I’m not sure if I know any ‘functional’ families, if functional means a family without difficult times and members who don’t have a full range of problems.
I am becoming used to an overwhelming, grinding mixture of anger and worry...
Wherever you be, wherever you may, seek the truth, strive for the beautiful, achieve the good.
Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability. It is at once sublime and terrifying.
At my worst, I even resented Nic because an addict, at least when high, has a momentary respite from his suffering. There is no similar relief for parents or children or husbands or wives or others who love them.
How innocent we are of our mistakes and how we responsible we are for them.
Our children live or die with or without us. No matter what we do, no matter how we agonize or obsess, we cannot choose for our children whether they live or die. It is a devastating realization, but also liberating. I finally chose life for myself.
Some people may opt out. Their child turns out to be whatever it is that they find impossible to face – for some, the wrong religion; for some, the wrong sexuality; for some, a drug addict. They close the door. Click. Like in mafia movies: “I have no son. He is dead to me.” I have a son and he will never be dead to me.
Ha Jin writes: ‘Some great men and women are fortified and redeemed through their suffering, and they even seek sadness instead of happiness, just as Van Gogh asserted, ‘Sorrow is better than joy,’ and Balzac declared, ‘Suffering is one’s teacher.’ But these dicta are suitable only for extraordinary souls, for the select few. For ordinary people like us, too much suffering can only make us meaner, crazier, pettier, and more wretched.
Anne Lamott advises, “Try not to compare your insides with other people’s outsides.
Every time the telephone rings, my stomach constricts. Long after the euphoria from meth is no longer attainable – Tennessee Williams described the equivalent with alcohol in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: “I never again could get the click” – addicts are agitated and confused, and most stop eating and sleeping. Parents of addicts don’t sleep, either.
Al-Anon’s Three Cs: “You didn’t cause it, you can’t control it, you can’t cure it.
An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie about it. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.” Part of me is convinced that he actually believes that he will find it for you.
You’ve got to wonder what Jesus was like at seventeen,” Anne Lamott wrote. “They don’t even talk about it in the Bible, he was apparently so awful.
It is still so easy to forget that addiction is not curable. It is a lifelong disease that can go into remission, that is manageable if the one who is stricken does the hard, hard work, but it is incurable.
There is much good, but to enjoy the beauty, the love, one must bear the painful.
But you know, I don’t think I will be so scared to die. I think it’s like today: the end of a vacation when you are ready to go home.
Even as all the experts kindly tell the parents of addicts, ‘You didn’t cause it,’ I have not let myself off the hook. I often feel as if I completely failed my son. In admitting this, I am not looking for sympathy or absolution, but instead stating a truth that will be recognized by most parents who have been through this.
If Nic were not ill he would not lie. If Nic were not ill he would not steal. If Nic were not ill he would not terrorize his family. He would not forsake his friends, his mother, Karen, Jasper, and Daisy, and he would not forsake me. He would not. He has a disease, but addiction is the most baffling of all diseases, unique in the blame, shame, and humiliation that accompany it.
When Sigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, Luigi, and Zelda, heard the complaints about video games, he simply shrugged his shoulders. “Video games are bad for you? That’s what they said about rock ’n’ roll.