Addicted Like Me (7 page)

The summer vacation passed more easily than I expected it to. I had been dreading that I would have to plan what to do with both kids, as Lauren would be back from Montana by that time because I couldn't leave her with her grandparents forever. Leaving either of them home alone while I worked, however, was not an option, so I sent them both down to Arizona for summer break. Rick was living there, and the kids spent a good part of that summer with their godmother, Mary. The hope that this quiet summer would somehow
last died away as soon as the school year began again, in Colorado. It didn't take long before I was getting phone calls that Lauren had ditched school, was having attitude problems, and was failing her classes, just like before.

I couldn't figure out what was happening to my family that was causing all this chaos. I had tried the steps I knew were supposed to reverse behaviors and control uncontrollable kids. I enforced consequences as best I could, took the kids to doctors, and had used the help of an inpatient hospital to deal with the behavioral issues. None of this had worked. I was missing work often by this time to meet with school officials and counselors on behalf of Lauren or Ryan. I felt helpless. One night in my bedroom, I got on my knees and prayed for knowledge that would help and guide my family. I got my answer the next afternoon. A marijuana pipe was lying on my couch. I kept thinking
I'm shocked!
Even though the kids said the pipe belonged to Christy, clearly I knew that my kids were doing drugs. I felt overwhelmed by disbelief and disappointment. I thought we had gotten away from the addicts in our lives. I had worked so hard to change our circumstances through all of the counseling and recovery work. Creating and maintaining a stable home environment for my children had been my highest priority. Now the disease of addiction was right back in our lives and worse than ever. How could this possibly be happening? I had to wake up to the fact that nothing was out of the range of possibility. Everything I'd refused to believe about Lauren and Ryan's behavior and all the insanity that went along with it was starting to make sense.

I accepted the pipe story that Lauren and Ryan told me, that
it belonged to Christy. She played along and said that the pipe was hers. Then she begged me not to tell her mother and said that she knew she needed help. I was easily impressed by these kinds of seemingly honest, heartfelt reactions. Rather than look for the lie in Christy's story, I was hopeful that maybe if my kids could become as honest as she was, there might be progress for us all. The kids strung me along with this hope for a long time. I had taken Christy back to our house on the day I found the pipe to sit her down with Lauren, Ryan, and her brother, Danny, to ask everyone to be honest. I gave Christy and Danny my word I would not tell their parents and shared stories about what happens to kids that get hooked on drugs. I revealed things about my own past drug use and told everyone about the accident that killed Jason. When I thought they were on board, I even said that I planned to use my time to find recovery meetings for them all. I found out much later on that none of them really wanted help. They just wanted to appease me. It amazes me that I was so blind to the lies and manipulation, because I had done some of the same types of things to my dad when I was a teen.

The irony of family addiction is that when you are faced with a loved one's addiction, you go through the typical denial, anxiety, enabling, and fierce need to control that anyone does who is facing the situation for the first time, or has not struggled with addiction personally. I was going to save them all! Not. I was recovered from drugs at the time, but even I was not sober yet from alcohol. I was coming from my level of understanding at the time, which had not progressed to the point where I was able to admit that all of us were addicts: Lauren, Ryan, and me. Lauren and I remained in therapy,
and after this pipe incident came out in one of our sessions, the counselor pulled me aside and recommended that I tell Christy and Danny's mom. The counselor told me I really didn't have the right to keep such important information from a parent, no matter what I had previously promised. So I followed through. Once I did, the kids were furious. Christy and Danny no longer trusted me, and Lauren and Ryan were especially angry, which only strengthened the addictive beast in them.

