In a Fog
by
Dick Prosapio
© 2002
She left the same way she came back, her clothes
stuffed into black garbage bags. The look on her face was different
this time though. When our run-away daughter came home, a year and a
half ago, she look scared and a little relieved. Scared of my, and
ultimately, our reception to her coming back into the family after a
year of no contact and one aborted "rescue" attempt. (We had gotten
the word through her girlfriends that she couldn't get out of her
situation with her gangster boyfriend. We sent police on a look-see.
She didn't want to leave.) Relieved, as it turned out, to be able to
eat real food again and to not be living day-to-day expecting a
narcotics bust.
Her look this time was sadness mixed with disbelief.
Sadness at the parting of course, disbelief that we had finally stood
our ground and said, "This far and no farther."
I've never lived with an addict before. I had a one
year relationship with an alcoholic, but at that time I had no clue
about what was going on. I just knew that I felt crazy a lot of the
time not knowing how any given evening or dinner party would turn out.
And always being surprised. Never pleasantly.
If you don't know what it's like living with someone
who is drinking and/or drugging I don't recommend exploring it. With
our kid addiction came complete with a set of behaviors which always
accompanied her drug use. In fact, before we had a clue that she was
using again for a fact, our suspicions were aroused by the slow and
inexorable onset of the same behaviors we had seen before. The only
reason the alarm didn't go off was that it was all so subtle and
easily overlooked. Ultimately, she had to hit us over the head with it
and come home so wasted, and this is exactly the right descriptive
word to use, that she couldn't wake up for work and slept eleven hours
to get out of the stupor she had put herself into.
The funny thing is, a lot of the response we still
get from friends and relatives when we tell our tale sounds like,
"It's just pot?" If we substitute booze for our descriptions of her
use, then they can relate. But "just" pot? No problem.
Never mind the stuff of the addiction, it's all the
baggage that comes with it that is the core of the thing. And there's
this to consider; when whatever is being used to alter consciousness
takes precedence over all other things in the users life, that's a
problem. For our daughter, using "just pot" was more important than
being with us. It was that, plus the dealing, the driving under the
influence, which she does not do well, the nodding off, the sleeping
for long hours, the broken promises, the incessant lying, the general
chaos her life was becoming.it was all of it.
On the day I am writing this our hill top home is in
the middle of a cloud, a literal cloud. We are blanketed in a gray,
drizzly fog. It is a perfect outpicturing of our internal landscape.
The only relief we feel is that we will not have to plan any more
involved strategies to deal with what our daughter will be presenting
us with tonight. We will not be using all our awake time and lost
sleep time figuring out what is true and not true, which, in an
addicts case is mostly the latter.
And the sun will come out tomorrow.
