Addict Mom Quotes

In all of your living, don't forget to live.

Independence is a heady draft, and if you drink it in your youth, it can have the same effect on the brain as young wine does. It does not matter that its taste is not always appealing. It is addictive and with each drink you want more.

We're talking about humans inhaling the toxic life force sucked out of a demon from another world.' Quite possible the weirdest sentence I'd ever said aloud...'And according to your mom, if they survive addiction-and that's a big if-their scrambled brains'll make Ozzy Osbourne look rational and coherent.

it's okay to be addicted to beauty," Mom says, all dreamy. "Emerson said 'beauty is God's handwriting.

I think, maybe, that’s what being a mom is. Being able to handle all the unexpected things in life.

I forgive you." The power of those words rushes through me, purging all the torturous memories of my youth. It gushes into all the cracks my mom's neglect and addictions have created, filling them with a mercy that's not my own.

Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only. To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense. The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn. The trouble with learning the backgrounds is that you end up wanting to deck somebody, possibly Bettina Cook and the horse she rode in on. (Not happening. Her dad being head of the football boosters and major donor.) Once upon a time we had our honest living that was God and country. Then the world turns and there’s no God anymore, no country, but it’s still in your blood that coal is God’s gift and you want to believe. Because otherwise it was one more scam in the fuck-train that’s railroaded over these mountains since George Washington rode in and set his crew to cutting down our trees. Everything that could be taken is gone. Mountains left with their heads blown off, rivers running black. My people are dead of trying, or headed that way, addicted as we are to keeping ourselves alive. There’s no more blood here to give, just war wounds. Madness. A world of pain, looking to be killed.

I love you. You’re not your addiction, Mom. I love you. And despite everything I will always forgive you.

Your dad was in a street gang?" My adopted dad was an accountant for a big Fortune 500 corporation. Him, me, and my adopted mom lived in the suburbs in an English Tudor house with a gigantic basement where he fiddled with model trains. The other dads were lawyers and research chemists, but they all ran model trains. Every weekend they could, they'd load into a family van and cruise into the city for research. Snapping pictures of gang members. Gang graffiti. Sex workers walking their tracks. Litter and pollution and homeless heroin addicts. All this, they'd study and bicker about, trying to outdo each other with the most realistic, the grittiest scenes of urban decay they could create in HO train scale in a subdivision basement

Addicts are good at lying, but never as good as their children. It's their sons and daughters who have to come up with excuses, never too outlandish or incredible, always mundane enough for no one to want to check them. An addict's child's homework never gets eaten by the dog, they just forgot their backpack at home. Their mom didn't miss parents' evening because she was kidnapped by ninjas, but because she had to work overtime. The child doesn't remember the name of the place she's working, it's only a temporary job. She does her best, Mom does, to support us now that Dad's gone, you know. You soon learn how to phrase things in such a way as to preclude any follow-up questions. You learn that the women in the welfare office can take you away from her if they find out she managed to set fire to your last apartment when she fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand, or if they find out she stole the Christmas ham from the supermarket. So you lie when the security guard comes, you take the ham off her, and confess: 'It was me who took it.' No one calls the police for a child, not when it's Christmas. So they let you go home with your mom, hungry but not alone.

It’s okay to be addicted to beauty,” Mom says, all dreamy. “Emerson said ‘Beauty is God’s handwriting.

Each morning set out to accomplish a goal with your kiddos and at the end of the day the reward is knowing your babes were invested in and well-loved and nurtured. Could that be reward enough?

You look like a drug addict,” Mom says. “It washes you out completely.” “Wow. Thanks, Mom,” I tell her, swallowing the lump her words bring up in my throat. “I can always count on you to build up my self-confidence.” “Would you feel better if I lied to you?” Mom asks. “Okay, fine. You look like Miss America. There, happy?

What's Facebook? It's where moms like me post about how much we love the husbands who annoy the living bejesus out of us, and share expertly edited photos of our kids and generally talk about our loves like we're living in an enchanted fairy tale blessed by rainbow angel unicorns. In short, it's for lying. But I'm addicted.

Every addiction story wants a villain. But America has never been able to decide whether addicts are victims or criminals, whether addiction is an illness or a crime. So we relieve the pressure of cognitive dissonance with various provisions of psychic labor - some addicts got pitied, others get blamed - that keep overlapping and evolving to suit our purposes: Alcoholics are tortured geniuses. Drug addicts are deviant zombies. Male drunks are thrilling. Female drunks are bad moms. White addicts get their suffering witnessed. Addicts of color get punished. Celebrity addicts get posh rehab with equine therapy. Poor addicts get hard time. Someone carrying crack gets five years in prison, while someone driving drunk gets a night in jail, even though drunk driving kills more people every year than cocaine. In her seminal account of mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow, legal scholar Michelle Alexander points out that many of these biases tell a much larger story about 'who is viewed as disposable - someone to be purged from the body politic - and who is not.' They aren't incidental discrepancies - between black and white addicts, drinkers and drug users - but casualties of our need to vilify some people under the guise of protecting others.

She was one of the few stay-at-home moms in Ramsey Hill and was famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else. She said that she expected to be “beheaded” someday by one of the windows whose sash chains she’d replaced. Her children were “probably” dying of trichinosis from pork she’d undercooked. She wondered if her “addiction” to paint-stripper fumes might be related to her “never” reading books anymore. She confided that she’d been “forbidden” to fertilize Walter’s flowers after what had happened “last time.

When we come in, Trey is sitting up in the bed, him arm is a sling and a shadow of stubble on his face. "It's about time," he says. He's got the look of a stoner on his face, and I he's got a morphine drip going. Guess mom and Dad don't think HE'LL get addicted. Eye roll.

Drug addiction was a disease, and just as I wouldn’t judge a cancer patient for a tumor, so I shouldn’t judge a narcotics addict for her behavior. At thirteen, I found this patently absurd, and Mom and I often argued over whether her newfound wisdom was scientific truth or an excuse for people whose decisions destroyed a family. Oddly enough, it’s probably both: Research does reveal a genetic disposition to substance abuse, but those who believe their addiction is a disease show less of an inclination to resist it. Mom was telling herself the truth, but the truth was not setting her free.

His mom was high when Whitey was born. She was also high when she named him. Esmerelda was the name of her sister, the only person in the world who ever treated her decently, and Torno was short for tornado, because that’s how it felt when Whitey came out. Whitey’s mom had a penchant for the cocaine.

The more time I spent focused on my issues, the less time I had to focus on Steven’s. And the less I was focusing on Steven’s, the further apart we grew. It’s been sad to recognize how much fixing has been the backbone of our relationship. Whether it was Steven trying to fix my bulimia or me trying to fix his marijuana addiction or pushing him to find the right cocktail of medication, it’s been the glue of our relationship. Without that aspect of fixing the other, we don’t have much to talk about.

As I increasingly saw Mom's behavior in myself, I tried to understand her.

