Addict In The Family by Beverly Conyers

Author:Beverly Conyers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

THE ELUSIVE CURE

Missy, a divorced mother of two teenage girls, was engaged to a landscaper’s assistant who played guitar in a local band most Friday and Saturday nights. She had met him at a club and was immediately attracted to his blond good looks. Early in the relationship, he had admitted to an on-and-off drug problem. After living with him for three months, she realized the problem was mostly on and that the drug was heroin.

“I felt physically sick when I found out,” she told me. “I mean, you hear all these stories about junkies, about how they’d kill their own mother for a fix, and here I’d brought this man into my house and made him a part of my family. At first I wanted to break it off, to end it right there. But I realized he was the same person I’d fallen in love with, except he had this big problem. I thought that maybe I could help him, that with my love and support he could get better.”

Missy tried to take charge of her fiancé’s behavior. She got him to check into a rehab hospital for thirty days, and when he came home, she began to monitor his actions. She was afraid to let him out of her sight. When he did go out, she wanted to know where he was going, whom he was with, and when he’d be home. While he was gone, she went through his personal belongings, checking for hidden drugs. After only a week, she found a syringe. When she confronted him, he became angry. He said the syringe had been there a long time and that she had no right to go through his things. Worse, he said her hounding was making him crave drugs.

Missy tried to back off, but her suspicions ate away at her. Before long, she found herself following him around. Once, when he was parked in front of an apartment house where she suspected he bought drugs, she blocked his car with her own and waited for him to come out. He was furious when he saw her outside. They had a loud and prolonged argument in the street. “I must have looked like a crazy person,” she said, blushing at the memory. “In a way I was. I was out of my mind. I thought that if I screamed, nagged, or threatened him enough he’d get clean. It didn’t work.”

In a way Missy was fortunate. She soon grew tired of her fiancé’s increasingly irresponsible behavior and broke off the relationship. It is usually much harder for parents and other close family members to shut the addict out of their lives. Instead, when confronted with addiction, families are often drawn into painful, lengthy, and costly attempts to help the addict get better.

“We could have bought New York with the money we spent on our daughter,” declared Elaine, a schoolteacher whose husband owned a thriving real estate business. I met with her in her home, where a collage of photographs of her daughter at various ages hung on a wall in the living room.

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