The children are watching. I want to be proud of what they see.
Voices
The Healing Power Of Writing
My friend from Virginia writes me that he took my book to his son who is serving a six-month sentence in jail. Justin was so moved by the book that he has decided to write his own story. I am happy to have been a source of inspiration for him, because just the act of writing my story was healing for me. Likewise, it could prove to be the catharsis Justin needs to finally face his demons and walk away from drugs.
David Sheff’s (Beautiful Boy, Clean) son, Nick, wrote his own gripping tale, Tweak, and it was very successful.
We all have a story to tell. And even though we’re not all famous authors, our stories have value to those of us walking down the painful road of addiction. I hope Justin and many other addicts out there write down what’s in their heart. More of us need to get these stories into bookstores. The shame and stigma of addiction will fade in time if we all come out of the shadows and tell our truth.
My Glass Is Half Full
From Hope For Today, January 23:
“One of the gifts I have received from Al-Anon is learning how to maintain an attitude of gratitude. Before the program I didn’t really understand the true nature of gratitude. I thought it was the happiness I felt when life happened according to my needs and wants. I thought it was the high I felt when my desire for instant gratification was fulfilled.
Today…I know better. Gratitude is an integral part of my serenity. In fact, it is usually the means of restoring my serenity whenever I notice I’m straying from it.
Gratitude opens the doors of my heart to the healing touch of my Higher Power. It isn’t always easy to feel grateful when the strident voice of my disease demands unhealthy behavior. However, when I work my program harder, it is possible.
‘Just for today I will smile…I will be grateful for what I have instead of concentrating on what I don’t have.’”
Accepting life on life’s terms is hard. My daughter has been a drug addict for fifteen years, and I grieve the loss of her in my life every day. The five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—I know them all, and not always in that order.
My path to recovery involved a lot of denial in the beginning and, as it said in the reading, “the voice of my disease demanded unhealthy behavior.”
So I’m grateful now for the serenity and peace that I have in my life. Acceptance is the gift I give myself every day when I let go and give Angie to God. When I remember that my glass is half full, it dulls the ache from losing my precious daughter.
She’s still alive, but I haven’t seen her in almost five years. When they say that there’s always hope, I agree: as long as she’s alive there’s hope for her to recover. But more importantly, there’s hope for me to move on with my life and focus on my blessings. I deserve to be happy, and that’s the only thing that I can control.
Writing A Healing Memoir
My memoir about my daughter is a graphically honest portrayal of addiction at its worst. And Angie is still alive, so I was a little fearful of publicity and pictures. But not anymore. Many readers have asked me “What would you do if Angie saw this book someday? Wouldn’t you be horrified?” My answer is this: “No, not at all. The book is not a condemnation of Angie. It is a celebration of life and love.”
In the Introduction, I showcase Angie as she was before addiction corrupted her. She was a beautiful child, young woman, a talented gymnast, writer, artist, and college graduate. And most of all she was a loving and thoughtful daughter to her father and me.
The rest of the book is a portrait of the horrors of addiction and what it does to a young woman with her whole life ahead of her. Once addiction took over, this person was no longer my daughter Angie. And I make that clear in the final chapters, how parents must learn to separate their children from the addicts they become in order to keep loving them and deal effectively with this cruel disease.
Letting Go
Letting go…how do we do that? Whether our addict is fifteen or thirty-five, how do we let go of the fight to save them? I guess when I’m finally convinced that I can’t play God anymore. When I finally see that she’s not making a choice, but is in the grips of a cruel disease. When I accept all this, it’s easier for me to accept my powerlessness. When I’m finally convinced that I don’t have the power to cure a disease—not in my daughter…not in myself—then I can let go and let God.
That realization is a painful one, but it also sets us free to live our lives as best we can. I have much in my life to be grateful for; I want to celebrate my blessings every day. And that includes Angie—because without her struggle I never would have taken such a close look at my life in an effort to live well. In spite of everything, I believe with all my heart that my daughter would want me to.
Feeling The Sun On My Face
The Heart To Listen
The Serenity Prayer (Part 4)
“and Wisdom to know the difference…
“Wisdom is God’s own conversation with me. Often he speaks through books or other people. Wisdom can be found merely by listening to others after I develop the ability to hear it in their words. To recognize Wisdom, I must have compassion for others, which gives me insight rather than knowledge of myself. Facing reality encourages recognition of Wisdom, because Wisdom is always truth.”
