I remember difficult child's birth. The joy...the fun of dreaming of his future.
I see the phrase, "and her son" and I want to break down. I remember when I had a son. I don't really feel like that anymore.
It's like a death without a body or a funeral.
This helped me.
On those rare occasions when we would see our son during his druggie years, it was as though he were not the same person. I could see that this willfully mean, vicious male looked a little like my son. Even the eyes were so different. That was the most heartbreaking part. There was no reflection in those eyes for me, at all. Every so often, though...I would see a flash of my son, of the son I knew and remembered, in those eyes. It would be there and gone in an instant, but I saw it. Building on that flash of him, I came to understand that it was as though my son had been kidnapped. The person who had him trapped in there looked like our son, but that is all. Through this imagery, I was able to understand what was happening to all of us a little more clearly. I was able to love my son, trapped in there, and discount the braggart who wanted money and time and everything that wasn't nailed down.
It went on like that for a long time.
I set a place for my son, who I knew would be missing, for each holiday. I set it in my room, where no one would see it, but me. At the end of the day, I would light a white candle for him. I began using those white electric candles you put in the windows at Christmas? For the sake of my son. Somehow, I was making concrete my belief that he would find his way home.
It was part of how I held faith with the flash of my son I had seen, in those reflectionless eyes.
I also have a thing, special to him, and special to me, that difficult child had given me before this happened to him. That was my talisman. I keep it still, carefully wrapped and put away. When I needed to feel my son, to remember how he smelled, how he smiled, what his laugh sounded like, I would unwrap the item. I would rage, if that is what I needed to do. Cry, if that was what I needed to do. Pray, always. Then, I would carefully wrap that item and put it away again, safe and sound.
It helped me too, to remember that people who lose their children to death receive much support. Others are gentler with them, are willing to discuss the missing child, are accepting of the parents' pain.
That does not happen, for us.
No one wants to talk about our drug-addicted children.
So, we have to provide that caring, that strength, that pride in who our children were, and that belief in who they will be, again, for ourselves.
These are the things that helped me.
Our son did stop using. But he did it on his own. Nothing we did made a difference. This isn't what we asked for, what we dreamed about when they were born? But, addicted or not, these are our children, our sons and our daughters. Our job is to love them through it without enabling, and without being destroyed, ourselves.
Barbara