They are totally onboard with me and actually apologized for going and picking her up but I can understand how hard this must be for them too.
Yours is a remarkable family.
This is how D H's mom is, too.
I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach when I found out she was back in our hometown because I just knew she would pop up somewhere with our family.
In a way, this is a good thing. Everyone now has the time (it is not winter, yet) and the opportunity to learn how to do this. Loving an addicted child is a hard thing. We have to go through so many layers of denial and hope and belief with our kids before we can understand what our best response should be.
Then, we need time, and we need to fall apart a few times, before we can know that what we thought was happening is really what is happening.
Then, it takes more time to know the words to say to reclaim our own lives. We begin to establish boundaries we never imagined we would need to establish.
It is a strange time, and we go back and forth between knowing we are handling our situations in the best way for us and for our child, and those times when we fall apart entirely.
Nothing is simple or easy.
It helps me to remember that it is the situation that is bad. Not me, not my child, not the neighbors who gawk and turn away or the friends who count their blessings on the heads of our addicted kids.
What I can tell you is that detachment parenting seems to be working better for us than anything else we have tried. Even when the kids continued on their same terrible paths, knowing that it was okay for me to detach from the emotions surrounding what was happening to them helped me survive the hellishness of it intact.
That's why I am always saying there comes a place where we decide, pretty coldly too, to survive it.
We have to come to that place, or we will all go spiraling down. Our children will be old, we will still be caring for them. Only, they will be old addicts, and we will be vulnerable elderly parents, still denying the truth of what has happened to our children.
So, we have to be wise, and we have to be wary. That doesn't feel right, either. Trust used to be a given, between family members. That phrase, "Addiction is a powerful master" is absolutely true.
Again, it helps me to remember that it is the situation that is bad. Not me, not my child.
That is how I love my children, addicted or not.
Detachment parenting is working for us.
It is harder to be honest, at first. It is harder to say no, at first. It is really hard to know what to say "no" to. Guilt an eat us alive.
But here on the site, we are all struggling through the various layers of acceptance and detachment theory.
And that is how I know you can do it, too.
It is a hard thing, but there is nothing easy about battling an addiction. Over time, if the addiction is very destructive, the triumph becomes loving our children and ourselves anyway.
That is what we are after ~ or at least, what I see as my guiding light, as my win.
To love and respect and hold compassion for myself and my family and my addicted kids.
I ache for my child that is beautiful and only 18 years old and so capable of living a good life and she just won't - she still sees us as the problem and herself as a victim and it's just exhausting and frustrated.
Yes.
I could use some re-assurance today that I AM doing the right thing for both her and myself....days like today make me question my path although I can already see how peaceful my life is without her drama and abuse and I feel like I deserve that peace. I also feel, at times, that I'm giving up on her and on my responsibilities as a mother and that just makes me crazy..the doubt and the guilt.
Heart to heart, know that we have been where you are. None of us knows how to do this. We are flying by the seats of our pants through something so destructive we cannot wrap our heads around what is happening.
And yet, somehow, we expect ourselves to do "the right thing".
It is very hard.
We are right here. This site is a godsend, and I am so grateful it exists, every single day.
Even when things are going well for our family, I am so happily grateful for this site.
You said she had been kicked out of where she was staying, this may or may not be true but I would ask her why and you may or may not get the truth but it offers an opportunity to point out to her that her choices are creating chaos not only for her but your family. I would also point out to her that it is selfish to put her grandparents through this kind of stress and worry or you for that matter. Of course if you choose to do this you will be engaging her which will most likely not be pretty.
It would take courage to open this conversation, but the end result would be strength and clarity for you both. The more certain our addicted children are that there is no one to help or support them, the more we can speak those words that tell them they are destroying themselves and we will not help them do it or be party to it by pretending right along with them that what is happening is okay, the more chance the child has to turn things around.
I think this is true.
I never did see it this way for the longest time. I was always so sure loving them more was the answer. Even when I didn't feel like I even knew or respected or cherished or even liked whichever of the kids was most deeply into his or her addiction, I chose to reflect an attitude of loving acceptance
to the point that I destroyed myself because I was lying.
