What I've accomplished is raising a spoiled brat who thinks rules don't apply to him. Just makes me sick.
I do agree the drug use makes everything so much worse.
My children are older than yours. What I have seen over the times they are not using is that the child I raised is still in there. When they are using, they are like strangers in the way they think and react to things and respond to us. That was a valuable thing for me to know. It helped me to understand I had not raised a child who turned to drugs because I had parented badly, but that my child was trapped in an addiction (or if not addicted, was using drugs), and that it was the addiction (or the drug use) that had changed my child.
There is a big difference.
We can let go of guilt once we get that piece about how drug use changes our children, and about how addiction turns them into cruel, manipulative strangers.
We have not failed. Our children have been trapped in something they don't understand any more than we do.
But they are still in there.
It is important for all of us, for our addicted kids too, that we let go of guilt for the way their lives are turning out. We cannot help them beat this unless we get our minds and hearts straight.
Let me change that. We cannot help them beat this. We are more likely to survive it in one intact piece if we get our hearts and minds straight.
Until we let go of guilt, we enable. We find ourselves trying, again and again, to make up for something we did not cause and so, cannot change for them. Recovering Enabler tells us that we can know when we are enabling because we will resent what we have given or done for them.
I found that to be true.
Enabling is an ugly, vicious circle of martyrdom, self-aggrandizement, manipulation, and resentment. We fall into it so innocently, when someone we love is addicted or ill. Over time, the culture set up when we fall into enabling makes it impossible to love our troubled or addicted people
or ourselves. We begin to lose faith in ourselves and our people. We begin interacting with them by rote. The problem becomes the focus of our relationships with them. We begin not to remember what it meant to love them from an open heart.
At least, that is what happened to me.
But addiction is not a thing we can overlook or positive think our way out of. Child of Mine describes it as a terminal disease. I would agree with that. We have come within a hair's breadth of losing both our children. But helping did not help. Not helping did not help, either.
Wanting her children and her life back. That is what helped our daughter.
And only she could do that.
And she could only make the changes she needed to make, she could only be strong enough to face it all down, because there was no one there for her, or for her kids, but her.
Our son took back the reins of his life and his self respect and his respect for us, when we stopped encouraging or allowing dependence. There was a strange dynamic happening in our family. I don't exactly understand it yet, but it had something to do with our daughter's problems and the skewed reward / attention / abandonment thing that happens when one child has problems and the parents' attentions are focused on those.
I think that is true, but I don't really know.
They say it is very hard to see our own situations.
My son has told me "I hope you're having fun out there while I'm in jail".
Next time, you might say: "I am not going to have as much fun as so and so, because though I will be on vacation, it hurts me deeply that your life has taken this turn. So and so was not living with that kind of hurt, when she went on vacation. But I am. You know I love you. I am your mother. I want the best for you, always."
Really, what else is there to say?
You do need to get away, Sherril. D H always took me away. I never once wanted to go. He was correct in his thinking. We need to be away from the helplessness and the hurt and the rage of what is happening to our families.
It helped me, when I could not get away even if we went away, to watch the sun rise. Something about connecting to the rhythms of everything that is, and something about gratitude and connection with all the moms ~ the new moms, the moms like me, the moms nothing like this ever happened to.
Also, if you haven't begun one, a gratitude journal helped me very much.
Sarah Ban Breathnack's Simple Abundance is very good for seeding gratitude.
Leonard Cohen's "Halleluiah" can unwind my heart a little, when I am too tightly wound to know how to help myself.
Cedar
