Love, Alone, Won't Stop Your Child's Addiction
I Tried, and Heroin Won
A Parent's View on Its Impact
Author Chooses to Be Anonymous
and
Wishes to Honor all Parents Whose Journeys
Must Remain Concealed Due to Stigma and Discrimination
My stomach grips in pain. I am lightheaded. The nausea churns my stomach. Can I throw up? Vomit, anything? Please! Dammit! They are GONE. . .AGAIN! I look. Rumpled sheets remain, in the sad, hollow darkness of their room.
It is 2 a.m. "Honey, wake-up? How can you sleep??!! They are gone." I changed and grabbed my coat. "Please? We must leave." Still groggy, he mumbled, "Where are we going?" "Out," I responded. "Where out?" he mumbled. "To find them," I cried. Cell phone, wallet, and keys in hand, I flip flop my thoughts in panic. "Police, no? Where, don't know? Chasing cats? Wanting to scream, oh yes!" I drive. I utter, "I am feeling suicidal." My husband in passenger seat stares at me alarmed. "NO, I am not homicidal, I am suicidal." An ironic breath of relief overshadowed the insanity of this moment. We drove nowhere but everywhere, searching for what could not be found – our children in a haven and drug free.
Shame penetrates the whole family. You see. We could not talk to anyone at their high school. Divisions were apparent. Parents, teachers, and administrators labeled "good kids" as those students who hung around with the "right crowd," got good grades, and stayed out of trouble. For students who experimented or worse yet, became addicted to drugs, the impact was heartless. Labeled as bad, troubled, and needing to be expelled, the options for parents as well as addicted youth did not exist within the confines of the high school.
Desperate, my husband and I sought support and refuge outside the walls of the educational system. We joined a local parent support group and participated in the 12-step program, Al-Anon. During these early years of the heroin epidemic in our state, the support group averaged six to eight participants at nightly meetings. Currently, its ranks have expanded to more than 50 members.
For me, this was the middle of the beginning of the end of a long journey to find solace from the binding savagery of heroin on my loved ones and on our family. Devoured by the narcotic, skeletal frames of our once happy and healthy children were what remained. This scathing substance does not eviscerate just the addict. It takes hostage loved ones – parents, siblings, friends – who bear witness to its destruction on the addict's body, spirit, and soul.
As a parent, it is impossible to lay a blind eye to heroin's aftermath. Overdoses, hospitalizations, evictions, incarcerations, violent assaults and death are the possibilities within this horrifying addiction; and the intergenerational impact is heartbreaking. Removal of grandchildren and changes in their custody heightens the trauma for everyone involved, and countless efforts by parents and caretakers to support their addict's treatment are prohibitively expensive, both monetarily and emotionally.
Worse, parents internalize the garbage fed to them by the larger society, and assume responsibility for their child's addiction and resultant actions. I should have loved them more. If only I had been a better parent. There is a magically distorted belief that I could have, should have stopped my child from doing harm to themselves. THIS IS A MYTH – A LIE. Addiction as a disorder is not contagious. Like heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and other chronic and life -threatening conditions, we are powerless over the course of the disease. We can offer hope, faith and focus on our self-care – the most optimal way to love ourselves and model for those afflicted by addiction.
Read: Tips for Parents Facing a Loved One's Addiction
Known as the nation's OD capital, Ohio is likely to have well over 10,000 overdoses in 2017 alone. Thanks to the egregious success of the Mexican Cartel in our state (as well as throughout the United States), over 4,000 sisters, daughters, moms, wives, sons, brothers, dads, husbands, neighbors will die from heroin in Ohio. Of those individuals who have died from overdose in 2015, opioid fentanyl (50 to 100 times stronger than heroin) and carfentanil (5,000 times more potent than heroin) was involved in 58.2% of those deaths. This statistic is rapidly rising.