Our loved one's addiction affects us all in the most horrible ways.
The truth can be so ugly though, that it is too scary to let it be true. We fight it with everything we have. I think that is the wrong way. It did not help us, for me to do that. Our story is still an ugly, hurtful story, but at least it is an honest story. (In most aspects ~ I am still working through it.)
The difference, now that I am trying so hard to see what is really happening, is that I feel such compassion for all of us, and so much admiration for our courage.
This is unbelievably hard, what we are all doing, here on the site.
so frustrating to know that some people don't agree with how I am handling this and feel sorry for her being out on the street.
It is. Over time, you will know to be so grateful, for their sakes, that they do not know what you know.
That is what happened to me.
It drives me batty that I know people whose children are successful. I just wish they would shut up about it, once. But they don't, of course. They are legitimately proud of their children's accomplishments. Somehow, believe it or not, telling them all about how one of my children managed to score an entry level job and stuck with it for a whole two weeks does not represent, in comparison to their stupid kids with all their doctorates and etcetera ad nauseum, the triumph I know it to be, for my child.
So, I pretty much smile and wish I had at least a decent picture of one of my children. But when one is bald headed and pierced and tattooed (MY DAUGHTER) and one is not even speaking to me, let alone sending me pictures, this too gets to be a difficult thing.
There is nothing more to do than laugh at the ludicrousness of where we have all come to be.
Or, cry.
To talk to her grandmother like that is so infuriating and I am moritifed that she had to deal with that. My mother in law told me it wasn't my fault; that my Difficult Child came to her and she chose to help her for the night but that she told her she would never do it again. To that my Difficult Child said, 'Yeah'.
Here is a story about my sister and her difficult child child. So, the child was in some kind of lock-down place. She was transported from there to the airport, where my sister and her husband would meet the child and take custody of her to get her safely to the treatment facility they had chosen in another state.
As is so often the case, my sister ran into a friend at the airport.
Heh.
You know what's coming next, right?
So, the friend, always so well dressed and spiffy and with perfect children, says: "Is your husband coming in?" Unaware that her cover would soon be blown to hell, my sister said: "I'm waiting for my daughter." The well dressed woman smiled a perfect smile and asked which daughter. (My sister has two daughters.) At that moment, as fate would undeniably have it, my sister's daughter and those who had her in custody arrived.
The daughter was screaming and kicking and fighting. Spotting her mother, she raised her middle finger as far as the handcuffs would allow, screaming bloody murder the whole time.
"Why, there she is, now." my sister said.
True story.
"Oh hell, I'll call them for you and tell them you're my daughter and find out what's going on"
When our son was little, I was a Cub Scout den mother. When our son was in the beginning phases of addiction, one of the moms whose son I was den mother for called, offering to bail our son out of jail if we didn't have the money.
If we didn't have the money.
I explained we had decided to leave him there as an object lesson. (Though the charges had to do with a headlight ticket, the police knew exactly what they were doing. Though it was all unspoken, they were trying to demonstrate where our son would end up for real one day if he did not stop what he was doing ~ which, we have since learned, had to do with transporting illegal things between cities. But I digress.)
And I forgot where I was going with this story, too.
Oh.
That mother's son eventually wound up serving time in prison. Mine never did.
Knock on wood.
Fervently.
I speak from experience on this, my son has told so many lies about me and my husband. It's very painful to think other people actually believe the lies.
Yes.
Here again, there was true comfort in: I am glad you do not know what I know.
After awhile, my reputation or whatever ~ none of that stuff matters in the least. Maybe, it has been burnt out of me.
There is a quote that goes like this: "Perhaps, grandmother, the phoenix cries, as it burns."
It's like that, I think.
That is from Charles Williams. Descent Into Hell.
Charles is my favorite writer.
:O)
***
Figuring out in advance what we would need to see from our child before we would help them helped us maintain our boundaries without losing our sanity or falling into depression.
These are very real dangers, for us.
But you are here with us, now. One way or another, we will get one another through the worst of it.
Cedar