I called my best friend, Shirley, who was back in Phoenix, when this happened, because I hoped she could give me some ideas on where I should go to get help. She told me about the Tough Love program. It helps parents deal with children that have behavior problems. Shirley had been using Tough Love techniques with her daughter, Lindsey, who had experienced similar problems to Lauren's. I started attending weekly Tough Love meetings after I spoke to Shirley, and I learned I did not have to accept unacceptable behavior from my children. I learned techniques to draw boundaries between the kids and myself and how to run the house as a parent, not a friend. Of course, when one person in a family starts to change for the better, everyone else gets crazy. Lauren and Ryan started staying out later on school nights as a way to react to the fact that our system had begun to change, but because the town we lived in had a curfew set for adolescents, I could make calls to the police when they were out past curfew. This floored the kids. They could not believe I would do such an awful thing to them. I became the enemy, and our situation turned into a war.

I had started to feel a little better as I gained the upper hand,
sure, but Lauren and Ryan seemed to be getting worse despite the Tough Love techniques. Both children were busted at their schools for drugs. They were failing classes still, ditching school, and often suspended. Neither could do anything without receiving a consequence from me, which gave me the sense I was taking some of my power back, and yet I believe the kids were actually happy each time they were suspended. It allowed them to stay home alone and do what they wanted. It actually felt like more of a punishment for me than for them.

Lauren became a thief during this time to sustain her addictive behaviors. In her room, I found a drawer full of pictures of a family I did not know along with a wallet that belonged to a neighbor. I didn't understand how it had gotten into my daughter's room, because it wasn't my first instinct to believe Lauren was committing crimes. I took the wallet and put it in the neighbor's mailbox without leaving a note or an explanation. The familiar numb feeling from childhood came over me. I remembered that my addiction was no longer mine to control when I began to steal from my father. I was deep in denial that Lauren could have reached this stage. One day shortly after, I went down in the basement and thought I saw a dead body on the couch. I threw the covers back, but underneath there were just some pillows and a wadded-up blanket. It made me realize the level of insanity I was living in that by then I practically expected to discover a dead body in my basement, because I had discovered everything else.

I decided it was time to get specific help for at least Lauren's drug problems, and I called a counseling office that specialized in
substance abuse. I started taking her and Ryan to the office every Saturday morning. The counselor spent individual time with me as well. She encouraged me to do new things for myself, like take an exercise class and try to get out of the house more often to socialize with friends. The counselor also told me to try not to be anxious over what I could not control. If I could completely accept my inability to control Lauren and deal with my own fear and controlling impulses instead, I could open myself up to learning positive actions. Regardless of how I might be contributing to problems Lauren had, the choices she was making were 100 percent her own.

It took time before I was ready to embrace this philosophy. After going to the sessions for several months, I began to feel like I was making progress in accepting this fact, but Lauren had continued with business as usual. We seemed to be on opposite paths. Because a change hadn't occurred in her behaviors, our counselor sat me down and told me that she had done as much as she could to help Lauren. The counselor informed me that both of my kids were actively using drugs and were unwilling to change, because they liked their lifestyle too much. She recommended that I hospitalize them for substance abuse, so I called our health insurance company to see if this was possible. The insurance company put me in touch with a local hospital, where I took Lauren and Ryan to be evaluated on the same day I called.

The drive seemed like an eternity, as the kids sat sullenly in the back seat. The hospital decided that Lauren and Ryan should both be admitted into the day treatment program. I was to drop them off daily, at nine, and return to pick them up at four in the
afternoon, Monday through Friday for six weeks. This was terrible for me because of my work schedule. The hospital was a forty-five-minute drive from our house, which meant I had to tell my boss that I needed a leave of absence or to work only partial days. Still sympathetic to my situation, my boss told me to come in late every morning and leave early if I needed to. She said not to worry about taking a leave, but even with this flexibility, it was a rough six weeks. The most frustrating thing was the fact that in the hospital nobody was able to control Lauren or Ryan better than I had.

