Never Too Late

by Amber Portwood

  Seeing Leah was as amazing as a dream come true. I was so nervous about what it would be like. I’d been away from her for a whole year, and I was afraid she’d be less comfortable around me, or the visit would go bad somehow. But Leah was so excited and came straight for me. My heart just exploded, I was so happy. I have never felt so blissfully happy as when I look at that little girl. She is more than the world to me. The love I have for her and the love I feel for her is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced, and it’s worth everything.

  I saw her for a few visits total after that. She was still little but at the age where they grow up so fast, and she was so different and so much smarter every time I saw her. I felt like such a piece of crap having to spend my only time with my daughter in prison, but every minute I had her she’d sit in my lap and I’d just hold her tight. When it was time for her to leave, her facial expressions would kill me. It was so sad. It seemed really clear that she was aware of the situation, that it wasn’t good, and that she wasn’t going to see her mom again as soon as she wanted. That was extremely tough to stomach. Still, despite the situation, we had a great relationship and the same amazing bond we’ve always had.

  The family dynamic was as difficult as ever, though. After Leah’s father told me he had a girlfriend, he stopped putting money on the phone. I started paying for it, but he stopped answering as often as he did before. And it seemed like every time I called him Leah was either sleeping, or she wasn’t there, or she didn’t want to talk on the phone. It got to be sort of ugly, and we started talking more sporadically. I remember when I told him about my GED and that I got the highest score, he laughed at me and said, “Yeah, right.” He didn’t believe me. Whatever. All that kind of thing does is make it feel better to prove a person wrong. I’m over it.

  I knew I was getting out of jail if I worked hard enough on the GED. If I got the time cut, I’d be leaving in a matter of months. That’s pretty much the best motivation you can have to pass a test. I walked in there thinking, “If I get this, I’m leaving in a month. If I get this, I’m leaving.” And when I finally got the time cut, I almost died. I knew I was going to be out in three months. I called my mom and my friends and told them all. But I didn’t tell my ex-fiancé. I only ended up telling him a few days before I left, when I had the details, and only because I wanted to see Leah.

  Prison turned out to be exactly what I hoped it would be. It wasn’t fun, but it gave me the conditions I needed to change. I used that time as well as I could have. I worked my ass off. But there’s no perfect success in that situation. Even if I learned to channel all that darkness inside of me and turn it into strength, I know it’s never going away. I’m never going to be a regular, chill, easygoing person who never gets mad. I’m always going to have to work to control my anger, and I’ll have to keep learning ways to manage my anxiety and depression. That’s just a lifetime of hard work that you have to make a commitment to.

  I wasn’t scare of hard work. But I was scared of getting out and facing my addiction again.

  It’s a hell of a lot easier to be sober in prison. That was the whole point. Now, before anybody starts to wonder, yes, people do find ways to do drugs in prison. But it’s not easy for them to do, and it’s nothing like on the outside. Mostly it’s the inmates who are on psychiatric medications and trade their meds for commissary or whatever. Which is just about the worst deal you can come up with in general, because then you’ve got people skipping their meds when they really need them, and then a few desperate addicts zonked out on these serious pills that just turn them into zombies.

  I was safe from addiction in prison. But recovery never ends, and I’d be an idiot if I wasn’t afraid of the temptation that would surround me when I got out. I knew I was in for a long, hard road.

  It was clear one day when we were all watching the news and a segment came on about prescription drugs. The newscaster was talking about how the pharmacies were cutting down on prescription drugs because of all of the abuse going on. They were talking about Vicadin and Oxycontin and they kept showing the bottles and names on TV. Out of nowhere, I started bawling my eyes out. All that was going through my head was, “I’m never ever gonna be able to touch those again in my life.”

  I don’t know how many people understand the feeling. For the first time, I realized I was going to have to live with the feeling of wanting something for the rest of my life, and not being able to have it. Imagine something you really love and want, something you can have any time, and then suddenly someone says, “You’re never gonna touch that again in your life.”

  It’s an awful feeling to be so addicted to those pills and know you can never have them again. You feel strong and empowered every day you get through the addition. But it’s so pitiful how bad you want it. It’s like falling in love with somebody and then losing that person forever, knowing that even if you meet someone else, no one will ever do for you what that person did. I felt like something had died. I cried myself to pieces.

  But the feeling was connected to the fact that I was serious about my decision. The pain was proof that I was separating myself from pills and turning onto the road of sobriety. I was putting my new strength into leaving behind those parts of my old life and my old self. It was goodbye.

  When I walked out of prison, I was ready to go forward.

  12

  Thinking About Tomorrow

  The faces of family members. The taste of real food. The colors of normal walls and furniture. Everything you ever took for granted in your life jumps out at you when you’ve just gotten out of prison. And the things you always knew were beautiful are more beautiful than ever.

  Reuniting with my daughter that first night out of jail was the most emotional experience you can possibly imagine. There’s no way I could ever describe it to you. Just knowing I was going to see her already had me leaping for joy inside, but to have her in my arms and know that from now on I would be able to see her as often as we wanted, it was almost too much for me to handle.

