Hope is the mother of two recovering teenage drug addicts. She shares her experiences and fears as the healing process continues for her entire family.
I noticed two of my three children were using around 7th or 8th grade and this took place, because the principal of the school that they were going to called me in for a private session ... didn’t say who the parent was but someone had brought to their attention who wanted to let me know that there was a good possibility that they were using.
As soon as I found out, I spoke to my husband and then I spoke to the children that were involved and the younger one said, “See you got us in trouble now.” I thought it was one and not both and the realization of that was rather shocking. The other realization was that I went through this whole process once before with my husband ... I was not a parent who wasn’t going to be unaware of the pitfalls of drugs for kids and I was scared to death and I was going to fix it.
My husband and I sat down with our children and we explained the process that my husband went through, beginning to end and how horrible a disease it is including heredity tendencies because of their father ... and, of course, they agreed with everything that we said: “We’re sorry, we were only trying it out,” it was not as big of deal as we were making it out to be. As all parents do, I want to believe that because they were very apologetic about the situation ... because all of my life that was not something I was not going to allow in my home and for this to come up, I mean, I was angry, and I was mad and I was very upset and they knew that. My children were using a lot more than what they said they were doing, and I just didn’t want to believe that. Not my children.
I later found out kids are great manipulators and they know how to get and say what they want and when they want it and they know what you need to hear as a parent so that you will back off.
I was shocked to discover that my children were not only using marijuana but they were using drugs that I thought were used by experienced drug addicts and it was an incredible shock ... and that the availability of it is absolutely horrendous.
My fear in confronting this is that other people would find out that my children were using and therefore, I was a bad parent, that I did not recognize the signs.
To find out that I wasn’t a bad parent was a process that I had to go through and the process of eliminating the guilt, eliminating the emotional ties to my children, eliminating the anger of everything that took place because I felt totally powerless, I was helpless, I was in great despair. And what did I do? What did I do to make this happen? I had to go through I process of undoing those feelings.
When we were looking for help we went to the school. We wound up with a person who was an expert in dealing with families who have children who suffer from addiction.