As I’ve spent the last year-plus writing a book about the opiate abuse epidemic in America, I’ve come across some remarkable people in times of frightening stress.
Along the way I encountered one of the most poignant pages on FB. It’s called The Addict’s Mom, run by Barbara Theodosiou, a Florida PR consultant and mother of two addicts, one in recovery and one in jail. She set up the site a few years ago feeling that no one could understand her but another mother of an addict.
The site now has 12,000 members. They are American mothers who write in the rawest, most honest terms about the arguments, jail, kids who lie and steal from grandparents, prison, their children homeless, raising their children’s children, mortgaging all they own to send their kids to $40,000 rehabs, the joy of seeing a child 200 days clean, and the terror of the late-night phone call, or policeman’s knock on the door.
I hope to be quoting some of these posts, without names, simply because they, like poetry, evoke stories you can imagine in full. (Note: AS=Addicted Son.) Here’s one that I’ve broken out from the original prose into verse:
I have found myself planning my AS’s funeral in my mind.
Recently I have even found myself praying for God to at least take one of us because the pain is just too much.
And then I step back and ask myself what kind of mother could pray for death for one of her own children !?!
I feel horrible even putting these words on paper but i just need to let it out.
I am tired of fighting this fight.
I am tired of seeing my only son destroy himself.
I am tired of all the arguments with him.
I am tired of living with fear of getting that ‘phone call’.
I just don’t know how much longer he can survive at the rate he is using .