  I was so grateful to be with Leah and to hear her voice telling me that she loved me and she missed me. After all those long months in prison, all the bad days I’d spent alone and miserable with nothing but the dream of my daughter to carry me through, I finally had the reward I’d hoped and dreamed of for so long. I had wanted this so bad, to be free and sober in a comfortable, clean place with my daughter in my arms, that when I finally got it, it almost didn’t seem real.

  The only thing that has ever made me feel complete is my bond with Leah. The only times I remember feeling blissfully happy were the first moment I held her in my arms, and the night I got out of prison and got to have her with me, knowing she loved me. My love for my daughter dragged me back from the edge of death. It pushed me to remember the kind of life I once swore I’d have for myself. It reminded me how important it is to never stop fighting the demons that can threaten a family, whether they involve addiction, depression, anger management issues, disagreements between parents, or something else. Leah deserved so much better than to see her mom and dad yelling and fighting all the time. She deserved better than a mom in jail, or a mom on drugs, or a mom dead. I knew that, and I’d fought to be clearheaded so I could keep that knowledge in my mind forever.

  Free time with Leah justifies every struggle I went through to change myself in prison. When we’re alone together, there are just the sweetest moments. I cherish the nights we sit together on the bed watching movies, and she talks and babbles in her little squeaky voice about anything and everything. Even when she kind of loses me and I don’t have a clue what she’s talking about, she thinks it’s the greatest thing in the world just to be having that conversation. It’s contagious. I love hearing her develop her little catch phrases and quirks. Whenever I ask her something and she doesn’t answer, I ask, “Do you hear me?” Now before she answers me she says, “Yes, I heard you!” with the cutest little attitude. She’s so smart and funny it just blows me away. When we interact togethe
r, everything is special. We’ll be hanging out and watching movies and she’ll turn around and put her hand on the side of my face, give me a big kiss out of nowhere and say, “I love you.” And that just makes me think to myself, “This is why I’m here right now.”

  It was startling to me at first, how much Leah had grown while I was gone. I don’t like to dwell on the time I missed seeing her grow up while I was behind bars. Seventeen months is a long time in a little girl’s life. Now she was five years old, already writing her name and picking up hobbies and interests, learning to express her personality. I got to know quickly how smart she was and that she had a real sensitive streak and a need to stick up for people. She won’t tolerate you being mean to somebody in front of her. One day I made the big mistake of calling a dog a little fatty. Leah turned to me with total, complete disapproval and said, “That’s not nice.” She got that sensitivity from her daddy. If you say anything mean about somebody, she will call you out in two seconds. She really cares. We’ll have to watch out for her when she gets older, I can already tell. I can imagine her being one of those girls in high school who beats the crap out of bullies, a real Captain Save-a-Kid. I can already see it in her, how tough she is, how goodhearted she is, and how she’s turning out. Best of all, I know she can tell how much I love her. She understands her bond with me. I’m very blessed.

  Mothers and children should always have a special bond, but it is something that has to be built and cared for. Some people are in prison for such a long time their kids are fifteen years old and absolutely hate them. When families get separated like that, things can get really bad. Kids get taken away from their parents and put with other family members, or if they don’t have family members, into foster homes. And when the parents get free, if they ever get free, they have to face all the years they lost building a relationship with their kids. There can be so much anger and hurt. Those are the saddest people I’ve ever seen, the saddest moments. I saw it so often in prison. I know they want to have that relationship. But the thing is, it’s not hopeless. It’s never too late. And I say that because of my own experience, because of me and my dad. I went from wishing he would die, hating him, and blaming him for all the sadness I’d felt in my life, and I got to a place where I loved the man and had a close relationship with him. No matter how bad it got, it wasn’t beyond forgiveness. It was never too late to get our relationship back.

  I was lucky I got my intervention and made my turnaround when Leah was still so young. She was three when I went into prison, old enough to understand a few things about what was going on. She didn’t really comprehend everything that happened, but she sort of did. Either way, I actually have a chance to reclaim my relationship with her now that I’m out. I’m lucky enough that I haven’t lost near as much as I could have through my mistakes.

  I was off to a great start and more determined than ever to show the world how much I had changed. After all, I hadn’t changed everything. I was still the same person who couldn’t back down from a challenge, who liked to prove people wrong. I knew I’d made a huge turnaround in prison, and I knew I’d get the most satisfaction if I blew up everyone’s expectations and kicked total ass.

  But there were a whole lot of roadblocks to deal with. I mean, traffic was slow. First of all, I had to deal with figuring out how to have a functional relationship with Leah’s father now that I was out and we were going to be sharing time with Leah. That wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. I was still beyond pissed about the shit he pulled when I was in prison, leading me on and asking for money from me when he had this girlfriend the whole time. And as soon as I was back in the world, I had to deal with his relationship clashing with our plans for Leah’s birthday. He didn’t want his new girlfriend to feel left out if she wasn’t allowed to come to Leah’s birthday party, but as far as I was concerned, trying to get me to hang out with his new girlfriend at my daughter’s first birthday party after I’d just gotten out of seventeen months in prison was a whole lot to ask of me real fast. We ended up splitting the celebration into two separate parties, so we could just avoid the whole issue.

