Hooked (3 page)

Learning to forgive

The thing that helped me most of all was learning to forgive my parents. It sounds like a cliché, I know, but it's true. And it wasn't something I just did one time; it's something I had to do over and over again. Every time my mom was away for days at a time, I forced myself to forgive her. And every time my dad got mad at her for gambling and took it out on me, I forgave him. It was really hard to do, but that process of forgiving them was really powerful for me. I don't think it would help everyone, but it has definitely helped me. And I think I was able to do it partly because I knew it could always be worse. I knew that other people's moms went away and never came back, but mine always did.

A Tough Road

Jermaine was always fending for himself and dealing with his crack-cocaine-addicted dad's paranoia and abuse. He finally learned that sometimes you have to turn your back on your parents.

My dad, the addict

I first found out that my dad was addicted to crack cocaine because he told me. He didn't tell my mom, he didn't tell anyone else, he told me. At the time, I was only seven or eight. I didn't cry or anything, but it was definitely a big burden for him to tell me alone. And it got worse. Shortly after he told me, he went through a period where every couple of weeks he would get so high smoking crack that he'd say to me, “I'm going to die. You have to get me ready to go to the hospital. I'm going to die.”

Feelings of anxiety and paranoia are a common side effect of cocaine consumption. Sometimes cocaine even causes hallucinations that can make the user feel he or she is about to die.

Later, I found out that the cocaine was making him paranoid, but at the time I didn't know that. So I would put him in clothes and wipe him up because he'd throw up on himself sometimes, but by the time we'd be ready to go, he'd no longer be as high, so he'd decide we didn't have to. That was very draining. Not long after that, he'd usually be back in the bathroom getting high again. That's where he always did cocaine. After a while, it got to a point where I sometimes hoped he would die. I went from hoping he'd stay alive to hoping he'd die very quickly.

No one noticed

For quite a while my dad had a good-paying job at a factory, and we were never poor or anything. But he took tons of time off and stayed home a lot to take drugs. That usually meant I stayed home to look after him. And none of my teachers ever caught on. I was really good at acting like nothing was wrong, so most of them just assumed I was skipping class, I guess. But in reality, my mom would be at work and I'd be at home with my dad and my sister.

My mom worked at a call center and was usually gone from six in the morning until six in the afternoon. That really sucked because it meant that she left the house before I had the chance to. So because of that, I got stuck at home with dad instead of her. Even after she got off work, my mom would often go get massages or get her hair done before coming home. That was even worse than her leaving early, because like I said, my dad got really paranoid when he was high. That meant he didn't like to have lights on in the house because he thought people could see in. So we would sometimes spend hours sitting around in the dark, waiting for my mom to come home and turn some lights on. That was terrifying—especially in the winter when it got dark early.

Protecting Caitlin

To make matters worse, I'd have to watch my little sister too. I have three sisters now, but this was when I was only eight and I just had one. Caitlin was just two years old while most of this was going on, and I would sit in the hallway between our living room (where she was playing) and the bathroom (where my dad was doing cocaine) and try to keep an eye on both of them.

Sometimes I feel like I've spent my whole life doing my best to protect Caitlin from my dad's drug use, since my mom wouldn't. A lot of the time I was so desperate just to keep her out of the bathroom and away from my dad that I would act like her slave. I would get her anything she asked for, just to keep her from going near my dad while he was using. Now that we're older, I sometimes feel like she still expects me to run around and get everything for her, because that's what she became used to.

My mom, the denier

Meanwhile, my mom never said anything about my dad taking drugs. Like I said, she was out of the house most of the time, and when she
was
around, she was in total denial about my dad's addiction. She would spend hours looking through medical books to try to figure out why he was “sick.” Even I, as a little kid,
I
knew something was wrong, but my mom didn't want to acknowledge that one little bit. My dad even told me that he sometimes tried to make her realize that he was in trouble, that he needed help. He said one time she came into the bathroom while he was getting high and he didn't even try to hide it. Instead, he blew a big cloud of crack cocaine smoke right in her face. But she just pretended it never happened.

It is not uncommon for addicts to go through periods where they stop making any efforts to hide their behavior. This is sometimes a cry for help, and sometimes a form of manipulation—a way of demonstrating that they are in control and there's nothing anyone can do to stop them from abusing their substance of choice.

Sleepless nights

When I was a little bit older, my mom went from working the day shift to working nights. At that point, my parents weren't sleeping in the same room because they went to bed at totally different times. And since my dad couldn't sleep with my mom, he would sleep on the top bunk of my bunk bed, which was normally empty. He wouldn't really sleep, though, because he was so paranoid. And to make matters worse, he wouldn't let me sleep either. In fact, he would sometimes punch me awake at night because he was scared of drifting off and not waking up. After a while, it didn't even hurt when he hit me because I was just so tired. Mostly it annoyed me, because sometimes I would
just
have fallen asleep and then he'd wake me. Ever since then, I've been a bit of an insomniac.

One of the most annoying times he did this was on my tenth birthday. I was sleeping on the couch in the living room and my dad came and sat on me for two hours. It sounds weird, I know, but he literally came and sat on top of me. And I remember exactly how long he sat on me because I was watching the clock the whole time, thinking,
This can't last much longer
. But it did. He was just ranting, and complaining, and cussing, and talking. Eventually he stood up and actually yelled at me for not telling him to get off me earlier, but it just hadn't occurred to me to do so. See, I was always very obedient. Even when I was just one or two years old, if you told me to sit still, I would literally sit still until you told me I could move again—sometimes for hours. So I just lay there, assuming he was going to get up eventually. I don't know why I was so obedient. I was a really smart kid too, so I think maybe I realized that if you did what people told you to, it would save you a lot of time and trouble. But sometimes it also meant that your dad sat on you for two hours when he was stoned.

