Once Upon a Time...

I fear that part of the struggles that I'm having in embracing recovery is because I'm still fighting to preserve who I think that I've always been. I recently told this to my sponsor. I get discouraged when it seems that others accept things more easily than I accept them and, therefore, they make better progress.

It's hard to think that I have to lay everything down in order to pick up a twelve-step way of life. I'm not even sure that it's a way of life that I really want. To be perfectly honest, if I were to be given a choice, I'd probably choose to have my old life back (or something like my old life and without the pills, of course). It wasn't a perfect life and it was painful in various ways. Still, I had hope that if I held out and continued to do what I thought that God was having me do, it was going to improve.

If only I could just not feel the need to pick up the pills anymore, or anything else as a substitute.

I admit that I get confused, especially when my mood changes. Maybe I'm just looking not to be an addict anymore. Maybe that's what I'm missing most from my old life. I had thought that almost all the guilt and shame of discovering that I'm an addict had left. Then, I had a mini-meltdown in the middle of the night last week. The guilt and shame of having robbed my family of the Christin they have always known, hit me hard.

Once upon a time, my sons and my husband could count on me to be the steady, reliable one on whom they could depend, no matter what. If they needed clarity or advice based on right-thinking, they knew to come to me. I was never one who reacted to situations. When I acted it was in response to what I knew to be moral and right.

Once upon a time, I was the only one out of my father's six children, whom he "didn't need to worry about." It's been a long time since my teenage years and my early twenties when I had some trouble. My father was aware of my drinking, but coming from a family of hard-core alcoholics, I still was considered little less than a tea totaler. He knew nothing of my substance abuse which, due to limited supply, never got out of control. All my father has known for the past twenty years is a woman who attends church faithfully, who has brought up her children in a disciplined and well-kept home, who served as den mother for cub scouts , religion teacher on Sundays, and secretary who seldom missed a day of work.

Unlike my father's eldest daughter, I was the daughter who respected her parents regardless of their flaws. I became a parent myself, which was instrumental in teaching me to accept and to forgive my parents for their neglect, understanding just how much they DID give considering how little they had received while growing.

Once upon a time, when my mother needed a caretaker for the last nine months of her life, she never feared that she would be put in a nursing home. I learned to give her insulin shots, to hook up the dialysis machine every night, and to perform wound care on a non-healing amputation which, making her wheelchair bound, made her unable to bathe normally, if her weak heart would have allowed for that.

Unlike my brothers, who are busy with monetary and career pursuits, I was always the one who looked to please others and to do for them whatever I could. Unlike my two younger sisters who have been wild in their lifestyles and who have not remained with the fathers of any of their children, I could be counted on to be married to the same man anniversary after anniversary, even though the marriage was one that often felt as though it were on the brink of divorce.

My life has turned upside down. Now, I'm the daughter who "of all (my father's) children is the one who (he) least would have expected to be a drug addict." My husband, who often acts more like my fourth kid than a partner in parenting, is put in the position of consoling me when I'm sobbing because I'm afraid that I'm losing my mind or when I can't sit still because the obsession won't leave me. Now, my youngest son, who deserves the best mother possible (after all, his two older brothers didn't have a druggie for a mom) feels that he needs to check up on his mother to see if she's feeling okay today and becomes concerned when I take a pill, unless I first tell him its purpose.

Forever gone, I'm afraid, are the things that used to define my life. Now, I look at me and I see (what I'm certain everyone else sees) a person flawed beyond repair. The blemish of addiction has marred my life so badly that I doubt that there is any hope of going back to what was my life once upon a time.