Tag: children

Their First Day of School Was My Last Day of Drinking

That day was the last time I bought into the lies that one drink will somehow not send me on that downward spiral to insanity and destruction of everything I love and care about.

The kids were still sleeping when I woke up early just to start drinking. The wine was hidden in its usual spot, my closet, and I stood in there at 6 a.m. to choke down whatever I had left. Not because I wanted to, but at that point in my alcoholism my poor body depended on those swigs simply to function normally. I downed enough to stop the shakes, the sick feeling creeping all over my body, the ringing in my ears. Today was the first day of school and a big one at that. My youngest was starting kindergarten.

Spenser

He and I had quite a history. I was standing at a nurse’s station in a detox center when I found out I was pregnant with him. I had no idea. And now here we were, my baby with his little backpack, the youngest of four kids, heading to his first day of school. What the hell have I been doing all this time? The grip of addiction was still strangling me and all I could hope was that I’d get better sometime soon. I was so tired.

The Secret

I took a quick shower, skipping out on washing my hair. I didn’t have the time or the energy to fix it today. After I got dressed, my husband was already in the kitchen. Coffee was brewing, and silence filled the room. He knew about the closet, knew what I had done. I had looked into those broken eyes countless times, and this morning’s overwhelming feelings of self disgust were the same as all the times before. Graciously he hugged me without saying a word. And we stood there holding each other, like soldiers witnessing a gruesome battle, carrying on a conversation without uttering a single word until I finally let go to wake up the other kids.

“I’ll start putting your bags in the car,” he said.

“Okay.”

And the sad secret being kept from the kids remained intact.

Shelby

It was her senior year of high school. My first-born baby girl had seen it all, from happy times in sobriety to life with a mom in rehab for the sixth time. Shelby was done with hearing apologies, but old enough by now to know I didn’t want to drink. She knew I tried, but she wanted her mother. I had one more year before she was gone and I felt every tick of the clock counting down as I wasted yet another day stuck in the fear and shame of it all. How many times had I failed her, and what if I did it again? She’d get her own ride to school, she’d hear the news, but would she forgive me one more time?

Rebecca

She had woken herself up for her first day of fifth grade, her last year in elementary school. I couldn’t help but think back to preschool days, her bright blonde hair and toothy grin. But like many memories, flashes of alcoholic moments clouded over the good times and I forced myself to think about something else. She was only four years old when she watched me get handcuffed out of the car and led away for my first DUI. I desperately needed to make new memories, not just for her but for me, too. All of my thoughts were killing me.

Stella

Since Spenser had snuck into our bed the night before, I only had one child left to wake up. Stella was still sleeping. She’d been waiting for this day — the beginning of third grade — for two weeks, excited to get back and see her friends again. I sat on the edge of her bottom bunk, reaching for her wavy brown hair. She rolled over and stretched, asking if it was morning. I realized this was it. I wouldn’t be back here for a while, wouldn’t be tucking her in tonight. Desperately wishing I could push rewind for the hundredth time, I just stood up and headed downstairs, feeling sad and scared and awful.

Eventually the backpacks we ready and the lunches packed. I took one last look around my house, swallowing the waves of tears ready to spill out of my eyes and ruin the picture of normalcy I was trying to paint for my kids. We got in the car, my husband driving, and headed to the school a couple blocks away.

A Long Good-bye

“Focus on the kids,” is what I kept telling myself. “God, just get me through this without crying.”

Hallway after hallway, at every turn was a flood of smiling parents with their best-dressed kids. The excitement was bubbling around me like Christmas morning. I, however, was in a private hell. Physically already feeling the effects of my maintenance wine consumption wearing off, I was dizzy, fluctuating between hot and cold. I thought I looked different than every other mom, so I kept my head down with a fake smile plastered on my face. I was an outsider, uncomfortable and out of place. We went room by room, starting at fifth grade, then third, and finally kindergarten. Each time I walked my precious child in and hugged and kissed them, holding back everything I wanted to say but couldn’t. I left parts of my heart, then grabbed my husband’s hand as we forced our way through crowds and out the door so I could breathe again.

