There was a group of teens playing red rover near us. Another group was at a table playing cards, and both groups had kids that were laughing and whooping and jumping up and down. Some teens counseled others, just trying to help them out. The most amazing thing was that all of them were interacting with their parents in positive ways. The energy in the air was electric, alive, and full of life. I had to hold back the tears as my emotions overwhelmed me. I felt as if I had been on a long hard journey and had finally found a home. I didn’t know what I had just experienced, but I knew deep down that my life was about to change. For the first time in years, I felt the sense of hope I had known I needed, which was different from the desperate type of hope I would have each time a new start with Lauren or Ryan seemed promising. Something was obviously working there, as was evident by the smiling parents and their enthusiastic daughters and sons.
The parent Bob and I had arranged to meet was named Janet. She explained the twelve-step program and told us that to join the “sober” school a child had to complete sixty days sober. Ryan had neared sixty days by that time, so we set a time to meet with Janet again and bring him with us. She recommended that I attend a twelve-step parent meeting before our date with Ryan, to learn about twelve-step healing myself. This was a recovery for me also, and I needed to step to the next phase. I hoped that Lauren would be willing to step to her next phase, which would include recovery. Instead, she got nastier with me during this time. She broke curfew often, but because I was still attending Tough Love, I was still imposing consequences on her. When Lauren didn’t come home at night, Bob helped me take the door off her bedroom. We also moved her furniture to the back yard patio to make it clear that her life was not her own—we operated as a family.
These consequences led to times when Lauren would just want to talk to Bob and me, seeming so open and communicative; however, I noticed new behaviors that were odd. She stayed up late at night, obsessively cleaning her room. In the morning she was like a dead weight when I would try to wake her up for school. I also noticed her weight dropping again and her moods fluctuating to extremes. Lauren was only euphoric or horribly nasty. Amazingly, during this time she remained consistent with church and continued to go to confirmation classes until she graduated. We confirmed her in the spring that year. She could be so inconsistent at home and school, yet follow through on church commitments, so I could only address incidents as they arose. One Saturday I walked by her room and saw something shiny under her bed, which ended up being an empty fifth of vodka. Upon further investigation I discovered more empty bottles in her room. When I was done, I had a large black garbage bag filled with empty liquor bottles she had been keeping right under my nose.
When Lauren returned home, I was there with the evidence waiting to greet her. She had just come from church, and when I confronted her, she stared at me blankly and said the bottles weren’t hers. I grounded her for two weeks, but it didn’t seem to accomplish anything. She isolated herself in her room and treated me like I had the plague. Another time I found a marijuana pipe sitting on her desk, and when she came home found me again, along with a police officer. He had a firm discussion with her, warning her that next time he would take her to jail, but once again this made her furious and then withdrawn. Lauren blamed me for ruining her life. Nothing seemed to work with her, and I was beyond my tolerance levels, running on overwhelm. I was stressed and frustrated and so very tired of it all.
One Sunday afternoon my hope shrank back further still. Shirley called and asked if she could come and talk to me about something. When she arrived, she told me that her daughter, Lindsey, had confessed that Lauren had been heavily using crystal meth. Lindsey was upset that Lauren was getting into drugs so heavily and told her mother because she was worried Lauren might end up dead. I was furious at Shirley for acting like she had the inside scoop on what was going on with Lauren. I couldn’t believe that she would take Lindsey’s story at face value. I was sure that this was something that Lindsey had just made up to take the focus off being in whatever trouble she was in with her mother at that time. I listened and thanked Shirley for her information, but inside I was seething. How dare Lindsey make up something like this about Lauren, I repeated in my head.
Denial is such a potent and all-consuming state of consciousness. It is a dangerous flipside of hopefulness. It protects us from what is too painful for us to acknowledge. The trick is not to stay there. That afternoon after Shirley left, I had to take a good hard look at how I was dealing with the news I had received about Lauren. My conscious mind did not want to comprehend what I knew in my heart was probably true. The beast of my grandfather’s and father’s and mine was now hers in a way I could no longer deny. My daughter was addicted to a drug I had been addicted to also, and I heard myself keep asking, “How could this be happening?” I got down on my knees in my bedroom and prayed. I was scared to death that if I did not do something, Lauren would end up dead just as Lindsey had feared.
Lauren didn’t know at that time that I had also had a problem with crystal meth at her age. I wonder if I should have been more candid about my past. I became so close to the situation after Lauren’s addiction began to include meth, I felt like I was being punished personally for having hid my secret from her. I asked myself how my daughter could end up having a major problem with the exact same drug, but at least part of the answer was because I had never told Lauren that she comes from an addicted family. I had to do something, or the legacy of addiction was never going to end. I picked up the phone and called the adolescent drug group, where Lauren had been with me for family counseling when Ryan was attending. I sat her down and talked with her about it, and I said that if she did not want to get sober, she would have to find another place to live. I was no longer going to tolerate drug use in my home.
