My name is Jean and my son was addicted to pills for over 4 years. My husband and I never dreamed that we would have to deal with a drug addict in our family, but we did and somehow, we survived – we all survived. Michael has been in recovery for over 5 years.
We thought we were doing everything right- good school, church, good friends, activities like baseball and soccer that my husband helped coach, volunteering in school. Sometimes despite doing everything ârightâ, things turn out wrong.
In high school, Michael played JV soccer with friends he had been playing with for years- good kids â good families. And yet, it was with those kids that Michael started smoking pot â on weekends at first â but then more frequently in junior and senior year. Michael stopped playing soccer when it seemed the pressure to perform started stressing him. We noticed Michael becoming less happy, less enthusiastic about things. His grades dropped a bit but not enough to cause alarm. We realize now we were seeing some of the effects of smoking pot on a regular basis.
After about a year of college, Michael came to us and said he was addicted to pain pills. A friend offered them to him earlier in the year and he was now addicted. To say we were stunned is an understatement â how in the world did we not know? But it sure did explain a lot of the behavior we noticed â no interest in school, lots of time alone, sulkiness, no interest in family and new friends we did not know.
As much as he said he wanted to stop and was asking for help, he did not take us up on our offer to find a rehab facility so he could stop. He said he could stop on his own. We believed him. We were as naĂŻve as he was. He did not get help and neither did we. It took us years to seek help.
For the next 4 years, my husband and I tried to figure out what was going on. We kept asking ourselves what we might have done â or not done â to cause Michael to turn to drugs. We really thought it was our fault. Only after a whole lot of counseling did we realize it was not our fault.
We lost our son to drug addiction. He became a different person. Underneath the drug addiction, he was still a good person; thoughtful and kind and gentle. He loved his family but being an addict tosses all that aside. Those good qualities get buried under the need to be high and find ways to get money to buy that âhighâ.
Early on in this journey, I began noticing money disappear from our checking account. Twenty-dollar withdrawals would pop up in my statement and I would rack my brain to figure out how that happened! Did I forget to write that down? Did my husband Mike take money and not tell me? I finally called the bank one day and asked them about a withdrawal figuring my card had been hacked. The lady was very sympathetic when, after she described where and when the money had been withdrawn, I realized it was Michael, my son, who withdrew the money at 11:30 the night before. She just said âIâm sorry maâamâ. I was beyond devastated. My son had stolen money from me! I cried the entire way to work and when I got there, my friends could see how upset I was. I told them what happened. Brenda took me in her arms and just hugged me. She did not say anything, she just hugged me. (I learned much later that she was going through the same thing with her daughter)
Even after that incident, we did not learn. We read him the riot act of course, but for years we continued to leave purses and wallets out in plain sight. He took money from them when we were sleeping or not around. We kept cash in a âsafeâ in our bedroom closet but we left the key in the lock. Michael found it and took over $3000. I went to put something in the safe one day and found the money was gone. I thought I had lost it somehow! (really- how do you not remember doing something with $3000). I was terrified to tell my husband and tried to replace it myself.  We still had so much to learnâŠ
Over the course of his addiction, Michael stole gold coins, savings bonds, a diamond ring and thousands of dollars of cash from us. It is unthinkable that your own son could do this, but he did. He took money from friendâs parents â even went in their medicine cabinets and took pills from them. There was no limit to what he would do to get his hands-on pills.
Michael had what we thought was an unusual relationship with his friendâs mother. Pam was having health issues â going through cancer treatments and surgeriesâ and Michael always seemed to be babysitting her kids or driving her to Baltimore for medical appointments. We were naĂŻve enough to think Michael was being helpful in her time of need. Turns out he was getting a lot of his supply of pills from her. Pam would call her doctors for refills and give many of the pills to Michael to use or sell. Michael started dealing to get more money after we finally started keeping our wallets in bed with us when we slept.
It got to the point where we would dread a phone call from Michael. We just know it would be bad news â something happened or he needed money. At first, we thought a request for $20 for gas was just that. After we learned how addicted he was we knew $20 was for a pill. It took us a long time before we realized we could not just hand him cash. Cash turned into a pill. We were enabling his habit by providing easy access to cash.
We sent him to counseling. Got him on medication for depression. We tried to do what we thought was right and help get him back on track. We would randomly test him at home for drugs. (he kept âcleanâ urine under the sink.) Of course, nothing worked because he was not ready to stop. We did not think to get help for ourselves to learn how to deal with addiction. We kept things inside and didnât share what we were going through. It was incredibly stressful on our marriage. Mike and I had differing views on how to deal with the situation. The household was tense and we sometimes avoided each other to avoid arguing about Michael.
Michael had several run-ins with the police and each time we would hire a lawyer to represent him in court. Each time we hoped this would be his wake-up call and he would seek help. It never happened.