Hey, laugh all you want, but I grew up poor in backwoods Florida, with an immigrant, single mom. I'm the only person in my family who learned to read, and that was only because of comic books at first, and then fantasy novels and an active imagination. I got addicted to them when I was a kid and read like crazy. I must have read thousands of them. So I've been reading about elves and that kind of thing for twenty plus years. I can't help it if I'm excited." "You were a geek," she said. "Well, I guess." "I bet you played Dungeons and Dragons in a friend's garage." "Well, yeah." "Nerd.

My mom was actually so concerned with my chocolate addiction when I was little that she had to repeatedly tell me that if a nice young man or woman offered me candy I had to scream at the top of my lungs.

Once again, my hands itched for my phone. My mom always complained I was addicted to the thing, but this wasn’t true; I just didn’t like sitting around with nothing to do, wasting time instead of spending it.

Not wandering in the world of desire is another way of describing cool loneliness. Wandering in the world of desire involves looking for alternatives, seeking something to comfort us—food, drink, people. The word desire encompasses that addiction quality, the way we grab for something because we want to find a way to make things okay. That quality comes from never having grown up. We still want to go home and be able to open the refrigerator and find it full of our favorite goodies; when the going gets tough, we want to yell “Mom!” But what we’re doing as we progress along the path is leaving home and becoming homeless. Not wandering in the world of desire is about relating directly with how things are. Loneliness is not a problem. Loneliness is nothing to be solved. The same is true for any other experience we might have.

she has no choice but to play Mom. Still, it’s impressive. Maybe Elise can’t see exactly how impressive it is, but I can. It takes a lot for a kid to break the cycle of addiction. And Belle is trying to save Elise from herself.

And then there's the truth beyond that, sitting like an old rock under green creek water: none of these things matter. Right now, in this moment, we have love. We have it in the sound of my daughter's laugher, in Mom's and Georgia's locked fingers, in the warm pressure of J.T.'s hand. It will leave, and it will come again, and when it does I'll give up everything and take it. Just like an addict. Like dry grass in new rain. It's not something I'm proud of necessarily. Then again, maybe I am.

We are supposed to consume alcohol and enjoy it, but we're not supposed to become alcoholics. Imagine if this were the same with cocaine. Imagine we grew up watching our parents snort lines at dinner, celebrations, sporting events, brunches, and funerals. We'd sometimes (or often) see our parents coked out of our minds the way we sometimes (or often) see them drunk. We'd witness them coming down after a cocaine binge the way we see them recovering from a hangover. Kiosks at Disneyland would see it so our parents could make it through a day of fun, our mom's book club would be one big blow-fest and instead of "mommy juice" it would be called "mommy powder" There'd be coke-tasting parties in Napa and cocaine cellars in fancy people's homes, and everyone we know (including our pastors, nurses, teachers, coaches, bosses) would snort it. The message we'd pick up as kids could be Cocaine is great, and one day you'll get to try it, too! Just don't become addicted to it or take it too far. Try it; use it responsibly. Don't become a cocaine-oholic though. Now, I'm sure you're thinking. That's insane, everyone knows cocaine is far more addicting than alcohol and far more dangerous. Except, it's not...The point is not that alcohol is worse than cocaine. The point is that we have a really clear understanding that cocaine is toxic and addictive. We know there's no safe amount of it, no such thing as "moderate" cocaine use; we know it can hook us and rob us of everything we care about...We know we are better off not tangling with it at all.

I told mom that she was confusing happiness with pleasure. That's common today. A trip to the video arcade may be a source of pleasure, but it will not give lasting and enduring happiness. This mother's son derives pleasure from playing video games, but playing video games in an online world is unlikely to be a source of real fulfillment. The pleasure derived from a video game may last for weeks or even months. But it will not last many years, in my firsthand observation Of many young men over the past two decades. The boy either moves on to something else, or the happiness undergoes a silent and malignant transformation into addiction. The hallmark of addiction is decreasing pleasure over time. Tolerance develops. Playing the game becomes compulsive, almost involuntary. It no longer gives the thrill and pleasure it once did. But the addict can no longer find pleasure in anything else. Pleasure is not the same thing as happiness. The gratification Of desire yields pleasure, not lasting happiness. Happiness comes from fulfillment, from living up to your potential, which means more than playing online video games.

editor in New York and my mom and dad on the phone. My body is weak and bloated. I’m slowly poisoning myself to death. And it’s not like I haven’t seen what this shit does to people. The most fucked-up detoxes I’ve ever seen are the people coming off alcohol. It’s worse than heroin, worse than benzos, worse than anything. Alcohol can pickle your brain—leaving you helpless, like a child—infantilized—shitting in your pants—ranting madness—disoriented—angry—terrified. But that’s not gonna be me, I mean, it can’t be. I may hate myself. I may fantasize about suicide. But I’m way too vain to let myself die an alcoholic death. There’s nothing glamorous about alcoholism. You don’t go out like Nic Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, with a gorgeous woman riding you till your heart stops. Alcoholism takes you down slow, robbing you of every last bit of dignity on your way

Drug addiction was a disease, and just as I wouldn’t judge a cancer patient for a tumor, so I shouldn’t judge a narcotics addict for her behavior. At thirteen, I found this patently absurd, and Mom and I often argued over whether her newfound wisdom was scientific truth or an excuse for people whose decisions destroyed a family. Oddly enough, it’s probably both: Research does reveal a genetic disposition to substance abuse, but those who believe their addiction is a disease show less of an inclination to resist it. Mom was telling herself the truth, but the truth was not setting her free. I

We must commit to pulling our brothers and sisters out of the river and also commit to going upstream to identify, confront, and hold accountable those who are pushing them in. We help parents bury their babies who were victims of gun violence. And we go upstream to fight the gun manufacturers and politicians who profit from their children’s deaths. We step into the gap to sustain moms who are raising families with imprisoned dads. And we go upstream to dismantle the injustice of mass incarceration. We fund recovery programs for those suffering from opioid addiction. And we go upstream to rail against the system that enables Big Pharma and corrupt doctors to get richer every time another kid gets hooked. We provide shelter and mentoring for LGBTQ homeless kids. And we go upstream to renounce the religious-based bigotry, family rejection, and homophobic policies that make LGBTQ kids more than twice as likely as their straight or cis-gender peers to experience homelessness. We help struggling veterans get the PTSD treatment they need and deserve, and we go upstream to confront the military-industrial complex, which is so zealous to send our soldiers to war and so willing to abandon them when they return.

Often, women's symptoms are brushed off as the result of depression, anxiety, or the all-purpose favorite: stress. Sometimes, they are attributed to women's normal physiological states and cycles: to menstrual cramps, menopause, or even being a new mom. Sometimes, other aspects of their identity seem to take center stage: fat women report that any ailment is blamed on their weight; trans women find that all their symptoms are attributed to hormone therapy; black women are stereotyped as addicts looking for prescription drugs, their reports of pain doubted entirely. Whatever the particular attribution, there is often the same current of distrust: the sense that women are not very accurate judges of when something is really, truly wrong in their bodies.