  So that was annoying. But it wasn’t as serious as some of the other things I had to deal with. Leah was just old enough that she was able to ask some really tough questions. It was one thing seeing how much older and smarter she’d gotten and realizing how much of that I’d missed. But it was another thing when she said little things that let me know how my time away had affected her. The first night we spent together when I got out, right as we were going to sleep, Leah asked me, “Are you still going to be here when I wake up?”

  That ripped my heart open. It just hit me full on with the fact that I had left my daughter alone for so long. Not just for the time I spent in prison, but for the time leading up to it, when I had been so messed up on prescription drugs, so lost in my own mess that I lost my legal rights to her as a mother and was only able to see her as often as other people would cooperate with. I had no way of knowing how much she even remembered of having a normal relationship with me as her mom. From the moment I got that no-contact order and Leah’s dad and I were prevented from co-parenting any more, and especially since that led to me signing over custody rights to him, Leah had never gotten to live with me full-time or experience what that was like, having her mom around her in a normal way. She was used to having me leave for two months in rehab or three months in county or seventeen months in prison.

  That was not the way I meant for things to go. Having to face the fact that my mistakes had affected her and the way she saw our relationship was extremely difficult. But all I could do was focus on what I had, which was my clearheaded mindset, my sobriety, and my freedom to decide on the right path forward.

  Staying clean is the ultimate in “easier said than done.” I’m not going to lie. Some days it’s very, very hard. For how crazy my life has been up to this point, I have a very boring life now for a twenty-three year old. It’s difficult to go from being a girl who goes out all the time and parties like crazy to a girl who lives with her grandparents and never really goes out.

  People don’t fall for those pills just so they can go to prison and lose everything. No. They do it for a reason that’s very hard to give up. The pills trick you into thinking you’re living the fast life, living the dream. And they really make you believe it! When they do what you want them to do, pills make you feel like you’re exactly the kind of person you want to be, a person without a care or a problem in the world. And pills lead you into situations that seem so exciting and fun and free, glamorous even. They convince you that the parties are the best parties ever, the people are the craziest people ever, and that you’re having more fun than most people will ever imagine having. It’s intoxicating, and it becomes a love affair, and then it becomes an obsession. Finally it becomes a kind of brainwashing that’s very, very hard to unlearn.

  It’s hard to be twenty-three years old and feel like most of the fun memories in your life are wrapped up in pills. There are no more parties for me. No more hanging out with the kinds of people I used to hang out with, going places where drugs were there for me if I wanted them. The wild lifestyle I gravitated to before was off limits now. What would I do with myself? How would I learn to replace the high I used to get from drugs? The temptation is always there, just behind my shoulder, to abuse pills again. If I’m doing well, I can forget about it. I can keep my mind off of it. But at the same time, I have experienced what opiates do to me, and I can’t just forget it completely. As an addict you have to constantly stay focused on all the ways that drugs fucked up your life and the lives of the people who love you. Because if you lose your grip on any of that, the other side of the experience is always there in your mind, waiting to lure you in. And you can never think you’re too smart or too strong to fall back into it again. The thing is, you can never escape the fact that you lost your mind on those drugs. You can never be confident that you’ve erased whatever it was inside of you that allowed addiction
to take such a hold on you. It’s a constant battle, and some days are harder than others.

  But I’m working my ass off, trying to hold onto this. And what makes me completely fulfilled is the love I have with Leah and the emotions I feel when I’m with her. She’s really holding onto me, and I’m holding onto her too. It makes me feel like everything is worth something. Leah reminds me every day not just of my responsibilities as a parent and a person, but of the joy I’m capable of feeling. For the first time in my life, I see the point in everything. I finally believe I can be happy.

  I can’t lie: life is pretty boring these days. Not as boring as prison, but boring. Boredom isn’t good. Drugs trick you into thinking they’re going to fill a hole inside of you, but they leave an even bigger hole behind for you to fill. Finding purpose in my life isn’t some spiritual thing I’m doing for fun. It’s literally the only choice I have.

  So what’s next for me, besides being a mom?

  Ever since I was a kid, my life had been defined by depression, anxiety, and addiction. Now, at twenty-three, I finally have the tools and the self-knowledge to see things clearly for the first time. Suddenly I can see there are things I’m good at and things I want to do, talents and interests that I never paid much attention to before when I was so caught up in all the bullshit.

  That’s why the CLIFF program was such an amazing experience for me. For someone who had dropped out of high school, having that educational environment was amazing. Right away I was kicking ass in the program, acing my GED, and taking on as much responsibility as they’d let me have. The funny thing was that it came so naturally. It made me think back to the times before I was messed up on drugs, when I was all about working hard and getting things done. Whether I was helping Leah’s dad study or organizing our finances, I was always good at staying on top of things and accomplishing whatever I put my mind to.