Addicted Like Me (6 page)

The kids told me that Sylvia had kicked Ryan and had thrown him up against a wall. They had told Rick what had happened, but he hadn't believed them. I thought about my father and Nora, and how I would overhear her force my father to say that he loved her more than he loved me. I could never tell my father about the way Nora mistreated me, because I believe he would have sided with her, just like Rick had done with Sylvia, leaving my kids to live my story all over again. The jealousy of the alcoholic, abusive stepmother was playing itself out in yet another generation of our family. I filed a police report against Sylvia, yet I was told that without physical
bruises on the children there was not much that the police could do. The police recommended that I file a complaint with Child Protective Services, which I did, but at this point I knew I could not count on Rick to be there consistently for Lauren and Ryan unless I wanted to subject them to more of the same.

I know now that Lauren began smoking cigarettes shortly after her dad disappeared from her life. She became an angry young preteen. I had bought a home in a nicer part of town, an act I was very proud of as a single mother, to have come so far from my own story of addiction. This move caused two major changes for my children. One was that their favorite baby sitter no longer lived next door. The second change was that Lauren and Ryan had to change schools twice during this time, due to a job offer I received in Colorado. I decided to take the job, which caused us all to move a second time after our split from Rick. The first signs of trouble began brewing then. Lauren and Ryan began spending time with new friends, a sister and brother, Christy and Danny, who lived nearby. Not long after, Lauren started talking back to me, doing obvious things to provoke me, and becoming difficult to deal with.

I didn't know it was addiction with her at first. I remember believing it was regular teenager things. Once, she took the dog out for a walk and did not come back until late into the night. When I asked her what had been going on, she screamed at me, “Leave me the hell alone and get out of my face!” Lauren stomped up the stairs and slammed her bedroom door. But around the house, there were other signs. She wasn't doing her chores, and when I would confront her about this, she would give me nasty
remarks and attitude. It wasn't like her to be so angry, so often. I was beginning to wonder what the heck was wrong. I was frustrated, because I really needed her and Ryan to be responsible; I needed their help, and it just wasn't happening. I sometimes wonder if Lauren would not have become totally out of control at this point had I followed my gut and provided constant supervision, but then again I think maybe it wouldn't have mattered. Addiction is powerful when it has been maturing silently in the next generation, especially in a hurting girl like Lauren, or a hurting girl like I had been, years before.

I KNEW SOMETHING was off when Lauren's behavior changed. Still, it was challenging to figure out how to handle this suspicion. She was too old for a baby sitter by this time, but she did not seem trustworthy enough to be left alone. I counted on school starting up again to make her life busy and distracted, and I hoped things would go back to the way they had been with her when things were good in Arizona. That was before I had taken the job in Colorado that moved us away from the friends that each of us had counted on for support. I couldn't have been more mistaken believing that distraction can stop an illness that is passed on through the family. It was about to flare up, not settle down.

Lauren went into ninth grade at a high school near our home. Ryan went into seventh grade that year, at the middle school. He was doing poorly with his grades and started telling me he was sick many mornings and unable to go to school. Too often I let him stay home. I called the house frequently and stopped by to check on him on my lunch hour, but he was already doing drugs by this time and purposely evaded my calls and knew how to avoid me when I came over. Then calls from the vice principal started coming. I started by trying to talk to Ryan about it; then I yelled at him, grounded him, and even dragged him to school on days he wasn't supposed to be staying home. I felt powerless.

I couldn't make a consistent change in Ryan, so I sought help and finally took him to a psychologist. From there we were referred to a psychiatrist for an evaluation, because it was suspected that a psychological disorder lay at the root of his behaviors. The psychiatrist asked Ryan questions and concluded he had ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder). The psychiatrist put Ryan on medication, and I sent him back to school, where his attendance and grades improved considerably. I thought we had solved the problem as quickly as it had flared up. During this lull, Ryan called me up at work to say he had spilled a bunch of his pills into a mess of Kool-Aid, had to throw the pills down the drain, and needed me to get him more drugs. I really didn't realize at the time that this story was a sign. We hadn't scratched the surface of the problem at all.

