Voices

The Voice Of Denial

Marilea C. RabasaLeave a comment

Memoir Excerpt:

“Angie worked at one part-time job after another, saving her money in the bank. I bought her an old car so she could drive to school and she never abused the privilege. Friends were important to her, but she remained focused on school and work. Angie was endlessly thoughtful to both her parents and grandparents on special occasions. And the list goes on.

If I was surprised by my daughter’s drug addiction in 2001, this is why. Later on once her addiction had taken hold of her, I would be incredulous at the dysfunctional behavior I was seeing. It’s as though she had become possessed. She had problems, but I thought I was helping her deal with them responsibly. There were no visible red flags. She didn’t stay in bed every day and pull the covers over her head. She diligently saw her therapist every week, facing every day with discipline and good humor. She never missed her classes and she never quit her jobs. Her grades were excellent. Maybe—and this is important to recognize now—this was the beginning of the denial that would hamper me throughout Angie’s addiction, preventing me from dealing with her illness intelligently and effectively.

Angie was a good daughter. But please, beware of the complacency in those words. Clearly, she hid her pain very well. Clearly, much was lurking beneath the surface that I did not see. And if I ache with the vacant promise of all the “woulda, coulda, shouldas,” it’s because I know that even if I had known what was coming down the road, I couldn’t have stopped it.”

“Changed Attitudes Can Aid Recovery”

Marilea C. RabasaLeave a comment

SharingExperienceStrengthandHope

From SESH, June 27: T-H-I-N-K

“Today I express my fears and know that my Higher Power will control the outcome. I am where I need to be. When I feel anxiety, I can focus on the slogan T-H-I-N-K, which reminds me how to react differently.

T – Thoughtful

H – Honest

I – Intelligent

N – Necessary

K – Kind”

Our shortest slogan, T-H-I-N-K, can be very helpful. However, as with most tools, I need to use it with care and reason. As I’ve heard it said around these rooms, ‘my best thinking is what got me here.’ For me, thinking too much or in a negative way is almost as dangerous as thinking not at all. Obsessive thinking can be my symptom of this family disease as much as obsessive drug use is the addict’s.

I will try to free myself of pointless rumination and stay focused on the freedom of my recovery.

 

“Blame Is For God And Small Children”

Marilea C. RabasaLeave a comment

Memoir Excerpt:

“Lately I’ve been reading a few books on suicide: Jill Bialosky’s query into her sister’s suicide (84); and Judy Collins’ heartfelt story about the addiction and suicide of her only child, Clark (111). Both of these authors consulted with the late Dr. Edwin S. Shneidman, a well-known suicidologist. His word, “psychache,” resonated with me. From watching Angie grow into the addict she has become as an adult, I can see how that term would apply to her. If ever there was an aching psyche, it was hers, so in pain and so unable to express that pain effectively to those she loved. I often feel that drug addiction and the pain that accompanies it is a form of suicide, slow and relentless, if left untreated.

My father made attempts here and there to give up gin and tobacco. When he had his gall bladder removed the nurses made him cough into a bag, and he was so disgusted with what came up that he stopped smoking for a while. But he never completely set aside his self-destructive behavior. It was like an old friend who reminded him of what he’d often felt as a child from an uncaring, abusive father: ‘You’re not good enough, not important enough.’ As a young man working in the family business, he met and fell in love with my mother, who spent a good part of their marriage echoing his father’s disappointment in him. Where do the seeds of addiction take root? It’s the old chicken and the egg confusion. Was my father predestined to become an alcoholic? Or was he made one by the emotional abuse he endured? And if the latter is true, then how and when was I an emotional abuser of my own daughter?

But Twelve-Step recovery gently steers us away from questions like that; we can’t go back and do things over. And I’m only human. I sometimes ask myself what I did wrong or what I missed seeing. Then I remember that addiction is a disease: ‘I didn’t cause it, I can’t control it, and I can’t cure it.’ And like a gentle breeze blowing away the clutter of remorse, I let go of those thoughts and embrace my life again, free of responsibility.