Mike received a phone call one night from the police â there was an arrest warrant for Michael â charge was breaking and entering and theft. He actually broke into Pamâs house and her husband came home to find Michael and his girlfriend in his basement watching TV. Many items were missing â TV, expensive sneakers and such. Since we lived in a âgoodâ neighborhood, the police did not want to come to the house and make a scene so he asked for Michael to turn himself in. Mike went with Michael the next day and he was arrested. By now we were getting pretty fed up with everything and we decided not to post bond right away. Michael spent the night in jail. But we did hire the lawyer againâŠand it still was not the wake-up call we were hoping for.
One day I had had enough after I found yet another withdrawal from the checking account. I left work and drove home to find Michael there. I confronted him about the withdrawal â about stealing money from us yet again. He was agitated and we argued. I hit him; slapped his face. He went to the kitchen and opened the pill bottle of medication and swallowed a bunch before I could stop him. It was a halfhearted attempt at suicide but still an attempt. I called (husband) Mike and we took him to the emergency room where he had to stay 24 hours for observation. It was very difficult, but we convinced him to sign into the psych unit for a few days. Our rehab journey had begunâŠ
Michael had actually been in several outpatient programs before the suicide attempt, (part of his sentence from previous run ins with the legal system) but the one he had just been in refused to take him back. Â Another facility agreed to take him even though the program was mainly for teenagers. Michael was a bit older- 21 or 22 by this time, but they took him anyway. After a few weeks of outpatient rehab, they recommended Michael go to a 28-day inpatient facility and he actually agreed to go. It may have been the fact that we literally threw him out of our house for a week during this time. We could no longer trust him to be living under our roof so one day I put some of his stuff in a bag and told him to leave. We lived in an active adult community at the time. I found him sleeping in his car in the parking lot when I went to work the next morning and told him to leave. He could not stay there. I am not sure where he was all week. He would call and rant and yell and cry and say he needed help. I knew he was high and I could do nothing, so I hung up the phone. I could not listen to him. It was one of the most painful weeks of our lives.
Michael stayed in that rehab over Thanksgiving and came home âcleanâ. We celebrated â it seemed we had our son back. It lasted for maybe 3 months before he relapsed. We have since learned that you canât go back to your âhome placeâ after rehab. Your drug contacts are still there and it is too easy to fall back into old habits. It did not help that his girlfriend and most of his friends were addicts. We did not know that at the time. We were still learning but finally began to understand addiction through counseling and attending family support groups. We also started talking openly with friends about our troubles and came to find a good deal of support and understanding with them.
By this time, we had sold our house and were building a house here in Garrett County. We planned on moving here full time and we told Michael he was not invited. Michael was about 23 at this time and we decided that we could not be responsible for him anymore. We decided it was time to take care of ourselves.
Around the same time, one of Michaelâs high school buddies called him. This friend was also an addict and told Michael about a counseling group that would help him find a rehab facility when he was ready. By some miracle, it looked like Michael was ready and he made the phone call. He scheduled himself to go to a facility in Trenton, New Jersey in August 2012. The night before he was admitted, he went on a binge â he was so high and agitated his girlfriend called the police. Luckily, they did not charge him and I was able to drive him to NJ the next day.
Michael does not remember the first week or so of rehab and it was 3 weeks before we heard from him. At that time, it did not seem to us like he was making any progress. It took another week or so before he really started making some progress toward recovery. They kept him there for almost 8 weeks. A twenty-eight-day program is not enough time for rehab.
When I picked him up, he was a changed man. He chatted all the way home â I had never heard him talk so much! We visited friends in the old neighborhood and he apologized for the hurt he caused them. Â We came out to our new home in Garrett County and 3 days later, I drove him to Pittsburgh to catch a plane to Colorado. He was moving there to live in a sober house. He could not go back to where he grew up and became addicted. That was over 5 years ago. He lives in California now, has a job he loves and a girlfriend he hopes to marry soon.
My sonâs addiction taught me that sometimes, love is not enough. As much as we love our son, it was not enough for him to stop using drugs. It hurt so much to realize there was nothing we could do or say to make him stop. It hurt so much to make the decisions we had to make â face jail time, throw him out of the house, refuse his phone calls. It was agonizing to see him hurt himself. You want to protect your kids and heal their pain but sometimes you just canât. At some point, they have to do that themselves and you just have to stand there and hope they will figure it all out before it kills them. We were lucky.
I want to leave you with something I found on the internet- I donât know who to give credit to but it describes pretty closely what our lives were like during Michaelâs addiction years-
If you are lucky enough to NOT understand addiction, then good for you. I hope you never have to.
I hope you never see someone you love disappear before your eyes, while standing right in front of you. I hope you never have to lie awake all night praying the phone doesnât ring, yet hoping it does at the same time. I hope you never know the feeling of doing everything you thought was right and still watch everything go wrong. I hope you never LOVE an addict.