At 3 o’clock, school would get out, but I’d be gone. My kids wouldn’t see me again until weeks later during visitation day at my seventh treatment center for drug and alcohol addiction. My bed had been reserved since the previous Friday. I’d begged both my husband and the rehab facility to let me wait so that I could do what I just described: take my kids to school for their first day of school, walk Spenser to his first day of kindergarten.

A Grateful Last Day

That was August 22, 2016 and I haven’t picked up a drink since that morning. There was no hard bottom circumstance like other times I tried to quit, just sick and tired of being sick and tired. I couldn’t do it anymore. I knew what was left for me: death. I’d been carrying it around with me for months like a dark cloud, convinced the impending death wouldn’t be easy enough to be mine. More than likely it would be one of these precious kids because I always found a reason to drive after I drank.

But that was the last time my body needed alcohol pumping through my bloodstream just to operate normally. It was the last time I needed to sneak away and find my liquid problem solver and stress reliever, my life-buffer that told me I needed a drink to cope. And it was the last time I bought into the lies that one drink will somehow not send me on that downward spiral to insanity and destruction of everything I love and care about.

First day, last day, same day. Sometimes a thousand failures lead up to that one success, but that one is all you ever needed. True freedom is accepting it happened the way it was supposed to; taking what you have and making a purpose out of it. I was tired of being sick, and sick of being beaten down by this disease. Sick of always having shame take me out, sick of drinking to escape the self-hatred of not being able to stop drinking.

In sobriety, our last day is our first. Sometimes we show up in hallways of institutions and sometimes in closed rooms, feeling uncomfortable and out of place. But once we lift our heads and open our minds, hope comes sneaking in. It’s that moment where recovery is possible — for anyone, even a mother like me.

View the original article at thefix.com

25 January 2019
How Pregnant Women with Substance Use Disorder Are Criminalized

“The more we double down on the idea that pregnant women who struggle with addiction are terrible people and terrible mothers, the easier it becomes for… everyone else to treat them terribly.”

Pregnant women in at least 45 states have faced criminal charges for abusing drugs while pregnant, stemming from the idea that they are doing harm to their unborn babies, according to a New York Times investigation.

Many addiction and recovery professionals, including Dr. Sarah Wakeman, who directs the substance use program at Massachusetts General, say that criminal charges result from and contribute to the stigma around addiction and the idea that substance use disorder is a moral failing or choice rather than a complex medical issue.

“The more we double down on the idea that pregnant women who struggle with addiction are terrible people and terrible mothers, the easier it becomes for doctors, social workers, judges and everyone else to treat them terribly,” Wakeman told the Times, which reported on the issue as part of a series about the rights of pregnant women. “When we criminalize women, we make them scapegoats for all of these large structural forces and societal failures that create poverty and give rise to addiction in the first place.”

At Massachusetts General, the Hope Clinic provides treatment and parenting support for pregnant women and mothers with substance use disorder. By helping women rather than criminalizing them, both mother and child fair better, Wakeman said.

In Tennessee, a law was passed two years ago that could force pregnant women with substance use disorder into jail, essentially claiming they need protective custody. However, the law backfired, resulting in women giving birth in risky situations or leaving the state, said University of Tennessee College of Law professor Wendy Bach. Now, the law is not being renewed.

“We started out saying we would curb drug use and promote treatment and care. We ended up deterring people from treatment while doing basically nothing to curb use,” she said.

Even when substance use doesn’t result in criminal charges, it can cause children to be taken from their families. Kasey Dischman, of Pennsylvania, got sober when she was pregnant with her first child. She maintained her recovery for years, until her daughter was eight and Dischman reconnected with the girl’s father.

Dischman said, “It was like we didn’t know how to be sober together.”

Dischman relapsed. She became pregnant again and accidentally overdosed, resulting in an emergency cesarean delivery for her second daughter.

She said that in the moment when she injected heroin, the pull of addiction was stronger than her concern for her daughters — something she believes shows the power of the illness.