Thank God I have the ears to listen when He speaks to me! Not always, of course. And some of the best wisdom I pick up is in the rooms from other members. Opening my heart to listen to others is one of the great rewards of my recovery program. And I NEVER feel alone anymore.
The Ache In Their Souls
Memoir Excerpt:
“While Angie was in Fredericksburg, I really stepped up my attempts to reach her. For one thing, I had an address to mail things to. For another, I thought she might be reachable while she was in Doc’s care. But I see in so many of my communications a dreadful tendency to condescend to her. I still clung to the illusion of control and I wanted her to do things my way.
‘Honor them, Angie, honor them.’ I know what I meant when I said those words to her, reminding her of the moral code I had raised her with. But how she would react to them was a different matter.
Many of my letters to Angie throughout her addiction were pages of barely veiled anger and disappointment. Since she was so sick I didn’t have the heart or the courage to be more honest with her. She saw through the mask anyway. My letters demonstrate how deeply entrenched I still was in needing to fix and control her. I needed to back off and let her find her own way. I kept hearing my mother’s old (imaginary) voice in me: “You can’t let go of her, Maggie. That’s not love. You can’t just stand by and let her self-destruct!”
It’s no surprise that she never answered these letters. Angie was well into her twenties by now and I should have known better anyway. I really needed to do more of what the Program was telling me to do. Even in my own journey of self-discovery, no one could have told me that I was OK. I had to believe it myself. I’ve had a lot of therapy over the years, but none of them worked as well as the Twelve Steps to bring about change in me. And I so wished that Angie could find something in life to give her faith in her own worth—go back to the first twenty-one years of her life—and remember all the things she excelled in and how much ambition she once had for herself. I too wished she could access the love of her whole family. It was such an impotent thing now, I realized, though I once naively thought that my love could pull her away from all this. But there was a masonry wall between Angie and recovery: rough, forbidding, high and difficult to scale. Addiction crippled her with destructive ‘solutions’ to the ache in her soul.” (From A Mother’s Story: Angie Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, by Maggie C. Romero)
Looking Within
Memoir Excerpt:
“That summer (2009) I wanted her to come visit and see our farm in the Southwest. In she flew from sunny Palm Springs to sunny New Mexico, and it was a joy to have her with us for a few days. Angie is, among other things, a very talented artist, and I asked her to paint a little sign naming our farmhouse Casita del Mar, so named because of my huge shell collection. It still hangs on the post in my front courtyard, though in the years since her visit it has sustained a lot of weather damage.
We had fun, tooling around Santa Fe, and visiting the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. I knew she would appreciate seeing this artist’s work. Angie had a gift for expression, both in the spoken word and in her renderings. As a child she wrote a lot of poetry. She also could capture on paper a face or expression with great accuracy. In art school I was good at drawing elevations and brick walls, but I couldn’t begin to draw someone’s face. Angie had a great gift.
We continued north up the slow mountain road to the Taos Pueblo, where we visited a potter we knew and bought some more of her pieces. The next day we took Angie up the tram on Sandia Crest, where you can see for miles in three directions. Looking out for hundreds of miles—and looking within. I knew I was doing a lot of that in my own recovery, but Angie never shared her recovery work with me. On our last day together we celebrated her birthday at dinner in Corrales. Of course, she had to get back to work. We hugged at the airport and said goodbye. Again, there were so many goodbyes—so much uncertainty. I will never allow complacency into my life again. I will never, ever, take a moment of happiness for granted.”
Punching It Out
There are many stages to grief and loss. I’m grateful to be at a place of acceptance and peace now. But I didn’t always feel this way. Four years ago I was very, very angry, as is clear in this scene from my memoir (A Mother’s Story: Angie Doesn’t Live Here Anymore):
“’I hate you, Addiction! You are the curse of this century and I despise you. You’ve stolen my daughter and this is what I think of you: Kapow! Boom! Left jab to the right eye. Bleed, you b—– Angie may not have the strength to fight you, but I do. Here’s a right hook to your left eye. Keep bleeding, you s-o-b. This one’s for my dad. Ever since I can remember, you snatched him from my life. This one’s for Angie, you piece of sh–. Is this how you get off? Turning a beautiful, bright young woman into a vegetable? And this one’s for me, you giant succubus. Me, I won’t let you destroy. Me, I’m gonna save. So that my children and grandchildren will see that there is hope when struggling with Addiction. It doesn’t always have to win.’”
And it hasn’t. One day at a time, I’m learning to save myself from addiction and all the devastation it has caused in my life…and for this I am very grateful. Life does go on, and the world still turns.