Was I an overprotective mother, or was I a negligent one? Certainly, I was on the lookout for the usual suspects: stranger abductions, pedophiles, rare diseases—these all seemed like quasi-threatening risks to my family.
But I had no clue that chemical dependency was just a pill bottle away. In fact, that was the furthest thing from my mind because “we were a good family,” we modeled responsible parental behavior and, most of all, my children wouldn’t be stupid enough to “experiment.” I don’t know why I expected them to exercise any more judgment or willpower than I did at their age.
Why didn’t someone tell me about the dangers of highly addictive drugs that plagued my community, our communities?? If I had known better, I would have done better—monitoring my child and his friends, attentive to the warning signs, unblinded by denial.
I like to think that, had there been a public awareness campaign about teen substance abuse, I would have taken off my blinders. Today, we’ve got the tools to tell the story of teen vulnerability right at our fingertips, and this is where I ask your help, Dear Reader.
The Emmy Award-winning documentary, Collision Course – Teen Addiction Epidemic, is available at no cost to public TV stations nationwide. It has already shown on TV stations across the nation, and you can bring it to your local channel by calling your PBS station director and making him or her aware that it is available. Start by telling them about the documentary, share your local statistics or own story, and convince them to watch it online and then contact KVIE to gain access to the program. Free, compelling programming that can spare other families the heartbreak of a child’s addiction or alcoholism is just a phone call away. And you can reclaim your power against a child’s chemical dependency by preventing others from stumbling into the heartbreak you have known.
Christopher Kennedy Lawford wrote a great book, 
What pearls of wisdom can I share from my turbulent river of addiction? These are some facts that caught my attention when our family was first thrown into that terrifying and alien landscape.
Whoever said “There are no guarantees in life” must have been well acquainted with the hopes and fears of the merry-go-round called substance abuse. During my child’s active substance abuse, my personal definition of insanity was that demon of uncertainly perched on my shoulder, always whispering in my ear…”Sober or not today? And will it stick?”
“Love the addict; hate the addiction” perfectly captures the torturous dilemma you face when you have a chemically dependent child. You love them — you probably never stop loving your child, in your heart of hearts — but you hate what they have done to themselves and to others. And while we may hate our children’s addict/alcoholic behavior, they probably despise themselves even more.
That million dollar question asked by parents of addicts and alcoholics everywhere has an answer you probably won’t like to hear: the sad truth is that you can’t keep your child from relapsing. It is entirely up to him or her. You can’t keep him from swiping Grandma’s meds. You can’t keep her from buying a drink at a bar. It is out of your hands. But you can keep the toxicity of relapse from taking you down, too.
When you first learn about your child’s addiction, denial kicks into high gear. The first stage in the death and dying process, denial protects us from absorbing too much information at once. Just picture it as a psychological gag reflex of sorts. Working through my denial, I slowly began to wrap my brain around my child’s illness, the unhealthy way our family had adapted, and the work I needed to do on myself in order to get healthy.
liday time, a season of both promise and peril. For a while there, we never knew who would show up at our holiday dinner table. The good son or his evil twin? And how do you react to, and prepare for, your child, sober or not?
alloween, a good time to revisit some of the demons of addiction and possibly vanquish them from my life. Perhaps I could enlist the services of the 12-year old Zombie Hunter who just knocked on my front door. Guilt is one of the tenacious remnants of my son’s addiction. I know, I know: I didn’t cause it, I can’t cure it, I can’t control it. I understand that intellectually, but still….couldn’t I have done something different along the way to derail it?
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