God meme

In any case, whatever she chose to do now, I needed to leave her alone to do it. I knew better than to scream and wail in the night to God and all the graces that protected the innocent to save my daughter. Whatever the roots of addiction are, whatever holes were missing in her that this opportunistic disease filled in, I didn’t have the power to combat them. And I just had to let go of the struggle, or I would disappear down that rabbit hole with her.”

Carpe Diem

Marilea C. RabasaLeave a comment

trust the outcome

 

Spending too much time regretting our past mistakes and/or fearing what may happen in the future keep us from looking at what’s right in front of us: the here and now. But the present moment is all that’s real and something we can hold onto. So I will try to be present and attentive to what’s going on right now. That’s how I can relish what’s good in my life and enjoy the ride.

From Hope For Today: September 5:

“…In Step Four I realized I was stuck in the past. My daily thoughts were usually about plans for the next day, week, or even month. I always anticipated tomorrow to the point where it became my today. I’d get so caught up in what I was going to do that I often wasn’t aware of what I was doing now.

After realizing this character defect and asking my Higher Power to remove it, each day I have is usually better than the one before. I give thanks for the little joys in each day. I still make plans, but I don’t let my thoughts erase the present. Anticipation is sweet, but not at the coast of today.

When I look back on this in the context of alcoholism, I understand why I behaved as I did. With all the awful happenings at home, there were many today’s I didn’t want to experience. As a child, I had limited options, so the best way to escape was to flee into the possibility of a better tomorrow. I have different choices now. I know enjoying my day and doing the right thing for myself and my Higher Power is the best plan for an even better tomorrow.

Thought For The Day: Just for today I choose to enjoy all this day has to offer. If I don’t like the offering, I’ll ask my Higher Power to help me adjust my attitude.”

 

Echoes From The Past

Marilea C. RabasaLeave a comment

Memoir Excerpt:

“The condo will soon be on the market. There is so much those four walls hold inside the beams and drywall. I went from room to room looking for memories, the happy and sad evidence of Angie’s presence. There it is, the cigarette hole in my sheets, the burn marks on the porcelain sink where she carelessly left her butts. The black dye she spilled on my new wood floors that I tried to sand away. The bottle of muriatic acid in the laundry room I had no clue about at the time. Why didn’t I throw it away years ago? I remembered the night she had free-based and lost her eyelashes, noticed the knife mark on the door she had locked and couldn’t open. I walked around and felt the walls she had brushed against, sat in her favorite chair, ate from her Asian bowls, smelled her perfume on the jacket she’d left hanging in the closet. They were everywhere, the reminders of Angie’s presence, of the cruel illness that had claimed her, of her loss of self. Why haven’t I walked away from all that sooner? Many would have. What does that say about me?

But Angie, my daughter, was there too. I left them around, remnants of her lost innocence: the hand-painted ceramic heart for “The Greatest Mom in the World” on Mother’s Day in 1988; the picture of wild geese she bought me at the flea market in Greece; the dried coral roses she gave me for my birthday one year; the Scrabble game we played together on her weekend visits in 2010; pictures of her on holidays there with family while she was in recovery. How could I have known then how fleeting it would be?”

The Birth Of A Memoir

Marilea C. RabasaLeave a comment

I’m the mother of a heroin addict, still in active addiction, and I want to share how I’ve learned to live with a parent’s worst nightmare. My book’s first draft started out as an account of my daughter’s addiction and all the horrors, her loss of self, her loss of soul, that accompany it. But as I got to the end, I realized that her story really began with me, and my story began with my father, etc. It became a story of the generational nature of addiction. And so I rewrote it with an Introduction, where I share my childhood and Angie’s with the reader so that you will know us; you get to know Angie before she was corrupted by addiction and, in my case, perhaps understand why I behaved as I did throughout Angie’s addiction. And as I paralleled her roller coaster ride with my own recovery, it ceased to be a simple story about drug addiction and took on the shape of a memoir, as I show how this tragic life event has changed and transformed me.

