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And will.

Am I letting Dan down somehow?

Does my belonging to Dan negate Faith's claim to her mother?

Territory.

When did I simply belong to me?

Sleep was a long time coming.

I awoke early. After I heard Dan leave, I bathed and dressed.

I heard Faith stirring around upstairs and knew she would soon make her morning pilgrimage to the front porch.

I was right.

“Faith,” I approached her as she smoked on the front porch. “Will you do something for me? For us? The family?”

I sat in the rocker next to hers. She looked at me with reservation. Yet I whiffed her curiosity. It slanted its way to me from her tilted gaze. “What?”

“Would you write a journal of your life for the past ten years? How did you get into drugs? Your epiphanies. Everything.”

“Why?” She looked off into the distant sky, her complex mind sifting, sorting, weighing.

“Because I want to know who you are. Where you've been. You weren't here — with us, not for years. I want to know about that journey that took you somewhere else entirely. I want to know the whys and the hows and the wheres. I want to know what brought you back.”
At least closer, if not all the way.

She turned her head to look at me and blew out a stream of smoke. “Why?”

“Truthfully? I want to know. I think it will give me some sort of — closure. And I also think it will help you to see things more clearly, honey. I think it will help you get to know yourself again, the person you were created to be. You weren't just born, Faith. You're
a miracle.”

I watched the play of emotions skitter over her features as she considered all I'd said. She rocked softly and
stared off again into space but I felt her interest gather and grow.

“Okay.”

“Good,” my voice didn't give away my relief and joy. I got up to go into the house and closed my bedroom door. Then, in my welling-up moment, I sat in the leather easy chair, eyes closed, and thanked God.

“I need to put things in perspective because I have a disease of perception.”

— A Recovering Drug Addict

 

 

 

 

My name is Faith and I am a 29-year-old junkie. A heroin junkie. I can tell you how many months I have been clean or how many Narcotics Anonymous chips I have acquired, but none of that takes away from the fact that I am a junkie.

Always will be. The first step to recovering from drug abuse is learning that I will always be an addict. Clean or not.

The first thing non-users want to know is “Why? Why do you use? Why did you start?” Like there is some elusive, all-consuming answer to it all. Wish there were. But that's not the case. There are infinite variables involved in addictions. Some, I will try to describe.

I can take you back to the first time I smoked marijuana, but it will have nothing to do with my current junkie status. It was in no way a gateway drug. Webster's Dictionary defines “gateway drug” as any drug or addictive
substance abuse — e.g., nicotine and alcohol, that may be abused, and is allegedly linked to subsequent abuse of illicit ‘soft' drugs, e.g., marijuana, and/or ‘hard' drugs, e.g. cocaine and heroine.

My infrequent marijuana use was merely a stupid teenage attempt to fit into some pop-culture ideal. My teen years were pretty normal. I wasn't a big alcohol drinker and was not a drug user. I enjoyed hanging out with my friends and occasionally cruising around looking for boys. That was the extent of my trouble.

My drug abuse didn't come about until years later, in my early-twenties after the birth of my daughter Maddie. Looking back, I think I might have suffered post-partum depression, but at the time, I didn't know it. My husband, Jack, traveled extensively with his job and I was regularly left alone as a new mother. Even when Jack was home, the marriage was volatile, rocky at best. Apparently, I began looking for something to numb me.

My first experience with street drugs was with my best friend Lola, but I will get to that later. Ironically, my drug dealer was not some back-alley pimp with his ladies of the night lurking about. My drug dealer was my family physician.

My enabler was my HMO.

An appendectomy and later, severe menstrual cramps justified my first narcotic prescription for Lortab (also known as Vicodin). It did ease my pain. It also provided an energetic high and excitement that I loved.

My flying phobia justified my second narcotic prescription. The Valium label said, “Take 1-2 pills every four hours for fear of flying.” This prescription could be filled monthly, but with me only flying 2-3 times a year, I
only filled it sporadically. It made me feel zoned out and loopy. Basically, it put me to sleep.

On one flight, while using the drug, the flight attendant had to wake me to sit upright for landing. I'd been sprawled across three seats, dead to the world. I'd told my doctor that if the plane crashed with me aboard, I wanted to be so out of it that I would be whistling Dixie. He honored my wishes.

Although it was meant for sporadic travel, it was actually written to be refilled monthly so I began using it nightly as a sleep aid.

