- Drugs
- Friends & Family
Submitted by: Susanne Johnson
Kadylou’s journey of addiction started in a very different way than most other people. It was not the alcohol which came first— she started with cocaine. She was only twelve years old and became a dealer. The person who fixed up her first line for her was her own mother, a drug addict and alcoholic. She told Kadylou and Kadylou’s childhood best friend about drugs, and gave them their first try of cocaine. Both were hooked to the feeling right from the beginning.
Then alcohol followed for both kids only six months later. “We snorted the cocaine and I was gone from there.” she says,. It took her over a decade to find the way out of this deadly downward spiral. As the next step, her mother was too lazy to mix her own mix drinks and had Kadylou do it for her. It didn’t take long until she started to try drinking too, while making drinks for mom. Soon, she found she really liked alcohol. This young girl became the drinking and drugging buddy that mom wanted, but never had.
About two years later, her childhood friend and his brother started to make methamphetamines at their home and she participated soon in production, dealing and consumption. They hid it from their parents, still doing the cocaine with Kadylou’s mom.
Kadylou started to get problems in school, but teachers knew that her mother was an alcoholic and addict and consequences were not drastic. At this time, she still lived pretty much the life of a normal teenager— she loved soccer, tennis and was the captain of the cheerleading team. She also was interested in music and played the flute. The missing love at home was found at her grandmother’s home— her grandmother was her best friend.
At age 15, her grandmother passed away and Kadylou fell into a deep black hole. Her addiction skyrocketed and she stopped all the things that she formerly found passion in. She stayed a lot of times at her childhood friend’s home and his mother was trying to help her get away from her own addicted and drinking mom, not knowing that the two kids have developed their own meth production in her home in the meantime.
Her mother often beat her when she was intoxicated of any kind. Kadylou only learned to live in defense and aggression and got herself multiple assault charges as a teenager from physical fights with her mother. Her first assault charge was at age 13 already, a possession charge at 14, which both were dropped, but for a trafficking charge at age 15 she went to a juvenile detention center for the first time. “Home was scarier than the detention center.” she adds and therefore it was not noticed as a bad consequence of her actions and behavior.
Her next fight with her mother brought Kadylou to prison. She was only seventeen, but sentenced as an adult. Kadylou was madly beating her mother and it took several cops and the mother’s current husband to get her off her mother. She was on drugs. Her mother switched husbands very often, it was her 26th husband so far. Kadylou’s biological father went to prison before Kadylou was born, as he murdered Kadylou’s brother. She spend a year in prison in Virginia, where she grew up, still drinking and using. As she got out she moved to Miami, Florida, only to get into some Cuban gang-style community, dealing for them. As she reached the age of 21 she started working in bars, most days drunk and high from meth.
At age 22, she met a guy and thought she would settle down with him in Tennessee. She got pregnant right away with him and the child died only an hour after she was born. At this time Kadylou tried for the first time to find help. Even a short stay at a rehab could not get her to find sobriety, so she used and drank all through her pregnancy, unable to stop. She suffered severe trauma and never had the chance to heal from the grief or resolve the trauma. She was high and with a bottle at the funeral of her daughter.
During a second pregnancy shortly after that, she managed to just drink, but left the drugs out of her system. By the grace of God, her daughter was born healthy. Severe fights made her leave the father of the child before she gave birth. She only knew to call her mother for help. Her mother took the child, and Kadylou went to college, trying a new start. Her mom got custody of the child, while Kadylou lived on campus and went downhill by partying again. She dropped college a semester before graduation to move in with “the man of her dreams”, who was doing meth. She again got pregnant and found out that this guy was married with two children. She also found out that he was a convicted child molester.
Kadylou was on the streets, drunk, pregnant, traumatized, and hopeless, when an old lady found her and took her home. She took care of her for a long time, helping her as much as she could, trying to be the best influence she had. Kadylou was drinking a little, but not taking drugs. The old lady became very ill and told Kadylou that it would be best to go back to her mother after she gave birth.
Kadylou went home and back on meth right away. This life lead to more legal troubles and as she was facing charges again, she thought it would look good to be clean and sober. She walked into a 12-step meeting and asked for help. She did not really have the intention to stop, but thought it would be helpful for her legal trouble. She met her sponsor, who believed in her, and also accompanied her to court. She did go to jail but was given probation after a few months and returned to the rooms of the 12-step-fellowship.
Kadylou is now determined to stay clean and sober. Now she has the ultimate wish to never ever to go back to the life she had. While she was young, she did not have many choices in life, the early drug consumption her mother pushed her toward took them away early. Today she enjoys the choice to stay clean and sober. She has been continuously sober for five months today, because she slipped once by using marijuana, which was never her drug at all. Without this she would have a longer time now.
Since she get drug tested from court, she was caught and never did anything again after that one day. She was in a bad situation that caused her to relapse. Her coping skills in her young sobriety were not strong enough to deal with all what happened at once. She was working the fifth step and bringing up old memories— such as memories of her youngest sister who had a bad car accident, her cousin who had died, her uncle who had died and her mother, who found out that she got cancer. This all happened within five days and was too much for her to deal with. She has learned from this relapse and knows today that the use of any drugs won’t make the situation any better, that using makes it worse. She has build up her support network and keeps working the steps.
Today she has a stable job in a good company, has a husband that is also in sobriety who works as a case manager at a treatment center and does almost every day at least one meeting, some days even more. She knows, that she still has a long way to go to get her life under control, but she trusts in the small steps in the right direction she is taking today.
Her sobriety is her highest priority today. If she feels that she has it stabilized she will try to get the custody of her two daughters back from her mother and raise them with a lot of love and without any drugs in the family home. She does a lot of service work inside the fellowship and will also start chairing meetings at a nearby jail soon, trying to give back what was so freely given to her.
She would love to work some day in the recovery industry, maybe owning a sober living home and utilizing the knowledge she got through her studies at college, although she never finished and graduated. She knows that her recovery and the 12-step program saved her life. “I was a tornado before, a jet plane flying at a million miles per hour straight into my grave. Now I am a butterfly,”, she states.