I had gone ahead and gotten Ryan's prescription refilled because it was one of those stories I just had a funny feeling about but dismissed. It's a fleeting thought that came back to haunt me.
I found out he had been passing his ADHD pills around to friends so they could get high. I didn't listen to my instinct or see my own historical pattern repeating in my kid. I know now that the feeling I had about Ryan's story wasn't odd. The feeling was familiar. I had lived the same story before, passing out pain pills I stole from my dad. I believe I chose denial instead of deciding to look deeper into what was going on with Ryan. I hoped that things would just get better on their own, which is almost always a mistake, because they rarely do and in our case did not. School administrators started calling about Lauren, who was about to take the starring role in our story of addiction.

Her vice principal had let me know she had attitude problems with her teachers. I decided to take her to a psychologist, like I had taken Ryan, to try to get to the root of her problem. The psychologist felt that there was something going on but could not figure it out, though she was concerned enough to recommend Lauren come back and believed maybe then we would get to the bottom of Lauren's behavior. My relationship with Lauren got worse as I took her to these appointments, but we continued going to counseling anyway. That school year, she failed most of her classes. I was concerned, but I didn't press harder to turn her grades around because our family was already going through problems with Ryan, they were both seeing counselors, and I felt overwhelmed. I believed I was doing all I could to deal with the situation. I didn't know what other steps to take.

As I tried to keep us all together, Lauren began to spend more time with Christy, the new friend she had made in our neighborhood.
I had mixed feelings about this girl. Christy and her brother, Danny, came as a pair. He had clicked with Ryan while Christy and Lauren hit it off, but I sensed the four of them together could be trouble. During the second semester of school, what I sensed might happen, did. Lauren and Christy got caught smoking and ditching school, and both continued to have attitude problems with their teachers. I tried to talk to Lauren about this, but she was only rude to me. She would deny that she was agitating her teachers. She actually claimed it was they who were out to get her. At home, Lauren began to stay out later than I allowed. If I got upset, she would just start arguing with me. I also started to notice that she had been steadily losing weight.

I should have paid more attention to the weight loss because of the sign it was pointing to. Had I realized that drugs and alcohol were involved, it might have dawned on me that her using had become more important to her than her health. The behavior issues with her, though, were such a distraction that it was all I could do to deal with the daily challenges that were in my face. One night she didn't come home at all, which scared me to death. The possibility that my daughter had been kidnapped, raped, or murdered made me sick to my stomach. I was angry and asked myself what she could have possibly been thinking to do something like that. I had to call the police and file a report. I didn't sleep all night, and in the morning I had to make a difficult call to my boss. My life with the kids had escalated to a point where I could no longer keep hiding. Until Lauren disappeared, I had been able to manage our family without it affecting my work, but after she vanished it pushed the
two worlds into collision. My boss had no idea when I told her that I was having trouble with my children.

After I called my boss, I phoned the police again and called the psychologist that Lauren and I had been seeing. She recommended Lauren be hospitalized in an adolescent psychiatric hospital. I was sick with worry, and Lauren was still missing. Only Ryan was able to help me find her in the end, and it turned out she had run away with Christy, so I called her mother and we decided to work together to find the girls. Christy's mom was extremely angry. We joined forces as allies at first, but it wasn't long before she turned against me, blaming Lauren as the troublemaker.

In the meantime I called the hospital. I made arrangements to admit Lauren as soon as I could get her back, but I had concluded by then that the girls were not going to be easy to find. It wasn't going to do me any good to sit home day after day, waiting until Lauren decided to come home. I went back to work, but I felt like an emotional mess trying to function at my job. On day three, I couldn't take it anymore. Christy's mother and I got together again to search for the girls. We went to the house of a girl whom we heard Lauren and Christy had been hanging around with and knocked on the door. Her teenage brother answered and got nasty with us when we asked to come in and look around, which gave me the feeling that something was up. I listened to this feeling, pulled around the corner of the house, and staked it out.