Being a product of Bea and Jack, he is the antithesis of Mom.  I don’t mean he doesn’t love me, rather his expression of love, acceptance, and even his presence in my life is as conditional as Mom’s love is unconditional.  He has an unwavering opinion of right and wrong, success and failure, and how a man should behave.  This belief is so rigid, I’ve always felt I wasn’t the type of person he wanted as a son. To

I always imagined rape as this violent scene of a woman walking alone down a dark alley and getting mugged and beaten by some masked criminal. Rape was an angry man forcing himself inside a damsel in distress. I would not carry the trauma of a cliché rape victim. I would not shriek in the midst of my slumber with night terrors. I would not tremble at the sight of every dark haired man or the mention of Number 1’s name. I would not even harbor ill will towards him. My damage was like a cigarette addiction- subtle, seemingly innocent, but everlasting and inevitably detrimental. Number 1 never opened his screen door to furious crowds waving torches and baseball bats. Nobody punched him out in my honor. The Nightfall crowd never socially ostracized him. Even the ex-boyfriend who’d second handedly fused the entire fiasco continued to mingle with him in drug circles. Everybody continued with business as usual. And when I told my parents I lost my virginity against my will, unconscious on a bathroom floor, Carl did not erupt in fury and demand I give him all I knew about his whereabouts so he could greet him with a rifle. Mom blankly shrugged and mumbled, “Oh, that’s too bad,” and drifted into the kitchen as if I’d received a stubbed toe rather than a shredded hymen. Everyone in my life took my rape as lightly as a brief thunderstorm that might have been frightening when it happened, but was easy to forget about. I adopted that mentality as the foundation of my sex life. I would, time and time again, treat sex as flimsily as it started. I would give it away as if it was cheap, second hand junk, rather than a prize that deserved to be earned.

I do love Oregon." My gaze wanders over the quiet, natural beauty surrounding us, which isn't limited to just this garden. "Being near the river, and the ocean, and the rocky mountains, and all this nature ... the weather." He chuckles. "I've never met anyone who actually loves rain. It's kind of weird. But cool, too," he adds quickly, as if afraid to offend me. "I just don't get it." I shrug. "It's not so much that I love rain. I just have a healthy respect for what if does. People hate it, but the world needs rain. It washes away dirt, dilutes the toxins in the air, feeds drought. It keeps everything around us alive." "Well, I have a healthy respect for what the sun does," he counters with a smile." "I'd rather have the sun after a good, hard rainfall." He just shakes his head at me but he's smiling. "The good with the bad?" "Isn't that life?" He frowns. "Why do I sense a metaphor behind that?" "Maybe there is a metaphor behind that." One I can't very well explain to him without describing the kinds of things I see every day in my life. The underbelly of society - where twisted morals reign and predators lurk, preying on the lost, the broken, the weak, the innocent. Where a thirteen-year-old sells her body rather than live under the same roof as her abusive parents, where punks gang-rape a drunk girl and then post pictures of it all over the internet so the world can relive it with her. Where a junkie mom's drug addiction is readily fed while her children sit back and watch. Where a father is murdered bacause he made the mistake of wanting a van for his family. In that world, it seems like it's raining all the time. A cold, hard rain that seeps into clothes, chills bones, and makes people feel utterly wretched. Many times, I see people on the worst day of their lives, when they feel like they're drowing. I don't enjoy seeing people suffer. I just know that if they make good choices, and accept the right help, they'll come out of it all the stronger for it. What I do enjoy comes after. Three months later, when I see that thirteen-year-old former prostitute pushing a mower across the front lawn of her foster home, a quiet smile on her face. Eight months later, when I see the girl who was raped walking home from school with a guy who wants nothing from her but to make her laugh. Two years later, when I see the junkie mom clean and sober and loading a shopping cart for the kids that the State finally gave back to her. Those people have seen the sun again after the harshest rain, and they appreciate it so much more.

You have to practice what you preach. Declare the family dinner table to be an electronics-free zone: no texting and no cell phone use allowed at the dinner table. That means you too, Dad. Although teenage girls are more likely than teenage boys to be addicted to texting and instant messaging, there seems to be a gender reversal in the over-30 crowd, with Dad more likely than Mom to be surreptitiously checking messages on his Blackberry at the dinner table.19 All electronic devices should be prohibited at mealtime.

FURIOUS FAVOR I wonder if David would be allowed in our churches today. In most cases, when a church member has an affair, he is shunned at best or mistreated at worst—even if he repents. But David doesn’t just have an affair. He lusts, covets, fornicates, lies, and gets another man hammered. Then he tries to keep his dirty little secrets by murdering the husband of the woman he “loves.” I doubt I’ve met anyone as sinful as David. Have you? He breaks half of the Ten Commandments in a single episode. And he doesn’t repent until he’s caught. But when Nathan shoves his prophetic finger into David’s chest and rebukes him, David falls to his knees and admits his guilt. And right then, at that moment, God rips open the heavens to reach down and touch David’s soul with stubborn delight. God eagerly forgives David for his sin, and all of it is buried at the bottom of the sea, never to be remembered again. There is no hiccup in God’s furious favor toward David. So why do repentant sinners still bear the stigma of “adulterer,” “divorced,” or “addict” in our churches today? It’s one thing if they don’t repent. But quite often we shun repentant sinners, like Jeffrey Dahmer, whose crimes we just can’t forget. “He’s the former addict.” “That’s the divorced mom.” “Here comes the guy who slept with the church secretary.” For some reason we love to define people by the sin in their lives—even past sin in their lives—rather than by the grace that forgave it. It’s no wonder that David pens the last sentence in Psalm 23: “Surely goodness and mercy shall [hunt me down] all the days of my life” (Ps. 23:6).

AND before you make some snide remark, based on my general temperament, that I must be “riding the cotton pony” or suffering from a “red-letter day,” need I remind you that I am dead, deceased, and rendered eternally prepubescent and therefore immune to the mindless reproductive biological imperatives that, no doubt, shape every living, breathing moment of your crummy living, breathing life. Even now I can hear my mom saying, “Madison, you’re dead, so just calm down.” Increasingly, I’m not sure to which I was more addicted: hope or Xanax.

A meal is sacramental when the rich and poor, powerful and marginalized, sinners and saints share equal status around the table. A local church is sacramental when it is a place where the last are first and the first are last and where those who hunger and thirst are fed. And the church universal is sacramental when it knows no geographic boundaries, no political parties, no single language or culture, and when it advances not through power and might, but through acts of love, joy, and peace and missions of mercy, kindness, humility. In this sense, church gives us the chance to riff on Jesus’ description of the kingdom, to add a few new metaphors of our own. We might say the kingdom is like St. Lydia’s in Brooklyn where strangers come together and remember Jesus when they eat. The kingdom is like the Refuge in Denver, where addicts and academics, single moms and suburban housewives come together to tell each other the truth. The kingdom is like Thistle Farms where women heal from abuse by helping to heal others. The kingdom is like the church that would rather die than cast two of its own out the doors because they are gay. The kingdom is like St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland, Tennessee, where you are loved just for showing up. And even still, the kingdom remains a mystery just beyond our grasp. It is here, and not yet, present and still to come. Consummation, whatever that means, awaits us. Until then, all we have are metaphors. All we have are almosts and not quites and wayside shrines. All we have are imperfect people in an imperfect world doing their best to produce outward signs of inward grace and stumbling all along the way. All we have is this church—this lousy, screwed-up, glorious church—which, by God’s grace, is enough.

