I grew up in a home where there was
very little mention of alcohol or substance abuse. That's not to say that
we didn't talk about it or discuss the dangers, but our home was free of
alcohol. I remember as a teenager in the early 80's going to a D.A.R.E meeting that our church sponsored.
There were police officers and substance abuse counselors at the meeting.
They warned us of the dangers of substance abuse and helped to educate us about
how our immediate, impulsive choices could affect the rest of our lives.
I remember feeling afraid of ever picking up any type of substance. My
father is a retired police officer and I recall asking him one time what he
would do if I was to ever be arrested. He replied that he would leave me
in jail for the night at least. His reason? If I spent a few days
in jail I would most likely do everything I could to never do it again.
As a first born child and a rule follower, I believed him and for the most part
lived my life on the straight and narrow, never participating in under age
drinking or substance abuse.
I met my husband in the summer of
1994 and married the following summer.
We began dating and were engaged within 8 weeks. It was just one of those things where we knew
that we knew that we wanted to be together.
He was very honest and forthcoming with information about his past. He will tell you that he is an alcoholic, he
has an addictive personality and he can’t be the guy who just has one
beer. He was arrested in Florida in 1984
on a drug possession charge and spent 30 days in county jail because he didn’t
have the money for bail. He was released
and went back home to New Jersey, where we currently reside, and he began to
put his life together.
In 2003, I was pregnant with our
third child when my husband began drinking socially. We had moved back to his hometown and he
began to spend time with his childhood friends, many of whom were still single
and living the party life. At first it
didn’t seem like a problem but as with anyone who is an alcoholic will tell
you, there is no such thing as one drink.
His drinking quickly escalated to an every night event. He was functioning as an alcoholic, trying to
live the life without me knowing, but I knew he was a mess and that things were
going to end badly. In October of 2003,
I discovered that he had been driving around while drinking with our boys in
the car. I was beyond furious. He came home and passed out and I sat in the
kitchen and began wracking my brain for a solution. I contemplated leaving him, but I realized
that I had done nothing wrong and that he should be the one to leave. I called his cellphone, knowing that he would
get the message in the morning when he arrived at work, to tell him that he
needed to leave and get his life together and decide if he wanted a family or
not. It was the hardest thing that I
have ever done.
My husband is a good and kind man and in the daylight the
consequences of his actions were too much for him to bear. He reached out to a friend from our church
who runs a faith-based substance abuse recovery support group for help. Three days later he was on a bus to South
Carolina to spend two months in a
program called U-Turn for Christ. The
program was life-changing for him. He
was humbled and brought back to the simple truth that he is powerless, without
the help of a higher power, over his addiction.
He was restored back to a right body, mind, and spirit during his time
there. He came home a changed man and
has been substance free going on 14 years.
In January of this past year, our 17-year-old son was
arrested for possession of marijuana. It
was disheartening to hear the police officer say, “It’s not that big of a deal,
it’s hardly any weed.” New Jersey is in
the throes of a massive heroin epidemic.
It is killing almost 1,000 people a year. According to the National Institute on DrugAbuse, marijuana is a gateway drug and the thought of my son going from
marijuana to heroin terrified me. As
part of his sentence from the juvenile court, he must attend six months’ worth
of meetings with a juvenile conference committee in our town. This is basically a group of people to whom
he is responsible for completing assigned tasks and remaining accountable to
them through drug tests. One of the
things that he had to attend is called Project Pride. It is a program wherein inmates are given a
forum to speak to teens struggling with addiction issues. They share the ugly truths of addiction and
where substance abuse can lead. Our son
was deeply impacted by the stories that he heard. He remarked, “I can’t believe how it can go
from so good to so bad so fast.”
The thing about this situation is that I was completely unprepared
for it. How could this have
happened? How could I have been so blind
to what was going on? We attend church
regularly, we homeschool our children, they are in boy scouts and involved in
community activities, they play on sports teams, we eat dinner together 4
nights a week. This kind of thing doesn’t
happen to families like ours, right?
Wrong.
So where to go from here?
We started to have open, honest, and sometimes heartbreaking communication
with our son. We have always talked to
our kids. We let them know that they could tell us anything, ask us anything,
good, bad, or ugly, and we would still love them and we would always be honest with
them. But kids make their own decisions
independent of us and we must decide things in those moments that will affect
us all for the rest of our lives. We
never talk to our son from a place of judgement, just from love and acceptance,
but that does not mean that we have not drawn a hard line with him for his own
good. We have told him that once he
turns 18 he will no longer be protected the good people at the juvenile committee
who want to help him, he will be a legal adult and will have to face adult
consequences. We have told him that we
will always be here to help him. He
meets with a counselor weekly now who feels a rehab facility isn’t needed at
this time, but in the future we will keep Elite Rehab Placement in mind. The section on teenage substance abuse on the
Elite website was extremely helpful to us.
I have seen first-hand that addiction can and does ruin
lives. I
am entering nursing school for my second degree and I hope that I can
take the experiences that I have lived through and help someone else in
their darkest time. One of my favorite quotes is from Henry Ward
Beecher, "Compassion will cure more sins than condemnation.” I seek to
always treat people with the compassion that they deserve because
suffering from addiction is nothing to be ashamed of.
