Attitude Is Everything

Marilea C. Rabasa2 Comments

Memoir Excerpt:

“When it’s dark enough, you can see the stars.” Charles A. Beard

Over the years in my struggle with Angie and her drug addiction, and certainly at the beginning, I wondered if I would ever run out of tears. They seemed to swim in a bottomless well of grief. But I’ve been fortunate to discover and nurture many spiritual tools that have helped me walk through this nightmare and that have sustained me. Though I’ll never stop grieving for my daughter and missing her, my life gets better when I apply acceptance, gratitude and faith in God’s plan for me. As I’ve learned to “let go and let God,” I’ve freed myself to appreciate all the blessings in my life that are right in front of me. And this is how I cultivate being happy.

My Love Is Forever

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Memoir Excerpt:

Quote from Cherishing Our Daughters by Dr. Evelyn Bassoff: “ ‘Veronica is learning to live with her real disappointment and to be supportive but not overly invested in her daughter’s life. ‘I am learning important lessons in therapy. One is that the only life you can direct is your own; my good advice (to Anne-Marie) only falls on deaf ears. Unless my daughter musters the courage to make changes, I cannot do anything more for her. And so, over and over again, I say to myself, I am not responsible for the way (Anne-Marie) chooses to live. Another is that you love your child forever not because she is happy or successful or makes you proud but because she is your child.’”

We Deserve Some Peace

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“Enough is enough when the hurt inflicted is greater than the lesson learned.”

All of us on this painful journey arrive here at different times. It took me many years: many years of being manipulated by guilt and finally finding the freedom to let go of it; many years of my determination to save my daughter from the disease that’s killing her, desperate to take control of what I had no control over; and many years of readjusting my focus onto all the wonderful people and gifts in my life. As I said in my memoir, “I have lived a very blessed life,” and to be able to say that in spite of my struggle with Angie, well, that says a lot about the power of spiritual transformation.

“Joy and Woe…”

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Memoir Excerpt:

“Angie was flitting back and forth between hotels in expensive cabs, with garbage bags of stuff and her terrier, Loki. Sometimes I think she got that dog to stay alive—to be accountable to something or someone other than herself. She and Loki stayed with me a couple of nights in my motel. By the time I checked out I was covered with fleabites. When I told her that she should have the dog defleaed, she flew into a rage. “It’s not Loki, Mom, you’re just too cheap to stay in decent motels. You always pick fleabags to crash in.” Whatever.

When Angie was in her first psych ward back in October 2007, they used art therapy on the patients. She made me a bead bracelet. “These are your favorite colors, Mom, ” she said, carefully placing it on my wrist. I finger those beads now and again, like Greek worry beads, a reminder of the hope I nurtured then. On one of the nights she stayed at my motel, she was out all night while I tossed and turned, wondering where she was. When I awoke, there was the most fragrant smelling flower in a glass of water at my bedside. She had picked it outside of her hotel in Japan Town and left it for me to enjoy in the morning. I still have what’s left of that flower, all dried and brown, another reminder that “Joy & Woe are woven fine.”

“God, Grant Me The Serenity…”

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Memoir Excerpt:

“Blissful dishonesty—that’s what I indulged in for five days in San Francisco. We were walking in parallel universes. Well, we had been for years, but it’s a strange feeling when you’re together up close. I chose to overlook the obvious. One word from me, one reprimand, one emotional “Give up drugs, Angie, or you will die!” would have sent her back across the cable car tracks and I wouldn’t see her again. This was the truce we had made together at the beginning of my visit. It ensured that she would see me at all. And I wanted to see her. At this point in our long goodbye, I never knew if I would see her again. It was such a desolate, helpless feeling. Let go, Maggie, I thought to myself, she has her own Higher Power and you, dear girl, had better cling to yours. You’re gonna need Him more than ever now.

This was where I was in my recovery as I left San Francisco, at that hard won place I’d fought through years of resistance to find: the end of the battle—acceptance. I had tried to help her over the years and admittedly made so many mistakes: I begged, I pleaded, I covered up, I manipulated, I enabled, I moved boundaries so often I couldn’t even find them anymore. I confronted her behavior; then I did the opposite, lapsing into momentary denial.”

