My Child is a drug addict

My child is a drug addict.

It took me a long time to be able to say those words out loud.

It’s something I was in denial over for a long time I think.

He smoked weed as a teenager.  Dabbled in some harder drugs, but I never saw it as a ”problem”.

As he got into his late teens, Loratabs became an issue, and I helped him overcome that addiction.  Twice.

I guess since it didn’t seem to be a great amount of time into the addiction, I didn’t label it as a problem.

Just experimenting gone wrong, I suppose.  I didn’t realize how wrong I was.

My son was so straight laced and intelligent, even as a small child, that I really didn’t think this was something I ever had to worry about.

His ”father”, and I use that term loosely was/is/will always be a drug addict.

He wasn’t around for my son’s early years.  Actually he hasn’t been around much at all.

But when he showed up during my son’s teen years, for a short time, I had hoped that his father would stay clean, and that he and my son could form a relationship.

I don’t know if that caused more problems or not.

By that time, we had all experienced a great amount of trauma that I don’t believe we had ever really healed from.

Honestly, I never really healed from that trauma, and it really kept me from being the mother that I was, and should have continued to be.

Grief and denial are both awful things to experience when you don’t realize you’re experiencing them.

I thought maybe being with his biological father would do him some good, but the man turned back to drugs, and my son ended up hating him for it.

I think maybe he wonders why he wasn’t good enough for his father to stay clean and stay around.  I’m sure it hurts his heart more than he would care to admit, and although it wasn’t the starting point of his drug abuse, I do believe that it played a large part in the harder drugs later on.

During my son’s teenage years, we were probably closer than most.  I believe my kids told me more than most kids would tell their parents.

I remember the first time my son got drunk, he was 14 years old and it was Halloween.  He was supposed to be staying the night with some friends and going to a party.

At about midnight I heard someone dry heaving and then bathtub water running.

When I confronted him, he admitted to being drunk, and the next day told me that he came home because he was so drunk, he thought something bad might happen, and he wanted to be at home.

That’s how things were.

I didn’t make a big issue about experimenting.

My friends and I had done it as teenagers, mostly drinking and smoking weed, but when I stopped, I stopped.

I didn’t touch another drug until I was in my 30s and dealing with uterine cancer.

What I did make a big deal about, was meth.

I had never tried it, and never intend to, but everyone I had ever known who had gotten hooked on it, either ended up being a junkie outcast, in prison, or dead.

It was the most readily available drug in our small town, and I preached non stop about the dangers of it, my dislike of it, and my dislike for people on it.

And I was just about to see how it worked on my child first hand.