Demanding that Lauren listen to me or get out of my house was one of the hardest things I had ever done. The last thing I wanted was for her to end up on the streets, but I also knew if I continued to allow her to carry on, Lauren might likely die. She agreed that day to go to the intake session, a relief that made me feel grateful for Shirley, not angry at her anymore. I sat in the waiting room while Lauren talked to the counselor, wishing that whatever happened in there, she would be willing to accept help. I knew I had to allow her to make her own decision, to help us both in the long run. The counselor came out and said that she was very sorry, but Lauren was not willing to get sober or attend the drug group, which left me with a feeling of despair. Right when I had thought I had been given a chance to turn things around, again it all felt like a waste of time.
I had to follow through on my promise to Lauren, that if she continued to use drugs I would ask her to leave the house, so we drove home in silence, and I asked Lauren where she would like me to drop her off. She asked if she could pack a few things at the house first and make a phone call. I agreed. Lauren got on the phone with her best friend, Paige, who had moved to Wisconsin. At nine in the evening I had to pick Ryan up from his meeting and had planned to drop Lauren off someplace when I returned. Just as I was leaving to get him, Lauren came running out after me. She asked if she could go with me to pick Ryan up. I was suspicious. I thought maybe she was just trying to stall so she didn’t have to leave, which was most likely the case given her history of excuses. I took her anyway, and when we arrived at the meeting, about fifty teens were outside the coffee shop, just like the first time Bob and I had visited the twelve-step center. More and more kids poured out of the meeting that had just let out. They were running around talking, laughing, and having fun. Lauren’s eyes opened wide. I could see disbelief on her face as she watched the crowd of kids, all having the time of their lives. She said, “Wow, I could be a leader in this group. Mom, let me out of the car.” I unlocked the door, and the next thing I knew she was lost in a crowd of teens.
Lauren could be so incredibly consistent and focused when she was committed to something. That was a quality that I admired in her and hoped she would
develop as she matured. I studied her face that night, as she stood talking in the crowd around her, knowing that my real daughter was inside her somewhere. If only her focus could shift from drugs to a group like the kids in the twelve-step program, then perhaps there was hope. I sat patiently in my car with that thought for about fifteen minutes, waiting for Ryan and Lauren. I noticed Ryan was talking to a boy whom we had known from the adolescent drug group. The boys walked over to the car, and Ryan’s friend proceeded to tell me, proudly, that he had thirty days sober. He said he had never been able to stay sober in the other programs, which made him enthusiastic about doing great. Lauren got back in the car shortly after and looked at me and said, “Mom, I want to be in this program.” I turned and gushed, “Okay!” I wanted the same hope for Lauren that I had seen in the eyes of Ryan’s friend.
CHAPTER 5
HEALING FROM THE BOTTOM UP
My first twelve-step parent meeting was pretty frustrating. One of my new rules was supposed to have been that Lauren and Ryan attend meetings with me, and I ended up driving to the meeting by myself. I just didn’t have it in me that night to drag them there. Lauren said she had a headache, and Ryan complained of both a headache and a stomachache. When I walked into the room, I felt so much like an outsider. Many of the people were laughing and talking happily. I didn’t understand it. These were all parents of addicts. How were they able to look so happy? They must be insane, I thought, or they had a different kind of kids than mine. I had to stand and tell the group my name. After I did, I realized I wasn’t the only new parent there, or the only other parent who was overwhelmed. I was welcomed with clapping and cheering. Each of us had a chance that night to talk and tell about our present situation. I told the group about what I had been going through with Lauren and Ryan. The lady leading the meeting looked at me, smiled, and said, “At least you are here!”
I was taken into a special meeting for newcomers after I met with the group, where I was given information about the twelve-step process. The concept of “enthusiastic sobriety” was explained to me, and the two-year program time line for teen sobriety was laid out to show me that sobriety could be taught as an attractive way of life. The philosophy of enthusiastic sobriety included having fun, sticking with sober people, and having honesty and integrity in relationships. It basically promoted getting children off drugs by teaching them to think straight and take their lives back. At the foundation of enthusiastic sobriety was the twelve-step recovery process, a set of guiding principles for recovery from various addictions.
The twelve-step process was originally developed by the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), for the recovery of alcoholism. Working the twelve steps involves admitting that one cannot control one’s addiction, recognizing a greater power that can give strength, examining past errors with the help of a sponsor who is an experienced member of a twelve-step group, making amends for past errors, learning to live a new life with a new set of behaviors, and helping others that suffer from the same addictions. The teens in twelve-step with Ryan were going to be encouraged to stick with “winners” only, which meant other sober people. Peer groups, I was told, were so important to a teenager that recovery could only happen when kids stopped hanging around with their former drug-using friends.
