our system had begun to change, but because the town we lived in had a curfew set for adolescents, I could make calls to the police when they were out past curfew. This floored the kids. They could not believe I would do such an awful thing to them. I became the enemy, and our situation turned into a war.

  I had started to feel a little better as I gained the upper hand, sure, but Lauren and Ryan seemed to be getting worse despite the Tough Love techniques. Both children were busted at their schools for drugs. They were failing classes still, ditching school, and often suspended. Neither could do anything without receiving a consequence from me, which gave me the sense I was taking some of my power back, and yet I believe the kids were actually happy each time they were suspended. It allowed them to stay home alone and do what they wanted. It actually felt like more of a punishment for me than for them.

  Lauren became a thief during this time to sustain her addictive behaviors. In her room, I found a drawer full of pictures of a family I did not know along with a wallet that belonged to a neighbor. I didn’t understand how it had gotten into my daughter’s room, because it wasn’t my first instinct to believe Lauren was committing crimes. I took the wallet and put it in the neighbor’s mailbox without leaving a note or an explanation. The familiar numb feeling from childhood came over me. I remembered that my addiction was no longer mine to control when I began to steal from my father. I was deep in denial that Lauren could have reached this stage. One day shortly after, I went down in the basement and thought I saw a dead body on the couch. I threw the covers back, but underneath there were just some pillows and a wadded-up blanket. It made me realize the level of insanity I was living in that by then I practically expected to discover a dead body in my basement, because I had discovered everything else.

  I decided it was time to get specific help for at least Lauren’s drug problems, and I called a counseling office that specialized in substance abuse. I started taking her and Ryan to the office every Saturday morning. The counselor spent individual time with me as well. She encouraged me to do new things for myself, like take an exercise class and try to get out of the house more often to socialize with friends. The counselor also told me to try not to be anxious over what I could not control. If I could completely accept my inability to control Lauren and deal with my own fear and controlling impulses instead, I could open myself up to learning positive actions. Regardless of how I might be contributing to problems Lauren had, the choices she was making were 100 percent her own.

  It took time before I was ready to embrace this philosophy. After going to the sessions for several months, I began to feel like I was making progress in accepting this fact, but Lauren had continued with business as usual. We seemed to be on opposite paths. Becau
se a change hadn’t occurred in her behaviors, our counselor sat me down and told me that she had done as much as she could to help Lauren. The counselor informed me that both of my kids were actively using drugs and were unwilling to change, because they liked their lifestyle too much. She recommended that I hospitalize them for substance abuse, so I called our health insurance company to see if this was possible. The insurance company put me in touch with a local hospital, where I took Lauren and Ryan to be evaluated on the same day I called.

  The drive seemed like an eternity, as the kids sat sullenly in the back seat. The hospital decided that Lauren and Ryan should both be admitted into the day treatment program. I was to drop them off daily, at nine, and return to pick them up at four in the afternoon, Monday through Friday for six weeks. This was terrible for me because of my work schedule. The hospital was a forty-five-minute drive from our house, which meant I had to tell my boss that I needed a leave of absence or to work only partial days. Still sympathetic to my situation, my boss told me to come in late every morning and leave early if I needed to. She said not to worry about taking a leave, but even with this flexibility, it was a rough six weeks. The most frustrating thing was the fact that in the hospital nobody was able to control Lauren or Ryan better than I had.

  Lauren was caught smoking during her first week of the program, and then she admitted to smoking pot in the mornings before we left the house each day during week two. Ryan fared only slightly better, because he was diagnosed with signs of depression and put on new medication. We had believed he was suffering from ADHD, but this change in his evaluation led to a new prescription drug. I went along with it, although I was unsure at the time because our previous doctor had been so adamant regarding Ryan’s ADHD diagnosis. I remembered that when I felt depressed at his age, I had used marijuana, and I wondered if Ryan’s issue might be similar. I began to wonder if any of these professionals actually knew what they were really dealing with.