Every engineer, doctor, and farmer on this ship has relatives on the waiting list, too, and those relatives won’t be drug addicts. Mom’s right: no one would pick her from a waiting list. No one would’ve picked me, either. Usefulness or death can’t be her only options. If being picked from the waiting list isn’t feasible, then the one choice left is to smuggle her in. The back of my mind keeps whispering about the risk, about She’d only be a drain, but I shut it up. There’s a difference between leaving Mom and leaving Mom to die. “I’m glad you agree,” Iris says. “I know it’s not easy.” That’s what I hate. She’s right. It’s not. I still don’t want to break the rules, even if it’s to help Mom. But people on TV never abandon their family; they risk their own lives. That’s what you’re supposed to do. On TV, people just never feel this twisted about it. “Four this afternoon,” I say. “Let’s talk.

In attunement, it is the infant who leads and the mother who follows. “Where their roles differ is in the timing of their responses,” writes John Bowlby, one of the century’s great psychiatric researchers. The infant initiates the interaction or withdraws from it according to his own rhythms, Bowlby found, while the “mother regulates her behaviour so that it meshes with his... Thus she lets him call the tune and by a skillful interweaving of her own responses with his creates a dialogue.” The tense or depressed mothering adult will not be able to accompany the infant into relaxed, happy spaces. He may also not fully pick up signs of the infant’s emotional distress, or may not be able to respond to them as effectively as he would wish. The ADD child’s difficulty reading social cues likely originates from her relationship cues not being read by the nurturing adult, who was distracted by stress. In the attunement interaction, not only does the mother follow the child, but she also permits the child to temporarily interrupt contact. When the interaction reaches a certain stage of intensity for the infant, he will look away to avoid an uncomfortably high level of arousal. Another interaction will then begin. A mother who is anxious may react with alarm when the infant breaks off contact, may try to stimulate him, to draw him back into the interaction. Then the infant’s nervous system is not allowed to “cool down,” and the attunement relationship is hampered. Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense — rightly or wrongly — that no one can share how they feel, that no one can “understand.” Attunement is the quintessential component of a larger process, called attachment. Attachment is simply our need to be close to somebody. It represents the absolute need of the utterly and helplessly vulnerable human infant for secure closeness with at least one nourishing, protective and constantly available parenting figure. Essential for survival, the drive for attachment is part of the very nature of warm-blooded animals in infancy, especially. of mammals. In human beings, attachment is a driving force of behavior for longer than in any other animal. For most of us it is present throughout our lives, although we may transfer our attachment need from one person — our parent — to another — say, a spouse or even a child. We may also attempt to satisfy the lack of the human contact we crave by various other means, such as addictions, for example, or perhaps fanatical religiosity or the virtual reality of the Internet. Much of popular culture, from novels to movies to rock or country music, expresses nothing but the joys or the sorrows flowing from satisfactions or disappointments in our attachment relationships. Most parents extend to their children some mixture of loving and hurtful behavior, of wise parenting and unskillful, clumsy parenting. The proportions vary from family to family, from parent to parent. Those ADD children whose needs for warm parental contact are most frustrated grow up to be adults with the most severe cases of ADD. Already at only a few months of age, an infant will register by facial expression his dejection at the mother’s unconscious emotional withdrawal, despite the mother’s continued physical presence. “(The infant) takes delight in Mommy’s attention,” writes Stanley Greenspan, “and knows when that source of delight is missing. If Mom becomes preoccupied or distracted while playing with the baby, sadness or dismay settles in on the little face.

He finally left.” It took you an hour. After you’re gone, my mom says, “I’m proud of you. I know that must’ve been tough.” “I’m surprised the son of a bitch respected her wishes,” my dad says. “He never respected mine when I told him to stay away from my daughter.” “Michael,” my mom warns. “Now’s not the time.” He holds his hands up. “I’m not surprised he listened,” she continues. “He’s a good guy.” My dad lets out a loud laugh. “He is,” my mom says. “He’s just an addict, and your daughter was his first high. That boy would’ve run right into traffic if she said she needed him to.” My dad looks at me. “I’ll pay you fifty bucks to do it.” “Michael!” “Geez, okay, don’t bite my head off, woman,” he says, squeezing my shoulder as he says, “I’ll throw in some free babysitting, too.” My mom laughs. “You’ll be babysitting for free as it is, Gramps.” He makes a face, mumbling, “Gonna need a better nickname.

The next morning I showed up at dad’s house at eight, with a hangover. All my brothers’ trucks were parked in front. What are they all doing here? When I opened the front door, Dad, Alan, Jase, and Willie looked at me. They were sitting around the living room, waiting. No one smiled, and the air felt really heavy. I looked to my left, where Mom was usually working in the kitchen, but this time she was still, leaning over the counter and looking at me too. Dad spoke first. “Son, are you ready to change?” Everything else seemed to go silent and fade away, and all I heard was my dad’s voice. “I just want you to know we’ve come to a decision as a family. You’ve got two choices. You keep doing what you’re doing--maybe you’ll live through it--but we don’t want nothin’ to do with you. Somebody can drop you off at the highway, and then you’ll be on your own. You can go live your life; we’ll pray for you and hope that you come back one day. And good luck to you in this world.” He paused for a second then went on, a little quieter. “Your other choice is that you can join this family and follow God. You know what we stand for. We’re not going to let you visit our home while you’re carrying on like this. You give it all up, give up all those friends, and those drugs, and come home. Those are your two choices.” I struggled to breathe, my head down and my chest tight. No matter what happened, I knew I would never forget this moment. My breath left me in a rush, and I fell to my knees in front of them all and started crying. “Dad, what took y’all so long?” I burst out. I felt broken, and I began to tell them about the sorry and dangerous road I’d been traveling down. I could see my brothers’ eyes starting to fill with tears too. I didn’t dare look at my mom’s face although I could feel her presence behind me. I knew she’d already been through the hell of addiction with her own mother, with my dad, with her brother-in-law Si, and with my oldest brother, Alan. And now me, her baby. I remembered the letters she’d been writing to me over the last few months, reaching out with words of love from her heart and from the heart of the Lord. Suddenly, I felt guilty. “Dad, I don’t deserve to come back. I’ve been horrible. Let me tell you some more.” “No, son,” he answered. “You’ve told me enough.” I’ve seen my dad cry maybe three times, and that was one of them. To see my dad that upset hit me right in the gut. He took me by my shoulders and said, “I want you to know that God loves you, and we love you, but you just can’t live like that anymore.” “I know. I want to come back home,” I said. I realized my dad understood. He’d been down this road before and come back home. He, too, had been lost and then found. By this time my brothers were crying, and they got around me, and we were on our knees, crying. I prayed out loud to God, “Thank You for getting me out of this because I am done living the way I’ve been living.” “My prodigal son has returned,” Dad said, with tears of joy streaming down his face. It was the best day of my life. I could finally look over at my mom, and she was hanging on to the counter for dear life, crying, and shaking with happiness. A little later I felt I had to go use the bathroom. My stomach was a mess from the stress and the emotions. But when I was in the bathroom with the door shut, my dad thought I might be in there doing one last hit of something or drinking one last drop, so he got up, came over, and started banging on the bathroom door. Before I could do anything, he kicked in the door. All he saw was me sitting on the pot and looking up at him while I about had a heart attack. It was not our finest moment. That afternoon after my brothers had left, we went into town and packed up and moved my stuff out of my apartment. “Hey bro,” I said to my roommate. “I’m changing my life. I’ll see ya later.” I meant it.