It just really amazed me that I
could
fill it every month. Keep in mind this was the late 1990s and awareness of prescription drugs addictions didn't exist as it does today. At that time, trust in family physicians was at an all-time high and medications were to be taken as prescribed. They were almost considered deity among us laymen.

My aches and pains were eventually diagnosed and I had a reason for the prescriptions to roll on in; an opiate for pain, those Valium pills for flying tucked me in bed each night, with various anti-depressants and antiinflammatory meds added to the mix.

When the medicinal hangover made it too hard for me to get up in the morning, I
developed
a case of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) to warrant a prescription for Adderall, which would wake me up. Adderall is nothing more than pharmaceutical speed. The generic title on the bottle actually says “Amphetamine/Salt”.

Keep in mind that millions of American children are on this drug to help them pay attention in school. I had to get my insurance company to over-ride a denial of payment on the Aderrall. They said I was too old to take
amphetamines. I found this ironic. Mom insists that I have always had classic ADD symptoms so I figured I might as well take advantage of a drug to remedy it, right?

This was merely the beginning of my prescription drug habit.

My motto in life has always been “Try anything once.” Unfortunately, that has been the reason that I have no voice of reason when I am approached with possible dangerous situations for the first time, like drugs. The majority of people have that Angel/Devil Scenario playing on their shoulder when they are about to do something wrong. My motto “Try anything once” takes those reasoning little creatures out of the picture because “Hey, I'm only going to try it once, right?”

This was my excuse in the spring of 1998 when I tried cocaine for the first time.

Two young mothers, Lola and I, were visiting at her house. My husband was out of town working, which was the norm at this time in my life. Lola's was working out in a gym, an obsession with him. After tucking in our toddlers for the night, Lola and I had the house to ourselves. Lola had scored some cocaine from a friend who was a heavy user.

“Make sure the door's locked,” I whispered to Lola. “The kids might wake up and come looking for us.”

“In a minute,” she whispered back, eyes aglow with adventure. “We'll be looking for
ourselves,
we're about to go on a
trip!”

Our toddlers were four months apart. Lola and I had married within weeks of each other. We'd been friends since our early high school years, when, to hear Lola tell it, I had cheated with her boyfriend. When she caught wind of it, she called me on the phone.

“Is it true?” she asked.

I told her the truth. “I wasn't aware you two were dating. Honestly. If you are, I'm sorry, Lola.” Lola forgave me and we'd been best friends ever since. We had, through the years, experienced many “firsts” together.

This being one of them.

We crept into the bathroom with our little bag of white powder. Lola had tried it once before, at a party with her husband, but as far as I can remember, this was my first time trying an illegal narcotic other than marijuana. This was a serious street drug.

I was excited to experience something Lola so evidently enjoyed. She maneuvered the powder into little white lines while quietly giving me instructions on how to snort it. And though there was no one there but us girls and the sleeping toddlers, our voices never raised above a whisper.

On some moral level, we knew what we were about to do was wrong. That only intrigued us more.

Lola already knew she liked the powder. Instinctively, she knew her best friend would too.

Unfortunately, she was right. The rush of euphoria appealed to me. Immensely. I immediately wanted to take in my second little white line. Lola and I transferred our private party to the front porch, armed with a newfound force to marathon talk each other.

I'm still not sure who was listening because we were both doing all the talking.

The main joke was “Say Hello to my little friend.” We did not tire of the Scarface saying that evening. After a couple more trips to the bathroom, Lola and I agreed this
was something we would enjoy on “special occasions.” We knew many friends who had let this drug take over their lives. We were adamant that we were
not
those people. “Special Occasions” only.

Over the next few months, Lola and I found innovative and creative ways to define a “special occasion.” Basically, it just came down to the two of us being in the same room. But my first run with cocaine came to a dramatic halt on a couple's trip to Jamaica late that summer.

When I thought I was going to die.

Lola and I, along with our husbands, Jack and Nick, planned an extended holiday in Jamaica, spending one week in Negril and one week in Ocho Rios. On our first day there, Lola and I took a “shopping trip” to the local flea market in search of cocaine.

Within minutes, I scouted out a local boy, whose demeanor smacked of
cool.
Moments later, Lola and I had scored. We hurried through the market, quickly buying things for the kids to legitimize our shopping excursion.

Back at the resort, we went straight to the bathroom of my suite (the men were already visiting the first of many golf courses).Why the bathroom? I'm not sure. Cocaine just automatically draws one to a bathroom.