Blaming me

It's always been really hard for me to ask for stuff that I want. Even when I was a really little kid, I never asked my mom for gifts or anything. I worried she'd say no, or feel like she had to say yes. My sister, on the other hand, has to have everything she wants. Ironically, that's one of my dad's biggest complaints about me. He says I should ask for things more—like Caitlin does. He actually told me once that he loves her more because she asks him for the things she wants and stands up for herself more than I do. He's even gotten mad at me a couple of times for not asking him to stop taking drugs! He says, “If you told me to stop, then I'd stop.”

Many addicts try to blame others—most often family members—for their behavior. This can help them justify their continued abuse, and it can alleviate their guilt by placing some of the responsibility on people who are, in fact, victims.

Once, he asked me to bring him his shoes. And I knew that he kept his stash in his shoes, but I did what I was told. Then he yelled at me for being “an enabler.”

An
enabler
is someone who intentionally or unintentionally does something that makes it easier for his or her loved one to continue engaging in destructive behavior. In some cases, enabling can contribute to ongoing substance abuse.

But of course, he would have gotten mad at me if I
hadn't
brought the shoes too. So I couldn't win. He would also tell me that I should hate him. He'd say, “You hate me, don't you? You hate me, don't you?” And I'd say no. Once, after I said no, he spat on me. It was like he was trying to make me hate him … or wanted me to.

How I coped

Even before I learned about my dad's addiction, I was a weird kid. I remember this one time when I was just four years old and a friend of mine asked me to go on the seesaw with him. And I said no, because in my head I thought:
We're going to go on the seesaw, and you're going
to want to go faster. I'm going to fall off and crack my head
open, and my parents are going to be sad when I die
. I'm weird like that. I worry about things and analyze things before they've happened. But I think maybe that was one of the ways I learned to deal with things, by planning for them and expecting the worst.

Another thing that helped was to get out of the house. On days that I actually made it to school, I would always try to avoid coming home. If I ever had to go back for lunch money or something like that, I would try to get someone to hand it to me through the kitchen window. I knew that if I actually went inside, I'd somehow get roped into staying there. When that didn't work and I was forced to come inside, I would just do my best to zone everything out. I guess that was my main way of coping. Every once in a while I couldn't ignore things, though. And one time in particular, I lost it.

Kicking Dad out

By this point I was about sixteen years old, and I had two sisters, Caitlin and Kim. My dad had gotten really stoned one night and was so paranoid that he actually kicked us out of the house. We went to the mall, because my mom was at work. I must have called her a hundred times, but she never picked up. Later, she had the nerve to get mad at me for calling so much, so that made me even angrier. Finally, she came home and convinced my dad to open the door and we all went back inside. After that, they were in the living room arguing and I finally just couldn't take it anymore. I walked into the room and I said to my dad, “You have to leave. You're always calling me a wuss and telling me I should stand up to you. Well, now I am. Get out.” Amazingly, he left.

He was back around three in the morning, though.

“I need to use the bathroom,” he said.

I wasn't buying it. “There's a Tim Hortons up the road. Use the bathroom there.”

“I have to get some stuff.”

“Come get it in the morning.”

“I need my wallet.”

“I'll get you your wallet and then you can go.”

Finally, he left and my mom thanked me for dealing with him. I guess I appreciate her saying thank you, but at the same time, that should never have been my job; it should have been hers. There's no point trying to confront my mom about anything, though. If I told my mom, “You should have come home earlier” or “You should have returned my calls,” I knew she'd say, “I needed time for myself” or “I had a long day.” And meanwhile I'd be stuck at home watching my sisters and trying to convince my dad he wasn't going to die.

Dad was back in the house again not long after that. He was only supposed to visit during the day, but he started sleeping in his car outside the house. So finally my mom took pity on him and started letting him sleep inside again. She actually asked my permission. And I was like, “Sure. Whatever.” I found it hard to say no to her, and I didn't know where else he would go, but I didn't like it.

After that, he relapsed again and things were basically back to the way they were before, except something had changed for me. I'd had enough. I left as soon as I could after that.

Looking back

Once, when I was in high school, we watched a movie about drug addicts. And what really got me was that so many of them were people who started using despite the fact that they were really smart and had really good jobs. One of the girls in the movie had a job in the White House. One of the guys used to be a really successful businessman who now sneaks into hotels for the free breakfasts. It made me think about how, at one point, my dad probably had so much potential but wasted it on drugs.

The good news is he's stopped doing coke now. He went to rehab and had one relapse afterward, but that was it. It's funny, because he doesn't have a sponsor or anything, but he seems to be doing okay. My three sisters still live at home, so I'm glad he won't put them through the same awful stuff he put me through. It's still hard for me to go home, though, partly
because
things aren't as bad anymore, so my sisters have a hard time understanding why I had to leave.

It's been a tough road for me. Because of everything I went through with my dad, I've been on antipsychotics and antidepressants for a long time now, and they make you kind of numb. I also have obsessive-compulsive disorder, which makes me really anxious, and can get me fixated on certain things. I've been on drugs for that as well, but lately I've been trying to avoid all those medications because they remind me too much of my dad.

I'm actually living with my girlfriend now, and we recently had a baby. I can only hope that I do a better job of being a dad than my dad did. I'm pretty sure I will, because I spent so much of my childhood taking care of everyone else in my family.