The banishing of a leper seems harsh, unnecessary. The Ancient East hasn’t been the only culture to isolate their wounded, however. We may not build colonies or cover our mouths in their presence, but we certainly build walls and duck our eyes. And a person needn’t have leprosy to feel quarantined. One of my sadder memories involves my fourth-grade friend Jerry.1He and a half-dozen of us were an ever-present, inseparable fixture on the playground. One day I called his house to see if we could play. The phone was answered by a cursing, drunken voice telling me Jerry could not come over that day or any day. I told my friends what had happened. One of them explained that Jerry’s father was an alcoholic. I don’t know if I knew what the word meant, but I learned quickly. Jerry, the second baseman; Jerry, the kid with the red bike; Jerry, my friend on the corner was now “Jerry, the son of a drunk.” Kids can be hard, and for some reason we were hard on Jerry. He was infected. Like the leper, he suffered from a condition he didn’t create. Like the leper, he was put outside the village. The divorced know this feeling. So do the handicapped. The unemployed have felt it, as have the less educated. Some shun unmarried moms. We keep our distance from the depressed and avoid the terminally ill. We have neighborhoods for immigrants, convalescent homes for the elderly, schools for the simple, centers for the addicted, and prisons for the criminals. The rest simply try to get away from it all. Only God knows how many Jerrys are in voluntary exile—individuals living quiet, lonely lives infected by their fear of rejection and their memories of the last time they tried. They choose not to be touched at all rather than risk being hurt again.

want to be OK right now, so you trade that for having a good life in the long run. It’s a bad trade, but people do it all the time. That’s all addiction really is. It’s trading away the future so you can feel OK right now. That’s what your mom is doing. And that’s what got me. There’s really quite a lot of it going around.

Gentile’s office in downtown Las Vegas, I got on the elevator and turned around and there was a TV camera. It was just the two of us in the little box, me and the man with the big machine on his shoulder. He was filming me as I stood there silent. “Turn the camera off,” I said. He didn’t. I tried to move away from him in the elevator, and somehow in the maneuvering he bumped my chin with the black plastic end of his machine and I snapped. I slugged him, or actually I slugged the camera. He turned it off. The maids case was like a county fair compared with the Silverman disappearance, which had happened in the media capital of the world. It had happened within blocks of the studios of the three major networks and the New York Times. The tabloids reveled in the rich narrative of the case, and Mom and Kenny became notorious throughout the Western Hemisphere. Most crimes are pedestrian and tawdry. Though each perpetrator has his own rap sheet and motivation and banged-up psyche, the crime blotter is very repetitive. A wife beater kills his wife. A crack addict uses a gun to get money for his habit. Liquor-store holdups, domestic abuse, drug dealer shoot-outs, DWIs, and so on. This one had a story line you could reduce to a movie pitch. Mother/Son Grifters Held in Millionaire’s Disappearance! My mother’s over-the-top persona, Kenny’s shady polish, and the ridiculous rumors of mother-son incest gave the media a narrative it couldn’t resist. Mom and Kenny were the smart, interesting, evil criminals with the elaborate, diabolical plan who exist in fiction and rarely in real life. The media landed on my life with elephant feet. I was under siege as soon as I returned to my office after my family’s excursion to Newport Beach. The deluge started at 10 A.M. on July 8, 1998. I kept a list in a drawer of the media outlets that called or dropped by our little one-story L-shaped office building on Decatur. It was a tabloid clusterfuck. Every network, newspaper, local news station, and wire service sent troops. Dateline and 20/20 competed to see who could get a Kimes segment on-air first. Dateline did two shows about Mom and Kenny. I developed a strategy for dealing with reporters. My unusual training in the media arts as the son of Sante, and as a de facto paralegal in the maids case, meant that I had a better idea of how to deal with reporters than my staff did. They might find it exciting that someone wanted to talk to them, and forget to stop at “No comment.” I knew better. So I hid from the camera crews in a back room, so there’d be no pictures, and I handled the calls myself. I told my secretary not to bother asking who was on the line and to transfer all comers back to me. I would get the name and affiliation of the reporter, write down the info on my roster, and

I could always tell when my mom drank because the corners of her mouth fell down. Alcohol took her smile. Strange, because I never drank, but it took mine too.

So you’re an addict,” he says. “I want to get better,” says Patrick. “I will get better. I want—” He looks at Charlie. His eyes are pools of need. “I’m sorry,” he says. Patrick stands up. He takes a deep breath. “I don’t want to be…” he says. He pauses. “I thought coming here, that maybe I would somehow…” “Just go,” says Charlie. “I’ve got Mom.” Patrick looks stricken. But he takes the chance Charlie’s given him to break away. He turns back a few times, as if he has something to say, but his addiction is more powerful than any remnants of love, and he exits the café.

The story wasn’t at heart only about economic devastation. It wasn’t just about those at the bottom. Not just hotel maids or supermarket cashiers or single moms. It was all of us. This made more sense as I read what neuroscience can now tell us: that every human brain has capacity for addiction. Isolation is part of why some people get addicted and some do not. So was trauma. Abuse, rape, neglect, PTSD, a parent’s drug use were as unspoken in America as addiction and as prevalent. The epidemic was revealing this. I also connected the epidemic to consumer marketing of legal addictive stuffs: sugar, video games, social media, gambling.

You couldn’t save your mom from an accident any more than you could save your dad from addiction. Now you worry you won’t be able to save anyone else. Or stand losing someone else.

Like I told you before, it gets to be an addiction. You want to be OK right now, so you trade that for having a good life in the long run. It’s a bad trade, but people do it all the time. That’s all addiction really is. It’s trading away the future so you can feel OK right now. That’s what your mom is doing. And that’s what got me. There’s really quite a lot of it going around.

You know what everyone likes to forget about me? I was a kid. I was a kid when I got into all that shit. I was a kid addict. I was a kid when I had Sadie. And my mother— my mother dying. I was a kid for that too. I was an orphan. I’m not making excuses but I don’t understand why Sadie was too young for everything I put her through, but I … I was just somehow old enough for the shit that got thrown at me. Soon as she was born, May Beth ripped Sadie out of my arms and started turning her against me. It broke my heart. And I let it happen because I was just a kid and I was fucked up and I didn’t know how else to be. My mom was dead. There was no one. Sadie hated me , and all I could do was let her. And then Mattie came and— Mattie, she loved me.

I thought my mom had gone totally nuts, but she hadn’t. She had finally, through her faith, found a way to voice herself and stand up to me; to share how she felt about what was going on; to voice her concern, fear, and worry; to state that her son had been taken from her and that she wanted him back, and to say she was not going to stand aside and let him be besieged any longer.