This was the first time I was told that drug abuse and alcoholism were both diseases, and that each was progressive and deadly enough that these risks, not behavior issues, were the focus of the program. It was a total change from the way we had approached Lauren and Ryan’s addictions. The concept at twelve-step was to get a teen off the substances first, so that many of the other behaviors would start to fall in place. In addition to this education for the kids, the twelve-step center did some individual counseling and held outpatient sessions. Next door to that was the coffee shop, where the teens could hang out or host functions and dances. The program also had an inpatient unit available, if that was necessary. The counselors who ran the inpatient program were different from any professionals I had met. All of them were young adults that were recovering themselves. Most had gotten sober in the twelve-step program. I suspected this was what had led to the impressive success rate of the program with teens.
It was recommended that parents come to meetings while their children were in the program, to reinforce the successes of counseling. I was committed to doing that. The teen group for Lauren and Ryan would include kids up to age eighteen. A young adult group also met, which included people through the age of twenty-four, but the program was typically two years long, after which time group members were encouraged to stay in touch and begin attending other twelve-step meetings. All of what I heard that first night made sense to me. The parent who led the group told her story, about her daughter’s behavior, drug abuse, and constant running away. Attempting to manage this had made her a mother who was completely out of control. As I listened, all I could think was, Wow, I can relate to that. She was telling my story.
The night closed with an appointment I had to make to schedule Lauren and Ryan for their evaluations. They each spoke with the senior counselor at the twelve-step center individually. “Well,” she said to me after they finished up, “they are willing to give this a try.” She had explained to them that they would be expected to attend two meetings per week and all social functions. If I ran into problems, I was to contact her. She reminded me of the commitment I also needed to make. “It’s really important that you commit to attending the parent meetings,” she said. “It can make all the difference if you are working on getting healthy, too. This is a family disease, and it affects everyone in the household.”
After blowing off that first meeting, Lauren and Ryan did make it to their own meetings during our first month, although they refused to go to coffee after their meetings, or to the social functions that they had promised they would attend. I spoke to the counselors about this. They didn’t think it was unusual because Lauren and Ryan were so new to twelve-step. Ryan had only just graduated to twelve-step from recovery. Lauren had only caught the fire for the program after seeing all the kids Ryan had met in the group. Sometimes I took them home after their meeting and went to be with the parents I had met. I didn’t really like leaving the kids home alone, because we were still having issues, but the counselors assured me that I could not watch them constantly. If issues were going to come up, it was best to let them happen, and then we could deal with them together.
I shared the negative reactions from Lauren and Ryan, about the coffee shop and social functions, with the parents in my meetings. “You can’t expect miracles overnight,” one man said to me. “Progress is that they are attending two meetings per week with some really cool people. They’ll come around.” After listening to my parent group, I brought my anger to them, so that the other parents could help me learn to respond, instead of reacting at Lauren and Ryan for not participating. Gradually, this system paid off. They started to go to coffee after the meetings, but I could sense they were still unsure. Addiction still had them and was still fighting to be the most important thing in their lives.
The first major crack in our new program was with Ryan. He disappeared for an entire twenty-four hours, after which I found him passed out in his bedroom reeking of marijuana and alcohol. Counselors at twelve-step recommended that he go through the outpatient program, which was a forty-five-day treatment, after we found him. I agreed that it would be the best choice, and a counselor from twelve-step came to the house to help me take Ryan in. She went into his bedroom and woke him up. Together they went outside on the patio and talked for about fifteen minutes. She performed a drug intervention right under my own roof, which had never happened before. The first week of outpatient went pretty well for him, but on the weekend he hooked up with a drug buddy. Once again, I found drugs at my house. The first thing I did the following week was call Ryan’s outpatient counselor. He said, “Thank you! We will deal with this.” I was proud of myself because I never mentioned to Ryan I had found his drugs. I worked
as a teammate with the counselors, who had promised I could rely on them, and together we were confronting the obstacles we faced.
It was the obstacles with Ryan that led to the discoveries about Lauren. Despite her slow startup with the twelve-step group, she had actually been headed in the opposite direction still and hadn’t reached her bottom yet. I came to a pivotal realization about reaching bottom with the program counselors, through Ryan’s subsequent slides. I had returned to denial to cope after two weekends in particular with him that had gone very badly. The worst of it was when a policeman found Ryan on a golf course and explained he believed Ryan was under the influence of some type of illegal drug. It was two in the morning, and we all stood on my doorstep looking at Ryan. His eyes were black and dilated. He was supposed to have been out at a “sober” party. I told the whole story to Ryan’s counselor, trying to convince him that the policeman may have been wrong about the drugs. The counselor looked at me and said, “If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck. Your son is a drug addict, and all of the evidence points to the fact that he is still actively using.”
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