Blog for April 18, 2022
One more time, one more week filled with ups and downs, that just seems to be the way of it. I enjoyed myself at times, I felt picked on at other times and mostly I just was. I was just being me and doing life.
On this day, I will be heading out to an old friend’s house about four hours away, to meet up with her and another old friend and my BFF, and spend a couple of days just bonding, healing and loving each other. We’ve all been friends over forty years. My two friends both lost their husbands to covid just a few months ago. It’s been so hard, so sad and painful. I am hoping for honest sharing and some laughter recalling “the good old days”. Yes, we used drugs together, they know the whole story.
Also, this day is my mom’s birthday. She passed away twelve years ago and I still miss her like crazy of course. I wish I could talk to her. I wish I could hug her.
When we made the plans to go to my friends this week, I knew I would be traveling alone on the ride there and plan to play some of mom’s songs and talk to her and reminisce. I’ll be taking her with me on that ride. She loved to travel, we’ve had many road trips together, this will be just one more.
The biggest challenge of this last week was with our grandson, he has been talking to his mom, who is very strung out on drugs and hates me a lot. I never know when they meet up, it happens when he is at his dad’s house. It affects him greatly. She spews venom, hate and lies and we all pay the price for it. I pray she get’s clean and gets her head back on right.
I am still trying to take care of him as best I know how and pray that he will see and know the truth. You can’t make someone love you, believe you or care for you if they don’t want to. Children are so easily influenced by others. It’s been difficult watching him in relationships with other kids that pick on him and take advantage of him. I’ve tried so hard to protect him, but it’s
becoming more and more difficult as he gets older and more independent.
He realizes that both of his parents are drug addicts and I’ve told him a bit of my own story, that this is a family disease and can run in him genetically. He turned that back on me yesterday, sounding much like his mother, saying “you don’t tell a twelve year old that stuff.” I said, yes, you do. Most all of us starting using about twelve years old. He needs to know he is suspectable to this disease, so he can make better and healthier choices than we all did.
This disease of ours, this addiction and other disorders we face due to drug addiction continues to wreak havoc on our family. It comes in many forms, just when you think you are out of it, it sneaks in through the relationship of a child and his estranged addict mom. It seems to always be touching our lives. From time to time, I sit quiet at home and ask, “Lord, when will it end”?
And yet, here I am, week after week writing a blog about addiction and recovery, that in and of itself tells me, it will never end. Because I plan to continue my recovery until the day I die. I plan to carry the message and let others know there is another way, a better way, they don’t have to live like that, not even his mom.
Question of the Week: If you are clean in recovery, do you still have someone who is using and brings the disease into your world?
