- Drugs
I never had what one would call a “happy childhood.” Things were always chaos and constant turmoil. I don’t know that it’s necessary to go into all of that, but believe me when I say that I am pretty sure that was the beginning of the end for me.
I started my family very young. I was married when I was 19, and by 21 I had my first daughter. She was such a joy and made me believe that things would be okay, but it didn’t work out that way. When my family started calling my daughter Little Lori, I had my first admission to a mental health unit. That is a nice way to say that I was in a locked unit for a week. I got past this and was moving forward with my life. I was doing better, and things were looking up.
When I was 26, I had my second daughter. She was such an easy baby to take care of. I honestly thought that I was working toward a happy life with my kids and my husband. As I look back, I actually was feeling good about life and looking forward to seeing what God had in store for me. Until September of 2001. I had worked all day in the school that I taught in. I was a teaching assistant and was working hard, given the time of year and considering that I worked with special ed children.
I will never forget the day that my life went to hell in a hand basket.
In May of 2000 my Mom had to have bypass surgery and ended with five arteries being bypassed, and her last few months were miserable. Let me say this before I go any further: My parents were drug users from way back. Mom started with prescription drugs that she got from the doctors on the military bases we lived on. When my father got out of the service, they both found the joys of street drugs. Before very long they were dealing to offset the cost of what they were using. At 16 years of age there was nothing cooler to have everything an up-and-coming user would ever want. I was quite popular in high school. All my friends knew, and we had some wickedly awesome parties. The ironic thing here is we were always having utilities turned off because the bills were never paid.
Fast forward to September 20, 2001. As I said, I had worked all day and was home for about an hour, when my phone rang. My older brother called to tell me that my Mom was gone. No one was saying it, but we all knew there was something not right about the things that my father was telling us. A few days after her funeral, I was told that Mom had a massive heart attack and that was her cause of death.
To say I wasn’t convinced is an understatement. I stewed on it for a few days, and then I called the medical examiner and got a copy of her autopsy report. Yes she had a heart attack, but there were contributing factors. I’m guessing it was the pills that had dissolved and the ones that were still whole in her stomach. Morphine, Percocet, Librium, Valium, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety medications and a host of medications for her heart.
I asked my father about the report, and he turned ghostly white and tried to talk around the whole thing. He said he didn’t want us to know that she had killed herself. I couldn’t find a way to make it make sense. I know that she had been very unhappy with my father. He wasn’t a very nice man, and Mom and I had taken a large portion of his meanness. She had attempted suicide several times before and never succeeded, but this was different: undissolved pills in her stomach and none left in her bottle. I couldn’t prove it, but I knew what had happened. You will never make me believe that my father didn’t have something to do with her death.
Move to five months later in February of 2001. My husband and I had been out all day on February 25. When we got home, there were messages from my younger brother to call him as soon as I heard the messages. My father had killed himself, five months to the day after we buried my Mom. This had to be the worst year of my life.
Two years later I was tired of the constant fighting between my husband and myself, of our fighting being his favorite way to take all the day’s stress out. In 2003 my marriage was over. I separated and, finally, we were divorced in November of 2004.
Things get a little blurry after that. I was using prescription drugs hard. I started with Vicodin and quickly moved to Percocet, Soma and a load of other things that I shared with the man I was seeing. It was so scarily close to Mom and my father’s lives.
Pretty soon I had lost more than I ever wanted to. My actual use lasted about ten years. I nearly killed myself in a car accident in 2009, when I hit another car head on. Had the police known what they were doing I would have gone to jail for felony DUI, vehicular assault and a laundry list of other charges. As it worked out, they flubbed the blood work, and it was thrown out. Without the blood they had no choice but to drop the DUI charge and I pleaded guilty to vehicular assault three, misdemeanor and careless driving. I lost my license for a year, did a year of probation and paid heavy fines.
The next three years are a complete blur. I lost my job, my home and worst of all my girls and my grandbabies.
Finally on November 14, 2012, I woke up and realized what I had done. I was shaking, crying and all the things that go with that. I called the local detox and rehab and was admitted that night. Then I called my kids and the man I love and told them. Finally they were going to get the woman that I am back, and the woman that took over for so long was going away. Truth be known, my Dennis was going to meet me for the first time. He had never known me clean, and I was terrified he wouldn’t like me. We have since moved in together, and he is one of the best things I have ever known. We love each other, but slowing down and getting to know each other all over again has been tough.
As I am writing this, I have just over nine months clean. It hasn’t been easy, but I am doing it. Meetings, counselors and all of my family are backing me all the way. I have craved, wanted, needed and declined every time. I know that I am forever an addict. I think I may have been born an addict and simply kept it in check for a very long time. But I can say this: As hard as it is some days, it’s worth it to wake up every morning and grab a coffee cup instead of a pill bottle.