blacksheep77

Hello, I'm new here. In fact this is my first post.
Last night I spent many hours trying to find a support system to deal with my two addict family members, because up until this point I've been trying to cope with only my husband to confide to; he is wonderful, but has no experience with addiction and is sometimes just as clueless as I am.

Both my mother and sister are addicts. Because of their lies and deception, I am constantly second-guessing and doubting my own perception. I feel so much guilt and shame associated with my relationship with both of them. Maybe I'm not there for them enough. Maybe I'm being too harsh. Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions. Maybe I just need to have more empathy for what my sister's going through. But I'm getting ahead of myself, so I'd better explain what's going on.

My mother has been an addict for as long as I can remember. She'd been hooked on painkillers since her early '20s and had me a few years later. I remember, for the first four years of my life, feeling pretty secure and stable in a clean, orderly house with a mother who was always there for me. We moved when I was five, and things abruptly changed when she had a hysterectomy. She began spending days at a time in bed, she cried a lot more, and I wondered what made mom so tired that she'd nod off at the dinner table. My dad ended up in jail because she had forged a prescription and sent him to pick it up. He ended up taking the fall for her addiction.
Chaos and disorder became an ever-increasing presence in my life throughout my elementary school years. When I was five, my mom and I were kidnapped by one of her dealers, and we drove around town with a gun pointed to her ribs as he forced her to make several bank transactions. It lasted for hours, and finally we were let go.

My parents divorced when I was eleven, which made life even worse. During the divorce, we were told how despicable our dad was, and how selfish he was for spending all his money on expensive cologne while we wore old, out- of-date clothing. She'd constantly remind us of the spankings and the awful things he'd say to us when he'd come home from work. While it is true that he had a terrible temper and was rather emotionally/physically abusive toward us, It seemed important to her that we remembered how much we were victimized by Dad.

After the divorce, my mom completed her LPN degree, but wasn't able to pursue her R.N. because she claimed that my Dad wrote a letter to the college, stating that she had a drug-addiction. She was kicked out of the program for drugs. She began working 12-hr. shifts in nursing homes, and in my teens I'd find bags of morphine and needles hidden in various places thoroughout the house. When she was home from work, she was either at a club, bringing home a new guy to sleep with, or sleeping. Rarely did we actually spend any time with her.

When I was 18 she began working home-health, and the bags of morphine were no longer as accessible. She needed a new source. So she began creating illnesses or using past car accidents as reasons for hustling pain-killers from her doctors. Then she was in an actual car accident later on that year, which left her bedridden with a severely fractured pelvis and collarbone. That meant more opiates.

Her pelvis was never the same, and she was left with chronic pain. She spent all her time trying to find pain relief, but her docs became wary of her and stopped prescribing enough Tylenol 3s to support her habit. She'd need a new RX every other day.

When in withdrawal (Which, again, happened every couple of days or so), she'd become suicidal. Between the time I was 13 until the time I moved out at 21, I had wrestled a fishing knife from her hand so she wouldn't slit her wrists, attempted to take a gun from her which the police finally succeeded in doing, and had been a passenger in the car she was trying to roll so she'd kill both her and us, thus 'ending her misery' from drug withdrawal. The car incidents would happen so frequently, I couldn't keep track.

Back to my late teens. While my mom was so wrapped up in her own addiction, my sister, J. became involved in an extremely abusive relationship, one which affected all of us. She met him when she was 15 and I was 17, and he was addicted to pot and meth, which she also began using for at least a short period of time because she couldn't cope with all the times he'd call her a dirty piece-of-****, a *****, and either confine her to their room or sit on her chest so she couldn't scream as he'd hit her.

I became pregnant with my first child, a girl, when I was 17. My sister and her boyfriend lived in the basement. I had a suicidal, crazy mom in withdrawal begging me to help her die in one room and a sister who was being verbally abused and beaten in the basement, at least 75 percent of the time. Life was hell. When my baby was 6 mos. old, my sister's boyfriend and future BIL was coming down from crystal meth and had a very violent episode in which he held all of us hostage inside our home with a hammer. He said he'd bludgeon my mom to death if any of us tried to leave and call the police.

What's so sick about this whole thing is that when I finally had him put in jail and he was released, he was able to make me feel like a heartless, awful person for turning him in. And my sister, who had been my best friend and the only source of love and relative security for so many years, began to believe that the rest of her family were 'out to get them'. During the abuse, my sister relentlessly and unconditionally defended her abuser, and he was allowed to continue living in our house, eating our food and beating my sister while we all felt sorry for poor Jerry.

My sister started abusing opiate painkillers during her relationship with Jerry, but noone noticed. We didn't notice, even though family heirlooms were disappearing, she was losing weight and becoming increasingly withdrawn, and she was beginning to show symptoms of withdrawal not unlike what my mom was experiencing.

In 1997, when I was 19, my mom finally joined a methadone clinic. She's been on methadone ever since. The good news about this is, she doesn't go through withdrawal and is relatively emotionally stable. The bad news is that she has never come to terms with her own addiction. She doesn't think she's an addict in the traditional sense of the word. She is resigned to be on methadone for the rest of her life. And she's left me feeling terrible confused because on one hand, her behavior is still very unhealthy but on the other hand, she's in chronic pain and seems to 'need' it.

She's now paying for my sister's heroin. My sister left Jerry but now has HIV from using tainted needles. She's dying, and because my mom hates to see her daughter in any kind of pain she's paying for the poison out-of-pocket.

She feels morally justified in lying to cover for my sister, for helping her score the drugs, because J. is in pain from her HIV and the unsympathetic docs won't give her anything for it. They're special, both of them. Everyone else is a junkie, but they need the drugs. And again, there have been times when I think 'maybe they're right and I'm being close-minded'.

There's so much more to write but this post is already so long. That's my unedited story, though.