I suddenly miss my old house and my addict mom and my empty fridge. I even miss the smell of her cigarettes, and I never thought that would happen. At least that smell was authentic. This room smells rich and sophisticated and comfortable. It smells fraudulent.

mom’s family had distanced themselves from us by then, due to their own grief, and I felt so isolated by this distance. That’s when the addictions began. I recall starting to eat when I wasn’t hungry to try and feel better, which seemed to numb the pain.

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am an Addict’s Mom. I am an Addict’s Mom. I stand before you able to state without hesitation that Yes, I am an addict’s mom. I have learned to look past those judgmental stares, sensing what you are thinking, that I must be “one of those Moms.” That somewhere, somehow, I made some horrific choices that sent my child into the depths of hell. I am here to tell you that the choices my child made are his own and his alone. This nightmare is far from what I wanted for my child. Just like everyone with children, there were big dreams and hopes for my child.

Mom is mostly interested in my life inasmuch as it affects her own. Fact is, despite her selfishness, or maybe even because or it, I can always ask Mom for help in a pinch. She seems to get on some kind of high fueled by maternal hormones and self-importance whenever I'm in extremis. Suddenly, she develops an in-depth interest in my life, feeding of the drama like a soap opera junkie anxious for the next installment. My breakups, heartbreaks, and financial crises give her something to talk about with her friends, especially her role as glorified rescuer of the distressed. Inevitably, whenever I emerge from a crisis and get my life back to normal, dear Mom lapses back into her routine lack of interest.

My mom verbally abused me. Happy now?” “No,” I said wrapping an arm around her. It seemed that was all she was going to say. I waited five minutes. “My mom was my best friend. She still is. She blamed me for my father leaving. She drank and was a drug addict. After a bad breakup, I believed what she told me. I still do. That’s all.

You and Dad are really the wrecking ball of all of our teenage runaway fantasies. Why couldn't you jerks go and be crack addicts or religious fanatics so we could have excuses to live on the wide open road? - email from Lily

You want to be OK right now, so you trade that for having a good life in the long run. It’s a bad trade, but people do it all the time. That’s all addiction really is. It’s trading away the future so you can feel OK right now. That’s what your mom is doing. And that’s what got me. There’s really quite a lot of it going around.” Billy

I was hungry and you gave me food….” —Matthew 25:35 (RSV) I sat through lunch at the usual eatery, hoping the woman would be gone when I walked back to the office. The sight of her was just too upsetting: a disheveled-looking mom at the top of the subway steps, begging with her two young children in tow. “If she’s gone when I go back, I won’t have to do anything,” I told myself. I’d be off the hook. But just the image of her had kept me on the hook. Why weren’t her children in school? Where did they live? “I shouldn’t give her anything because she’s probably an addict,” I rationalized. People who know more about these things than I do tell me beggars will take whatever money you give them and use it for drugs or alcohol. But what about her kids? They weren’t addicts. They were wearing clean T-shirts, jeans, their hair braided with beads. “I’ll pray for them,” I told myself. But to leave it at that seemed like a cop-out. Maybe they’re there because God wants you do something, Rick. Not just for them but also for you. The poor and hungry should not just be ignored. I swallowed the rest of my sandwich and went to the counter to buy some more food. Not for myself this time. I carried my bag and rounded the corner. She was still there. “What’s your name?” I asked the woman. “Dolores,” she said. “Dolores, this is for you.” I gave her the food and promised to pray for her. Back at the office I put her name on a note with the names of the other people I pray for. I’ve never been good about praying for big concepts like hunger or the poor, but now I had these three faces and one name. Harden not my heart, Lord, from the pain in the world. Let me know how I can relieve it. —Rick Hamlin Digging Deeper: Mt 25:31–46; 2 Cor 1:3–4

You want to be OK right now, so you trade that for having a good life in the long run. It’s a bad trade, but people do it all the time. That’s all addiction really is. It’s trading away the future so you can feel OK right now. That’s what your mom is doing. And that’s what got me. There’s really quite a lot of it going around.

know she’s hard to deal with right now, but we have to believe that she’ll beat this. If we don’t, she won’t.” “I will try, Mom, but it’s hard to have faith when I see what she is doing to this family.

You could have said my brother was a bit overprotective when it came to me, seeing as I was all he had family wise and vice versa. Our mom and dad died in a car accident when I was sixteen and Ha'Keem was twenty-two.

Mom rubbed the back of my neck and we kept walking, away from the kids and the colors and the high-pitched, happy voices. Seeing them made me feel like I was a million miles from anything good. I just got really lonely. I'm not sure why. All those kids smiling and laughing and my mom so fucking clueless and me feeling kinda shitty and high at the same time. All of a sudden, I couldn't figure out what the point was. I couldn't remember what mattered.

And he knew he came from addict blood. His mom’s brain had been wired wrong, and her parents’ brains and their parents’ brains all the way back a long descending line of Indian heads figuring it out as best they could. Past family members and the ancestors were constantly sending their blessings and curses down through time from that beyond before, that gave his present its particular bent, its dimness, its light, its scream, and its song, but also its sometimes dead silence.

Diane, soccer mom, age 32. Got addicted to OxyContin after undergoing surgery for complications with her last pregnancy. After her prescription ran out, she'd cheated on her husband with seven different doctors to acquire more pills. Her rock bottom: her 5-year-old son coming home early to find her fellating Doctor Padmanabhan in the kitchen. 69 days sober.

You think pushing your family away is the better option? This affects us. No matter what you choose, Lily. You know why? Because we all love you. Dad asks about you every day because he knows you won’t answer his calls. Mom has a stack of self-help books on her dresser. Want to know what they’re about?” I shake my head. Not really. This is going to hurt. “How to reconnect with your daughter. How to build relationships with your children. You affect them. Your addiction affects them. Missing parts of our lives isn’t a solution, it’s a problem.

know it in my heart. I couldn’t stay. I couldn’t marinate for years in grief and shame, couldn’t live my life with the specter of my sister’s murder and my father’s attempted murder of the man who went to prison for the crime hanging over my head. I couldn’t let Mom’s despair wrap itself around me like a chain attached to an anchor,

A dermatologist said I have nice skin. I’ll have to tell Mom. She’ll be so proud.

And maybe with you around, my mom won’t talk about the child bride.” Pete made quotation marks with his fingers, then rolled his eyes. “It makes me feel sick. Brittany is fifteen years younger than him. She’s closer to my age than his.

We are creatures designed for sabbath rest. Sabbath is not a rule, but a gift. We can use sabbath in the traditional way by setting aside one day a week for God, and we can also think of it more broadly as it applies to all of our routines, plans, and even addictions.

I told you before, it gets to be an addiction. You want to be OK right now, so you trade that for having a good life in the long run. It’s a bad trade, but people do it all the time. That’s all addiction really is. It’s trading away the future so you can feel OK right now. That’s what your mom is doing. And that’s what got me. There’s really quite a lot of it going around.