“It’s almost like I forgot about them. I know that’s awful, and that people think I don’t have a conscience,” she said. “But that’s exactly what addiction is. Once it enters your head to do that shot, you develop this tunnel vision that nothing can break.”

Today, Dischman is sober but still facing a complex legal battle in hopes of regaining custody of her daughters, all while feeling like the system is set up against her.

“They don’t want me to recover from this,” she said. “Because if I do, if I make it through and I do all right, then what does that say about them, and about how they trashed me?”

Barry Lester, who specializes in opioid addiction as a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at Brown University, said that the treatment of women like Dischman is short-sighted and hurtful.

“We love to hate these women,” he said. “But our hatred is not accomplishing anything.”

View the original article at thefix.com

16 January 2019
"I Wish Daddy Didn't Drink So Much": Judith Vigna’s Misguided Bibliotherapy

Vigna seems convinced that a few watercolor washes can make the world a better place, but her idealism is misguided; stories of the horrible undercurrent of the real world are more likely to scare children.

Although the following review is not positive, I empathize with what Judith Vigna tried to accomplish. In the late 1980’s, she took on a topic that few writers of children’s books would choose to address: how to explain family difficulties brought on by alcoholism and addiction. Beyond the intimate connection of a parent or trusted family member talking directly to a child, raising this issue on a public platform is like walking through a minefield. It’s so easy to make a single misstep that blows the project straight to heck. Not to hell, mind you, we’re talking about children’s books.

I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much (1988) and My Big Sister Takes Drugs (1990) were published by Albert Whitman & Company as fictional self-help stories to educate kids about alcoholism and substance use disorder. With these books, Vigna invents a kind of misguided bibliotherapy designed for children in preschool to grade 3. The books do a belly flop, and it’s hard to imagine that either would successfully educate or console a young child, although that is their goal. Moreover, both books are culturally biased since they focus on white characters in either suburban America or a strange rural environment where isolated houses exist in the middle of nowhere for no good reason.

Is such grim reality needed in children’s picture books? In the context of both of these efforts, there is a sense that something precious has been hijacked to accomplish a worthy educational goal. Children’s storybooks and picture books are a beloved part of childhood, combining the visual imagination with language. The innocence of the genre is a key element to the lasting success of so many outstanding children’s books from Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are and Dr. Seuss’s The Cat In The Hat to Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree and Margaret Wise’s Goodnight Moon.

Although each of these stories teaches a life lesson about good behavior and decency, they don’t cross the line by subverting the fantasy to morality. Indeed, the fantasy bolsters the moral message, taking it to the next level by presenting the ideas in an artistic context that provides access for a child. When I recall first reading books as a little boy, I remember the fun I experienced and the thrill of turning the pages. In Judith Vigna’s stories, the fun is replaced by a dull melancholy ruptured here and there by a disturbing undercurrent of anxiety and fear. Even when hope is presented in the end and partial solutions proffered, the ugliness remains, like the father’s undeterred alcoholism in I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much.

The best example of this replacement happens in I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much, aimed at kids in pre-school to grade 2. The night before Christmas is disturbed when young Lisa’s drunken father stumbles into her bedroom dressed as Santa Claus. On the very first page of text in the book, Lisa explains that the costume did not fool her for a second. She says, “I knew it was only Daddy in a Santa Claus suit because he bumped into my bed twice and spilled beer on the rug. I didn’t like that. When Daddy drinks a lot of beer, he acts funny.”

In other words, even a child knows that Santa Claus doesn’t show up drunk. Still, Lisa is excited because her father is going to take her sledding the next day. Santa even leaves a note taped to her new sled that says her daddy promised him that they would go sledding and try out the present after breakfast. Unfortunately, Daddy is too hungover to go sledding. Lisa asks later in the day if they can go, but Dad is drinking beer while watching television, focused solely on the hair of the dog that bit him the night before.

Lisa’s father ignores her request, and she gets mad, telling him that he promised. The face of the little girl is drawn with such sadness and disappointment. Reacting to her feelings, her father lashes out and yells at Lisa. She ends up playing with her sled in the house, imagining that she’s in the clouds but feeling sad and scared.