I begin with a question in the Prologue:

“Where might my daughter be now if fate, or genes, had been kinder to her? Now, several years into her illness, I am coming to terms with the terrible legacy that began generations ago in my own family and which I have unwittingly passed on to my daughter. All these years I’ve diligently searched for answers, clarity, and solace in the face of terrible pain. Like a gift from the universe, it has come to me slowly, and it is with me now. But it’s been a hard won victory.”

Angie’s illness was the catalyst, as I say at the end of the book “that catapulted me into a cave of my own discoveries…” I found myself at the end of this tunnel, “and I would always—still— reckon with the survivor guilt that has challenged my right to be happy while my daughter still struggles with addiction.”

Who Am I?

Marilea C. RabasaLeave a comment

Memoir Excerpt:

“I have faltered many times in my recovery. But learning to focus less on my desired outcomes and more on the journey has enabled me to learn more things along the way. I’m learning to slow down and enjoy the ride. And most importantly, it has kept me out of the driver’s seat and open to receiving life’s valuable lessons.”

 

“Ever since I was a very young child I’d been fragile, like thin ice on a lake—don’t walk on it; you might fall through and drown. My sense of being OK was always shaky when I was younger. Many of us who grow up with low self-worth become chameleons. Chameleons change their color out of fear to protect themselves from predators. We don’t have clear personal boundaries, often not recognizing where we end and others begin. We don’t really know who we are, so we attach ourselves to whomever we’re around, often seeking their approval by pretending to be like them. But like the chameleon who turns green in the jungle, we are afraid to distinguish ourselves. I remember telling Angie back in 2010, ‘I know who I am now.’ Well, that’s an ongoing process.”

“Joy and Woe…”

Marilea C. RabasaLeave a comment

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.”

Reckoning

Marilea C. Rabasa2 Comments

Memoir Excerpt:

“I felt as though parts of my life were raining down on me in these woods. This reckoning was long overdue. I was once again the little girl who longed to be close to her big sister and missed her big brother, the little girl who needed attention from her father, and the young woman who needed to be free of her domineering mother. Losing Angie again felt like a death to me even though it wasn’t. There was no real closure, like the day I put Oscar down, Mahler’s Ninth Symphony pounding in my head. I was back in the woods of my childhood where I could scream my frustration and no one would hear me This was not my whole life—just the parts I needed to purge, the parts that held me back, and the ones that told me I deserved to lose my child.

‘You had this coming to you!’ the voice of Guilt shouted.

‘NO I DIDN’T!’ I screamed back, ‘No, I don’t.’

I felt that day in December, with my temples pounding and hearing nothing but the train racing in my head, that I was powerful. I was reclaiming what was left of my life. I’d been in recovery for years and was happier because of it—no question. But often when Angie relapsed I’d felt myself start to crumble like a week-old cookie. I’d want to scramble to help her fight off the Monster. I’d start to cling, listen for her footsteps, and anticipate her movements, her moods, utterly lose myself in my codependency, allow myself to be controlled by the uncontrollable, and panic at the ensuing chaos.

‘Can I drive you to a meeting? There’s one in the same church as mine. Same time,’ I implored, as if going to a meeting would bring some order to the chaos.

‘Mom, stop. You know I hate meetings.’

When she said that I used to feel enraged, and impotent in my rage, with nowhere to go with it. Addiction had a life of its own. I had spent so much energy fighting a useless battle and worse, not allowing my daughter the dignity of fighting it herself.

But not this time—not this day—nearly a decade into her illness. For the moment, anyway, I was done. This struggle with Angie had worn me out, over and over again, and I wanted to put an end to it. All the hurt and pain from my childhood, all the agony of watching my daughter commit slow suicide, were racing through my head at breakneck speed.

I made my way to a clearing in the woods. I was, for a while anyway, transported back to Massachusetts. But I didn’t go back there that day to revisit the judgments of my childhood. I went back to the same place where I had grown up to try to end the battle inside me—and the battle to save Angie—for so long seemingly one in the same—and now, forever separate.”