I spent a lot of time with the MAGA movement for the Chasing History Project. I mingled with them for months. I interviewed church-going moms who babbled incoherently about life changing videos of politicians performing Satanic rituals, which they freely admitted they’d never actually seen. I felt their pain as they talked about real problems: jobs disappearing, poverty running rampant, swarms of drug-addicted homeless people sleeping in every park, and schools that taught kids almost no useful skills.

For males, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and an addictive one at that. The violent reaction of Nikkie and Yeroen to their loss of power fits the frustration-aggression hypothesis to the letter: the deeper the bitterness, the greater the anger. Males jealously guard their power, and lose all inhibition if anyone challenges it. And this hadn’t been the first time for Yeroen. The ferocity of the attack on Luit may have been due to the fact that it was the second time he had come out on top. The first time Luit gained the upper hand - marking the end of Yeroen’s ancient regime - I was perplexed by the way the established leader reacted. Normally a dignified character, Yeroen became unrecognizable. In the midst of a confrontation, he would drop out of a tree like a rotten apple, writhing on the ground, screaming pitifully, and waiting to be comforted by the rest of the group. He acted much like a juvenile ape being pushed away from his mother’s teats. And like a juvenile who during tantrums keeps an eye on mom for signs of softening, Yeroen always noted who approached him. If the group around him was big and powerful enough, and especially if it included the alpha female, he would gain instant courage. With his supporters in tow, he would rekindle the confrontation with his rival. Clearly, Yeroen’s tantrums were yet another example of deft manipulation. What fascinated me most, however, were the parallels with infantile attachment, nicely captured in expressions like “clinging to power” and “being weaned from power.” Knocking a male off his pedestal gets the same reaction as yanking the security blanket away from a baby. When Yeroen finally lost his top spot, he would often sit staring into the distance after a fight, an empty expression on his face. He was oblivious to the social activity around him and refused food for weeks. We thought he was sick, but the veterinarian found nothing wrong. Yeroen seemed a mere ghost of the impressive big shot he had been. I’ve never forgotten this image of a beaten and dejected Yeroen. When power was lost, the lights in him went out.

In all the things that (my crack-addicted mother) did wrong, she did some things right. My mom chose to give us all life, and I love her for this. Life births opportunity, and we are each responsible for the decisions we make with our given opportunities… We can’t control the circumstances that we are born into, but this does not negate the value of the life that we are given. Everyone deserves a chance to live and learn from experience.

But I’m thinking that sounds about right. All my life, Mom’s been trying to impress some guy—first my dad, then other guys. She even flirts with guys I bring home. It’s like love is a competitive sport for her and she needs to win to feel good.

With a shooting pain to my head, I closed my eyes tight and envisioned the disgusted look on my mother’s face. The blueprint of the perfect child that Mom had so carefully crafted was incompatible with the lying, cheating, stealing man I had become; I felt worthless. But I had a new master, one that controlled my body, mind, and soul.

I don't believe in urban legends. I've been an adult since I was a child. My parents are interesting in the sense they never truly grew up. I was managing Dad's alcohol addiction and Mom's cryptic affairs with her personal trainer before I could multiply.

VR addictions take it to a new level. People are found dead everyday in their beds or couches, with their VR helmets still on, their games still running. They die of starvation, thirst, heart attacks. It's a big problem, and zombies—people with severe addictions—are as common as alcoholics or drug addicts these days. Many of them can't function in the real world anymore. They don't go to school or work or go outside. They couldn't even if they wanted to. The way Hakeem's mom explained it to us—in an effort to scare us from ever letting ourselves go that route, I guess—people with severe VR addictions have flipped the real and virtual worlds in their minds. To them, reality is the simulation, and VR is reality.

Another reader wrote this so perfectly Hannah Greendale "Reasons to adore Jason Reynolds' books: Authentic narrative voices. Well-drawn child protagonists with equally well-drawn parents, each with their own rich backstory. Characters who respect their parents (especially mom) and are kind & caring towards younger siblings. An approachable introduction to difficult issues: illness, injustice, bullying, etc. Seamlessly delivered messages on life's really difficult issues: gun violence, drug addiction, death, grief. Promotion of finding healthy outlets for anger/frustration and timely warnings against toxic masculinity. So much heart, enough to manifest as an ache in one's chest and tears on one's cheeks".

It’s been sad to recognize how much fixing has been the backbone of our relationship. Whether it was Steven trying to fix my bulimia or me trying to fix his marijuana addiction or pushing him to find the right cocktail of medication, it’s been the glue of our relationship. Without that aspect of fixing the other, we don’t have much to talk about. Like right now.

She’s my favorite scent, like the Sunday mornings my mom used to spend baking muffins for our school lunches. She smells like the most intoxicating version of home, and I’m addicted to the feeling that comes with it.

I drive to the city and notice how the pedals are easier to maneuver with these longer legs. “I’m a monster,” I scream, when Simone calls. “I’m Mom.” She is calm. “Are you on ketamine?” I tell her I woke up as the old lady, our stepfather is cheating, she’s addicted to eggs. “This is a twist on a joke, right? You find out I’m trans, you can’t let me have this experience, you have to become an old lady?” “I don’t want to discuss the ins and outs of irony,” I say. “I’m in Mom’s breasts.” She agrees to meet me at a museum in the city.

In landmark experiments that began in the late 1980s, Michael Meaney, a neuroscientist at McGill University, in Montreal, studied how the interactions between rat moms and pups played out in the lives of the pups. His research team took genetically identical rat mothers and videotaped and analyzed their behaviors while the pups were infants. Then they let the pups grow up, and checked how the pups of nurturing rat moms fared compared with the offspring of stressed-out moms. The pampered pups grew into adults that were more laid-back, less reactive to stress, and less prone to addictive behaviors, such as overdoing it when given a free supply of alcohol or cocaine. They were also more social with other rats, more daring, and more willing to explore new places. Pups of stressed, negligent moms grew into loners prone to the rat equivalents of anxiety, depression, and addictive behaviors. Studies of monkey moms and their infants turned up similar results. Stressed macaque infants whose moms are inconsistent, erratic, and sometimes dismissive grow up timid, submissive, fearful, less gregarious, and more prone to depression than their better-nurtured peers. These early findings were the beginning of a paradigm shift in our understanding of how experiences in childhood can affect our health and the dialogue between the gut and the brain.

Maybe you don’t know the southside of Chicago....I grew up in a house of addiction, poverty, Government assistance, Divorce, neglect, abandonment, and violence. This wasn’t a unique experience in my neighborhood. There was a club in my school, and everyone knew who its members were: there was no hiding it. From the stink of your unwashed clothes, to Kids cracking Jokes in the lunchroom about your mom or dad being an addict, or worse. Some kids came to school with fresh bruises every week. If you were in this club, other students would rip on you. This was to be expected I suppose. But the teachers also looked at you differently. Not with empathy or even pity. More like they looked through you, As if your future was already written on your dirty clothes, and your weary eyes, on your dark skin.