Within twenty minutes, a car pulled into the driveway. Out of the front door of the house bolted our two runaway daughters, hell-bent to enter the waiting car and continue their spree. I am sure
they had been told we were close on their heels. I pulled up behind the car after I saw the girls make a run for it, so that the vehicle couldn't back out. Christy's mom jumped out of our car and started screaming at her daughter. The chaos got the attention of the entire neighborhood, which forced us to explain what was going on with our kids. I asked the neighbors to call the police, and within three minutes, a fire truck, an ambulance, and two police cars were on the scene. The girls were released to our custody. I tried to take Lauren to the hospital, just as I had planned, though of course word had gotten back to her, from Ryan, that she was headed for inpatient. Her first words to me when she got in the car were “I am not going to any fucking hospital!”

She demanded that I stop at a gas station so she could use the bathroom. She screamed that she needed a cigarette and told me she wanted me to stop at the store. I had given in so many times in the past when she had demanded and negotiated things, but not this time. I suddenly realized I had turned a corner as I began to drive. My life had been consumed by this obsession over the drama with my children. Although I had made some efforts with counselors for them, I was at a point where I was ready to do whatever it took to get things turned around, no matter how uncomfortable that would make our lives. This was a major breakthrough for me. I kept silent as I drove Lauren straight to the hospital without any stops.

She asked me to please not do it when I began to check her in, but I didn't know what else to do. Lauren needed more help than I could give her. I walked her in, and then she was led away. I left the hospital feeling frozen, yet relieved. The staff had told me to go
home and try to get some sleep. This is when I began to connect our story to the legacy of addiction. I came back the next afternoon to meet with the doctor assigned to Lauren, who began to complete a family history chart for us. I noted addictions in the lives of Rick, my father, my grandfather, and myself, and as I talked, the doctor just shook her head and said, “Wow . . . no wonder.”

Lauren was brought in the room after that. She was extremely upset, sobbing like a baby, begging that I take her home. It was a welcome change to see her vulnerable, with her walls down. She threw herself on me and told me that she was afraid and that there were some very scary people in that place. Lauren promised that she wouldn't run away again if I would only let her come home. I wanted to believe her, so I asked the psychologist what we should do. She said that taking Lauren home would be a bad idea. It was incredibly hard to tell Lauren that she needed to stay, but I did, and immediately this changed her whole demeanor. She became angry and sullen, the exact same Lauren I was used to seeing at home, which broke my heart.

Before being discharged, Lauren spent one week at this hospital. I felt horrible to have left her in a place that she felt was scary. I felt like a train had run over me. I felt such a burden from the choice I had made, and still I needed to trust the professionals at that time. They recommended Lauren not return to the house after her release, so instead I arranged to have her stay in Montana, with Rick's parents. I still called to discuss the kids with Rick; he went in and out of sobriety, and the responsible phases could sometimes accompany them. After talking the situation through with him, he
agreed that sending Lauren to his parents' house was a good option. She had always been very close to her grandparents, and especially her grandmother. They agreed to take her for a few months after we called to let them know.

I picked Lauren up from the hospital when she was discharged, driving her directly to the airport, where I put her on a plane to Montana. She was relieved to be out of the hospital and excited to go to see her grandparents. I was just grateful that she was safe. Lauren did great in Montana as far as I knew, although I wasn't getting the total picture. She didn't want to talk to me when I would call her. She was upset over what I had done. Her grandmother told me this, and she sent photographs of Lauren that were shot by her grandfather. In the photos I could see she had gained some of her weight back and looked really healthy, but Lauren would later tell me she was bored in Montana. I didn't see it. I saw a girl in the pictures who was happier than she had been before, which made me feel so relieved. Ryan was at home during this time. He made it through the rest of the school year with passing grades, and things were fairly quiet at our house until the next school year.