Although there is no direct physical violence in the book, beyond loud fights between the mother and father, the threat looms. The bad times continue and culminate with an intoxicated failed attempt to go sledding. Later, Lisa mopes outside as her mother and father have a big screaming match inside the house with sounds of breaking glass.

The story ends when Lisa and her mother escape her father’s drunken anger by going over to Mrs. Field’s house. They have a nice Christmas dinner with this old lady, and Lisa opens up about how her father’s drinking destroyed Christmas. Mrs. Field tells Lisa that she used to drink too much before she got help. One day, her father might be ready to get help as well. Until then, she advises this little girl, “you can learn to be happier. You can try to do one of your favorite things every day.”

And that’s about it. There’s a closing bit where Lisa returns home and her father promises to take her sledding on Sunday. But nothing changes, and Lisa remains in a crappy situation with little learned and less relieved. Telling a child to do one of her favorite things every day as a response to alcoholism in the family is like telling a cancer patient to go to Disneyland every weekend. It profoundly fails to address the primary problem.

Vigna seems convinced that a few watercolor washes can make the world a better place, but her idealism is misguided; stories of the horrible undercurrent of the real world are more likely to scare children. Story time is not when the dark issues of humanity should be raised with children. Going out and doing a favorite thing is not an effective approach to dealing with an alcoholic parent.

In complex.com’s list of The 25 Most Ridiculous Holiday Children’s Books, Vigna’s book comes in at number one. It’s an impressive accomplishment because the competition is stiff, ranging from How Santa Lost His Pants and How Santa Lost His Job to Santa Cow Island and The Flying Canoe: A Christmas Story.

My Big Sister Takes Drugs is Judith Vigna’s second attempt at the bibliotherapy children’s picture book genre. Designed for Grades 2 through 3, a slightly older crowd from seven to nine years old, the book tells the story of little Paul who is dealing with the fact that his teenage sister, Tina, is using drugs. The drugs profoundly change Tina in a negative way. Rather than play games with Paul, she offers him prescription pills. Later, after being busted by the cops for smoking crack in the park with her delinquent friends, Tina is shipped off to rehab. Tina’s drug use causes Paul to lose friends because other parents don’t want their kids around his older sister. Also, once Tina goes to rehab, there is no money left to send him to soccer camp.

As part of a Vigna’s desperate drug education and awareness program, this dank children’s picture book only succeeds in stigmatizing substance use disorder. Okay, Tina has become a mean big sister and hangs out with mean kids. Paul feels threatened in his own home. However, these scare tactics of losing friends and opportunities because of drug usage are counterproductive to any real understanding of addiction as a disease in general and a family disease in particular.

The story is poorly told and not believable. For example, there is a weird section where Tina tries to get her brother high on New Year’s Eve, offering him prescription medication while she reclines on her bed. Paul declines and Tina calls him a chicken. When Paul inevitably tells his parents about the incident, Tina is grounded for a week.

Such a sequence makes little or no sense. Why would a teenage sister want to give her little brother drugs? Why would she be home on New Year’s Eve with her little brother and not out with her friends? Does Vigna understand drug culture and teens at all? Tina is way too open about what she is doing with both her parents and Paul. The generally secretive nature of adolescent drug use is replaced with typical adolescent rebellion, a replacement which does not do justice to the truly insidious nature of drug abuse and addiction. I wondered why Judith Vigna did not do more first-hand research before writing a book designed to educate children on such a crucial issue.

At the same time, at this very moment, I feel a bit guilty about being so hard on Judith Vigna. Although her idealism might be misdirected, it comes from a loving instinct to do good in the world and help other people. At the end of I Wish Daddy Didn’t Drink So Much, she includes A Note to Grown-ups. In this note, Vigna writes about the challenge of alcoholism as a family disease: “The children tend to blame themselves, and without adequate support, may feel ashamed, confused, and alone… Parents and other caring adults can help by reassuring children that they are not responsible for the drinking.”

But despite such good intentions, Vigna’s attempt to offer such reassurance and educate children about substance use disorder, a worthy and necessary goal, falls flat.

View the original article at thefix.com

26 July 2018