I’m sure our newcomers appreciate hearing that being diagnosed with HIV is not all doom and gloom.” The leader’s gaze swept over all the others in the circle. “With an attitude like Duncan’s, great things will happen to you. Don’t let the disease define you. Make the disease work for you instead.” An hour later, the meeting was over. John had gotten the opportunity to introduce himself to the group, something he would have preferred to have skipped, but that wasn’t allowed. Everyone must participate in that part; only the question and answer session that followed was optional. He hadn’t mentioned that he used to be a cop, certainly not that he had been fired. He’d just said that he was a private eye and that he would be happy to be their spy if they needed one. “That wasn’t so bad now, was it?” Linda asked John when they were outside the room and in the hallway, where donuts and coffee and tea were served. Most of the participants milled around there, connecting with each other. John shrugged and grabbed a jelly donut. “I guess not.” The bespectacled leader named Robert came up to them then. He was on the short side and had an emaciated face with delicate features. He stuck out a bony hand toward John. John took it and gave it a firm shake. “John, it’s so nice to have you join us today,” Robert said with a broad smile that displayed big, graying teeth. Robert was HIV-positive as well, and in the chronic HIV stage. “Thank you for having me,” John said and returned the smile as best he could. “It’s been very…educational. I’m glad I came.” “Great,” Robert said, then his attention went to Linda. “Thanks for bringing your friend, Linda. And for coming again yourself.” “Oh, of course,” Linda said and smiled. Her hazel eyes glittered with warmth. “It’s a great group and you’re a great leader.” “Thank you. That’s so kind of you to say.” Robert tossed a glance over his shoulder, then leaned in toward John and Linda. “I just wanted to apologize for Doris.” “Apologize?” Linda repeated. “What did she do?” “Well, for starters, she’s not 33. She’s 64 and has been infected for thirty years. She’s also a former heroin addict and prostitute. She likes to pretend that she’s someone else entirely, and because we don’t want to upset her, we humor her. We pretend she’s being truthful when she talks about herself. I’d appreciate it if you help us keep her in the dark.” That last sentence had a tension to it that the rest of Robert’s words hadn’t had. It was almost like he’d warned them not to go against his will, or else. Not that it had been necessary to impress that on either John or Linda. John especially appreciated the revelation. Maybe having HIV was not as gruesome as Doris had made it seem then. Six Yvonne jerked awake when the phone rang. It rang and rang for several seconds before she realized where she was and what was going on. She pushed herself up on the bed and glanced around for the device. When she eventually spotted it on the floor beside the bed, it had stopped ringing. Even so, she rolled over on her side and fished it up to the bed. Crossing her legs Indian-style, she checked who had called her. It was Gabe, which was no surprise. He was the only one who had her latest burner number. He had left her a voicemail. She played it. “Mom, good news. I have the meds. Jane came through. Where do you want me to drop them off? Should I come to the motel? Call me.” Exhilaration streamed through her and she was suddenly wide awake. She made a fist in the air. Yes! Finally something was going their way. Now all they had to do was connect without Gabe leading the cops to her. She checked the time on the ancient clock radio on the nightstand. It was past six o’clock. So she must have slept

Talking about our problems is our greatest addiction. Break the habit, talk about your joys.

You’re the only person who loves me. If we broke up, who would be left? Things are hard with us right now, but my life would be ten times worse without you. Sometimes the only thing that gets me through what’s happening at home is knowing I’ll be going on a date with you later in the week or just knowing you’re out there, missing me as much as I’m missing you. I may not matter much to my mom and The Giant, but I’m everything to you. And it’s addictive, being someone’s everything. Letting them be yours. You’re the only drug I take.

After speaking with Rachel, I spoke with Rachel’s mom, Leah, about how her mind-set changed in response to Rachel’s addiction, and about what she tells other parents experiencing similar struggles.12 Leah tells parents that she learned a key lesson the first time she was in Beit T’Shuvah director Harriet Rossetto’s office with her husband seated beside her: Rossetto, a formidable presence behind her vast desk, asked Leah and her husband what was most important to them, and Leah replied, “I just want Rachel to be happy.” Turning her deep, probing eyes on Leah, Rossetto laid into her with advice Leah now passes on to other parents: “Saying you just want your kid to be happy puts enormous pressure on the child. They feel if they’re not happy, they’re failing. Periods of unhappiness are okay and our kids need to know that; it’s the struggle that makes you who you are.” Rossetto advises that the goal of a kid’s happiness is actually a dual burden, negatively affecting both child and parent. “The whole family system has to change,” says Rossetto. “The child is addicted to pleasure seeking. The parent is addicted to controlling a child’s choices and behaviors and creating a perfect human being, so their emotions are a mess. If the child is having a good day, Mommy and Daddy are happy, and if he’s not having a good day Mommy and Daddy are in despair. Severing that umbilicus is what our family program does. A parent’s well-being can’t be dependent on whether or not the kid is having a good day.” In addition to counseling other parents, Leah puts Rossetto’s wisdom into daily practice with her two youngest children, who still live at home. She says, “At times we make life too easy for kids by not letting them experience things we think of as traumas but that are, in reality, not all that bad, and we solve problems for them instead of letting them stew over some things. When my kids are storming about the house, it’s tempting to feel ‘My kid is angry at me’ and to want to do something about it. Now, I can accept that they can be unhappy or angry, and I don’t need to soothe their feelings; it’s okay.

I liked a girl, but never knew what to say. I won awards, longing for your "hooray." I was in a play doing whatever wildness suited. I did the same drugs mom said you did. It was always momma and me. You loved the racetracks for decades, but left me at three. All my friends were fatted with a love to claim, And the only thing you ever gave me was your name.

But my sister has created her own hell. I know all the elements in our lives—the addicted, abusive father; the struggling working mom; the overbearing sister—formed the gaping wounds in my sister, the burning ache that pushed her from guy to guy, party to party, drug to drug. I’m not going to make excuses for my own strong will. Somehow, against the torn backdrop of my own upbringing, my anger and bullheadedness fueled me to keep my grades up and enabled me to push myself to go to college even though I never felt like I belonged there. It was the fire that drove me to overcome the temptations that my sister fell prey to so easily. My mom and I tried to help her in the way every concerned family member tries—spending way too much money (mostly mine) to get her help that didn’t stick.

She’s always been my kryptonite, my favorite drug and sobriety was never an option. But the problem is—I’d rather deal with the addiction to her than the suffocating realization that my mom is gone forever.

My mom came up with all kinds of reasons why she didn't want to get off drugs, but I think one of the most poignant ones was her feeling of shame about becoming an addict with two young children. Her parenting standards were so high that I don't think she could ever truly get sober knowing what she had put my sisters through. The one thing that she had always prided herself on was that she was a great mother. She said, "My music wasn't that successful. I didn't finish high school. I'm not beautiful. I'm not good enough - but I'm a great mother." When she started to feel like she wasn't even that, she couldn't handle it....

The hurt in Mackenzie’s eyes this morning is about the saddest fucking thing I’ve ever experienced, and that’s saying something seeing as how my mom left me when I was a kid and my dad’s an addict.

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Mom wipes her eyes and signs the sales slip without hesitation, spending money she doesn’t have, on equipment I lied about owning, to a guy who hired me to do a job I’m not qualified for, in a place I don’t deserve to live, probably with a girlfriend I can’t seem to break up with.