Taking Care Of Ourselves

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Wisdom From The Rooms:

“In Al-Anon we learn how to exchange a wishbone for a backbone (with love).”

Setting and enforcing boundaries with our loved ones is difficult, and can seem harsh at times. But many of us see all too clearly the effects of drug use on our loved ones: the loss of their moral compass which can lead to lying, stealing, verbal abuse and worse, all as a result of flooding their brains with dangerous chemicals. It can become a matter of our survival to stay strong and take care of ourselves, even when that means making excruciating choices. At the end of the day, we owe it to everyone else in our lives to survive and try to live well. Then, God willing, if the addict needs us to walk through recovery with him/her, we’ll be strong enough to do so.

Love, Change, and Moving Forward

Marilea C. Rabasa4 Comments

Memoir Excerpt:

“My Twelve-Step recovery, so far, has brought me a great deal of gratitude and serenity, mostly when I remember that voice from God telling me to let go of control and resistance. Yet there’s another part of me that hurts terribly when I witness the destruction of my daughter at the hands of Addiction. How can I be well while Angie is so sick? I’ve spent all these years searching for an answer.

Meghan O’Rourke, author of The Long Goodbye, in an interview discussing her own grief about losing her mother, says this: “I’m changed by it, the way a tree is changed by having to grow around an obstacle.

It’s the subliminal mother force in me. Grief and loss—they change us. I keep getting beamed onto Planet X, then back again, my molecules getting rearranged every time. Just as Angie has changed, so have I. I’ve loved my daughter as best I could for half of my life. How can losing her to this living death not change me?”

Stirring The Pot

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memoir-witches

I love this cartoon from the New Yorker. But it’s not why I published my memoir. I suppose some authors put their stories out there for less than altruistic purposes. My motive was to heal from the disease that has crippled my family and me for generations. Many people still think of addiction as a choice or moral failing. So where I fully expect compassion from most people, I still feel judgment from some of those who have never walked in my shoes. And those are the people who will look at this cartoon and might say, “Hell, yes, she’s plotting to wipe out those people who nearly ruined her life!”

No, I’m not. “Those” people are my people, and we’ve all been swirling around in the maelstrom of addiction for a long time. Addiction is emerging from the shadows and people are talking openly about it. The shame and stigma are starting to evaporate, and people are viewing addicts in a new light, deserving of as much compassion as any other sick person.

And those witches stirring their cauldron, planning to poison the evildoers who wronged them? They’ll be out of a job.

Letting Go: Let Me Count The Ways…

Marilea C. Rabasa2 Comments

Memoir Excerpt:

“We walked up to this Italian place just beyond the intersection on Market. They served fabulous take-out in big bins, like a salad bar but hot food. Angie and I got what we wanted and sat down. We talked a little about her massage therapist, the apartment she had found and was planning to move into, the pending suit against Wayne Chin. These were safe topics—topics of her choosing. Conversation was awkward. There was no real engagement, no honest connection between my daughter and me. Blissful dishonesty; play it safe. Don’t push her away. I can’t begin to describe the loneliness I felt carrying on this meaningless conversation—and being with this stranger I barely knew anymore. All I could think of was how much I missed her bangs.

I chose to spend these five days in San Francisco in blissful dishonesty, knowing full well that Angie was using drugs right under my nose, but saying nothing about it. Maybe that’s a sign of my ongoing recovery, my letting go. Is it possible that I could have halted in its tracks more than a decade of methamphetamine, cocaine and heroin abuse with a reprimand?

‘You little, fill in the blank. What are you doing now? How could you ruin my visit this way?’

No, I don’t believe so. I’ve known it for years, knew it then and put it into play this last time I saw her on her turf: whether or not my daughter chose recovery and gave up drugs was not up to me; it was up to her. She herself had to embrace recovery from addiction—using whatever method worked for her. I know many addicts who have recovered, and I’ve prayed that she would join them.”