Wanda's Story - A Journey Thirty Years In the Making

This is a bit long but I hope it touches you. We are not alone.

My journey has been over thirty years in the making. A long, drawn out roller coaster of a story that I won’t subject you to. Those of us who have suffered along with our loved ones in active addiction will know the story. It will be theirs. Personally, reading someone else’s story is the last thing I want when I am suffering my own. Being brutally honest, if your child or loved one is doing well it will make me feel more inadequate than I already do. If they are doing worse it will cause my fear to skyrocket and I will panic.

My son's journey has not concluded, may never be, and I am inundated with the suffering and learning involved. I am egocentric. Like an addict. I have trouble seeing beyond life in this pressure cooker. Some would call it self-reflection. Some would call it self-absorption. Either way, I own it. By now, I care little about what others think. My pride has been stripped. My confidence gone with it. Who I once believed I was has been lost in the mire of trying to save my son. Crisis after crisis, lies, near death, hospitals, diagnosis, treatment, therapy, medication, second stage housing, community supports. The mental, emotional, spiritual and financial stress. The lack of sleep. The fear of hearing the phone ring and, worse, the fear of not hearing it ring. The fear of my child being cold, hungry, alone, in danger. It takes my breath away when I allow my mind to go there.

My child is thirty-two. This is the first time he has been completely clean since he was fourteen. Is he clean? He is brilliant and what I call a functional user. Many may disagree. It’s true that nothing about being an addict is functional, but he worked hard and was valued in his workplace. He maintained a relationship and marriage for twelve years and has two beautiful children. He loves his family, is competent, intelligent, mechanical, passionate and has a wonderful sense of humour. He is also self-deprecating, angry, depressed and self-destructive.

I hear words like codependency and enabling. They are framed as negative characteristics. Things I must painstakingly remove in order for my loved one to be healthy. For me to be healthy. I understand the words and I see the patterns in myself. For me, they have always been the definition of mother. When I learn that one definition of codependency is someone who would forgo his/her own wants and needs in order to care for the other, I wonder “Is that the same as someone who would put their child before themselves? Someone who would do anything to help their child survive? Isn’t that what parents do?” I understand that I need to set boundaries. In fact I have worked hard at it and am at the place where I can accept my son’s choices as his own and support him only when he is making a choice to be clean. I am doing it. Like smiling even when I feel sad. After awhile I will begin to feel happy. If I keep setting boundaries after awhile, I will not only look stronger but maybe I will feel that way. That’s the hope.

I do not feel strong. I feel lost. Through my quest to stop enabling I have reined in my instinct to mother. I daily remind myself that I need to stay ‘grounded’, keep busy, develop my creative side, do positive self-talk. On the surface I am doing it all, but I don’t know who I am anymore. Writing, reading, attending groups, counselling, learning, growing. Most days I feel on the verge of desperation. Lost and lonely. Wanting nothing more than to take that road trip for one hundred days, or forever. Now that I’m not the mother I thought I should be, who am I? What am I? Why am I here?

When I was a girl I didn’t dream of a beautiful big wedding. I didn’t even think of it. I dreamt of being a mother. I wanted a car, a job, a place of my own, but being a mother was the ultimate goal. A good mother. Like my own. My mother sacrificed everything for her children. I can’t begin to explain what she meant to me. How she supported me. But she also taught me that motherhood was sacrifice. I believed that wholeheartedly. When I was pregnant it only solidified my belief. The six and a half months of all day ‘morning sickness’. The acid reflux, the gestational diabetes, the back aches, the awkwardness of gaining a huge amount of weight. When the reward, a child, finally came so did the colic, the sleepless nights, the endless crying, the cracked nipples, the nightly checks for breath, the worry. None of it mattered. That’s motherhood.

So when our child turns twenty or thirty or forty we must stop. Stop worrying, stop caring if they breathe, stop the sleepless nights, stop mothering. You see it’s not just a goal anymore. It’s real. It happened. I became a mother. I can’t change that, nor do I want to. I can and will keep working at not enabling my son, not rescuing him, not worrying, not mothering, but it would honestly be easier to live without my limbs rather than my heart.

All of this is to say I understand. That you and I are in this together. That this is a paradigm we might share. That I am swimming upstream beside you and hopefully, with the strength of our limbs we can save our heart.

Wanda