the way I was anymore. This seemingly hopeless moment, when despair meets clarity, can be priceless for an addict, because it can lead to recovery. It was the late 1970s, and there were few options for treatment at that time. But my moment of clarity somehow brought me to the twelve-step meetings that turned out to be all over the place. I went to meetings with no idea of what I’d find, out of desperation. There I met people—especially women—who were calm and supportive and who told stories I could relate to. They gave me endless practical suggestions, which I desperately needed, on how to stay away from substances and learn to live a healthy life. Getting into recovery was painful and hard, but the healing has been worth everything. Along the way I met thousands of women and men with the same disorder who now have calm and productive lives. And these days more and more young people are crowding the rooms of twelve-step fellowships looking for a foundation for their life in recovery—as well as many other alternative support systems that didn’t exist until recently.
You’d think, wouldn’t you, I’d have recognized Kim’s addiction sooner, given my history. I knew that, as one study puts it, “a genetic predisposition to addiction and/or co-occurring mental health problems [put kids] at greater risk of progressing from substance use to addiction.”4 Yes, I worried about that, but I also thought having a role model of a mother in recovery as an example of a disease that can be arrested with diligence would give her the necessary ammunition against the temptation to use when the time came. Wrong! Also, who could have predicted middle-class kids, with opportunities that most of the world can’t imagine, would turn in such numbers to a drug that adults today associate with hard-core street users? And then there’s that thick veil, that inability or unwillingness to see—the denial.
My daughter became bone-thin, either slept all the time when she was home, raged and cried hysterically, or disappeared. My husband and I stepped it up. We took away serious privileges. Then, in the spring of her senior year at an alternative program for gifted, alienated kids (most of them miserable and many on drugs), one of her teachers called me in for one of those “talks” I’d grown to expect and dread from the authority figures in her life. Usually, they talked about Kim cutting class, missing homework. But this teacher was different. She cut to the chase: Kim had a serious drug problem and we needed to get her help. Hearing the truth from another responsible adult—that Kim was actually “hooked”—was like having bandages ripped off my eyes. I had been distracted by the side issues, her slipping grades, her questionable new friends, her new, horrible temper, her arrests. I’d continued to see her as she had been, like looking at photos of the adorable little girl I’d doted on. “Miss Social Butterfly” in preschool. Lead in the school play twice. Brownies and Girl Scouts. Theater camp. Talented in a variety of artistic pursuits.
In my research I’ve read or been told time and time again that girls often escalate their drug use to deal with trauma. It can cover a range of experiences, from physical or sexual abuse to what they perceive as a life crisis. In our family’s story, the escalation of Kim’s drug use is tied to a major loss. After suffering increasing pain, her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the fall of her senior year in high school. By the time the teacher laid it on the line to me in the spring, he was in and out of the hospital and in constant pain. We knew he didn’t have long to live and I determined to shield him from this painful news about his beloved daughter. I got her into an outpatient group for adolescents that met five nights a week at a local rehab center. At the weekly parents’ meeting, where kids, moms and dads, and grandparents and counselors met in an enormous circle, Kim was soon speaking up articulately about how grateful she was to be giving up the drugs and finding healthy alternatives. Of course, I wanted to believe her so much. And she wanted to believe herself, I understand in retrospect. But she also tells me that before and after the outpatient sessions, there were kids selling drugs to each other in the parking lot.
With drugs available all over suburban New York she soon caved after her short “clean time” in outpatient treatment. Her addiction pulled her further and further away from everyone and everything she had liked. This is the bewildering beast at the heart of an addict’s self-destruction. It is too painful and too frightening for the addict to think of stopping and it leads to bad decisions and terrible isolation.
Watching her vigorous, active, fun-loving dad crumble and eventually die a week before she managed to graduate from high school, Kim fell apart. When she stood before her class to give a presentation as part of the graduation ceremony, I watched the tears pour down her face and felt my own stream down on mine.
I was completely exhausted in body, mind, and spirit from caring for my dying husband, trying to deal with Kim, trying to be there for her grown brother, much less dealing with my own grief. That summer, I hardly noticed when she’d stay out all night and make up lame excuses when she got home. I simply reacted. When money went missing and I found sheets of paper on which she’d practiced imitating my signature to forge checks, I hid my checkbook, my wallet, my credit cards, and I changed the password to my bank accounts. I searched Kim’s room obsessively for bits of tinfoil, doll-sized Ziploc bags, and syringes. Sometimes I would beg her to stop. Sometimes I just cried. So did she.
Did I make a lot of mistakes with Kim? Of course I did. But as I was to learn, I was doing my best with the energy and knowledge I had. A parent’s basic instinct is to protect a child. What I didn’t yet understand was I was not protecting her: I was protecting her addiction.
She was supposed to go to peer-support twelve-step meetings after the adolescent group ended, but I didn’t know if she actually attended the meetings. I told myself she was and that this was a clear sign of her getting better. She’d been accepted by the college she wanted to go to and I thought this would be a positive move. She’d get away from all those sleazy friends and start a new, independent life. In October, when I visited her at her residence hall, though, there seemed to be no supervision of the freshman girls. The suite they shared was a mess. Soon after that, the dean of students called me to ask if Kim had dropped out since she hadn’t been to any of her classes. I called and confronted her. That weekend, I drove her and her stuff back home. She’d have to get a job, I said.
Crisis management had become the new norm. And the worse things got, the more I hunkered down; fear became a constant poison in my heart, my brain, my joints. Kim did get a job, then she promptly lost it, got another, lost it. I kept on rescuing her, fixing up her messes—in short, I continued enabling her addiction. I remember one awful night when she swore she would stop using drugs if I would drive her to an ATM and withdraw four hundred dollars she had to pay a drug dealer who was threatening to harm her. So I drove her to the ATM machine. I felt impelled to protect her, and I wanted to believe she could straighten out with the right support from me.
Each recovery story follows its own arc. The path to long-term recovery is often not straightforward. Along the way, Kim went to therapy, two outpatient adolescent groups, an inpatient rehab, moved away, came back home, and then went to a second inpatient rehab and aftercare at a sober house. She then had several more relapses before she became serious about her own recovery. And that’s not unusual for young people! (Nor for not so young people.)
Of course, I didn’t know about the latest scientifically backed types of treatment that help women of all ages with addiction. I didn’t know about the great deal of research in the last twenty years into the differences between female and male brains, hormonal functioning, and psychological needs; and that women are particularly vulnerable to trauma. I didn’t know each individual facing recovery needs careful screening and the proper treatment. I was fortunate to stumble onto these discoveries when I was desperately searching for a new rehab. For some mysterious reason, I got into a conversation with someone I knew only slightly who worked at the bank I frequent. He had always seemed sympathetic and one day I ended up sitting in his office, spilling out my story. He in turn shared his addicted son’s story with me, and how he happened to know about a small, women-oriented recovery center that his sister, a noted addiction researcher, had helped establish. (I have had too many of these conversations over the years to think they are coincidental. Many others have had them too. When
