The process means not knowing whether my son is dead or alive right now, knowing that if he is alive he is on heroin, and fearing that we'll end up losing this war.
There is so much, so unbelievably much pain for you, and for us all, Rina.
I don't know whether this will be helpful, but I can tell you what happened to us. That's really the only thing I know anything about, of course.
What happened to us.
The worst things did come to pass. It had been a process of so many years. When our daughter fell again, it went so fast. Unbelievably worst case scenarios came true one after the other. And then, a medical diagnosis indicating multiple organ failure.
It became a matter of time. Not a question of whether, but a certainty.
And the only thing that mattered to me then was gratitude that we had had her in our lives at all. To hear her laughter, to hear her voice ~ man, that simple thing made me so happy, so grateful, once I truly got it that the battle was over and I had lost. Whatever it was I had been carrying around in the way I was seeing my child dropped away, and I was then free to love her without all that cloudiness and poison in the air.
And that is what I felt.
Love for her, gratitude that I had known her, compassion for her.
Compassion for us, and a dawning...I don't know. It was like I started telling myself the truth about how bad it was and had been.
That was where the compassion for myself and for all of us came in, I think.
With compassion for all of us, for everything we'd been through, for the betrayals of extended family and of friends who turned vicious and judgmental...in admitting that stuff, I began to feel pride.
Isn't that something.
Pride, not shame.
I couldn't believe we had all made it through, couldn't believe how much love there was there, still, between all of us.
Addiction.
Our children begin to lie and manipulate and see us nothing more than vehicles to service their addictions. (!)
And we are so at their mercy.
So, that is what happened, to us. I came to feel, and I still feel, pride in my daughter, and in my son. It is like I am able to separate the illness or the addiction from the core of who this person I birthed and raised is, in the heart of them, whatever it looks like to anyone else.
Sometimes, I hate everyone.
I realized I was blaming the kids for the terrible things that were happening to them. And while I had reason to blame them, that wasn't helping any of us.
It was all very confusing.
Our daughter lived.
Today, she is making her way back.
I don't have anything soothing or healing to tell you. Everything about this has been sliding from one hellishly unbelievable loss into something worse ~ into something never even imagined.
But here we are.
For me, the thing I can take from this piece on how we see things, and on teaching or reminding ourselves not to create and believe in outcome, has to do with the part where the writer addresses thinking things through, doing our best as we see it, and ~ I guess what I hear, though that is not the word used, is forgiving ourselves for the outcome in advance.
Somehow, we have to learn not to destroy ourselves over the outcome when it is a bad outcome.
If we are going to survive what is happening to our kids, we need to figure out a way to assess carefully, make as informed a decision as we can about those things we have any say over at all, and then, forgive ourselves in advance.
Maybe that is it.
Knowing we are doing the best we know as we do it, rather than being so afraid we are not doing it in some magically right way that will change things for our child.
Heroin.
That is such an ugly word.
If you can stand to do it Rina, what was your son like, before?
While our daughter had one set of problems, our son was addicted for a number of years. He battled it so desperately hard, but he lost every time. I came to see addiction like a kidnapping.
I'm so sorry this is happening to you and your son and your family, Rina.
The worst part about it for me, with either of my children, was the pain in their eyes, the shame they felt, the horrible defensiveness, and the lies. None of that stuff lived in the heart of them, before the addictions.
This ~ all of this ~ is impossibly hard.
There is no way to accept it, or even to be okay with it.
But here we are.
Cedar