Lauren was caught smoking during her first week of the program, and then she admitted to smoking pot in the mornings before we left the house each day during week two. Ryan fared only slightly better, because he was diagnosed with signs of depression and put on new medication. We had believed he was suffering from ADHD, but this change in his evaluation led to a new prescription drug. I went along with it, although I was unsure at the time because our previous doctor had been so adamant regarding Ryan's ADHD diagnosis. I remembered that when I felt depressed at his age, I had used marijuana, and I wondered if Ryan's issue might be similar. I began to wonder if any of these professionals actually knew what they were really dealing with.

This was another of the periods when Rick was doing well enough to be in communication with the kids. I contacted him about the situation, and he decided it was time for him to make a surprise visit. Rick had been released from prison, was sober, and had separated from Sylvia because she had continued to drink during his recovery. The look on the faces of our kids was priceless when their dad walked through the door. At first, Lauren had a look of excitement,
but she caught herself after she realized this visit was not for fun. She sat down with Rick, Ryan, and me, and as parents we told them that we were no longer going to accept their behavior. I told them that if they did not straighten up, we were moving from Colorado back to Arizona, close to Rick, where we at least had support.

Lauren and Ryan listened attentively, not happy with what Rick and I had said. It was beginning to get tougher for the kids to enjoy their lifestyles of addiction, which was a change I wanted to make after our counselor had said the enjoyable way of life I had allowed was part of our problem. The week after Rick left, I got a phone call from the hospital. Lauren was trying to enjoy her addicted lifestyle in the hospital instead. There had been some hysteria because a few patients had taken hits of hallucinogenic LSD. Lauren was the one responsible for bringing the drugs to the program.

I had no idea she had been smuggling in drugs. It went back to the fact that I had been letting go of my control issues, because there was no way I could have searched Lauren's clothing, backpack, body, and purse every day. If she wanted drugs that badly, she was going to find a way to outsmart me, yet the hospital was up in arms and wanted to throw her out. Why was the counselor so surprised that Lauren was acting the exact same way at the program as she acted at home? Why did the counselor think I had brought her there for treatment in the first place? I wanted the counselor to be able to control the problems I couldn't, and here I was listening to the staff at the hospital complaining about their inability to change Lauren's behavior. Weren't these the experts?

I expressed my outrage, and the counselor backed down from
threatening to kick Lauren out. They started coming down hard on her with consequences instead. She was switched from the outpatient facilities to inpatient for a day and forced to spend the night in the program, as one punishment. She had been caught bringing in someone else's urine for her drug test. I later found out the urine she had taken belonged to a neighborhood girlfriend of Lauren's who had been in trouble with the law and had urine to share because she was required to supply it for weekly drug tests.

It seemed logical to me that if Lauren needed to be monitored constantly to catch all her tricks, perhaps the professionals should have recommended inpatient treatment. Nobody ever did. The hospital actually encouraged me to give Lauren some freedom and allow her to occasionally see friends. I was at the end of my rope. I felt overwhelmed, hopeless, angry, and discouraged. Though I had threatened Lauren and Ryan with the possibility that we would move back to Arizona, it wasn't what I wanted, and yet a series of things led straight there. I found out that a large Canadian corporation was purchasing the company I worked for, and my department of two was to be downsized. I opted to take the severance package the company offered me. Afterward, I sent out job applications and within a week had two positions offered to me in Phoenix. I had enough money saved by that time to purchase a home if I took either job, so Lauren, Ryan, and I moved a third time.

The home I bought in Phoenix was close to the church we had attended the last time we had lived in Arizona, and it was located only two miles from my friend Shirley's home. Shirley and her daughter, Lindsey, were still having issues at that time, but things
had improved since she had learned the Tough Love techniques and applied them in their home. My kids had not improved in the least. Before we left Colorado, Lauren stole some of my checks in the hope she could run away again, rather than move; however, she did not follow through. Ryan was adamant that he was not going to live with me and decided to go live with his dad, in Cottonwood, Arizona, a two-hour drive from the house where Lauren and I ended up. It upset me, but I let Ryan make his own decision. He wouldn't be that far away, and he would come home to spend the weekend a couple of times per month.