Answer Addiction

Tag: mother

  • How to Stay Sober Through a Parent's Illness

    How to Stay Sober Through a Parent's Illness

    I won’t lie, the urge to fix from the outside is constant. The helplessness is overwhelming, the grief indescribable.

    I think it was about a year a half ago when my mother became wheelchair-bound and was diagnosed with dementia. The two trips to visit her in Santa Fe were so stressful that my bestie, also a recovering addict, started vaping for the first time and she still hasn’t stopped. We had five days to clear out her apartment, find her a board and care, break her lease, put her stuff in storage, forward her mail, and much more. I cried most of that trip but it all got handled. 

    My life is different now. My mother can’t hear well and she’s confused. She can’t walk or use the computer anymore. People bathe her. She calls me multiple times a day about the same thing. On top of that, I was suddenly given power of attorney and appointed Social Security payee. I was in charge of all her bills, speaking to her nurse, speaking to her chaplain, and speaking to her social worker.

    Role Reversal

    If there’s one thing addicts don’t seek out, it’s responsibility. As an only child, I alone had to handle all of it. Sure I was sober, but mature? Hardly. 

    I recently had to sign a form to approve the use of Narcan should my mother overdose on her Oxycontin. When the nursing staff assistant tried to explain opiates and Narcan to me, I stopped her.

    “I’m …um…well-versed in Narcan. I’m an ex-junkie.”

    I heard her mutter an “Oh” followed by an uncomfortable silence.

    I’ve never had children for a sundry of reasons: my genes, my fertility, my financial situation, my shitty relationships. Suddenly I had a child and it was my mother. The role reversal was sudden and jarring and I recall rocking and crying and whimpering, “I don’t want this.” But it was all mine, like it or not.

    My relationship with my mother was always difficult. I was resentful for her physical absence during my childhood and her emotional absence always. But suddenly all that resentment melted away. Resentment is a luxury, I realized, and as her caretaker, there was no room for it anymore.

    Almost 50, with Zero Life Skills

    Having spent 30 years of my life mentally ill and struggling with addiction, having to “adult” suddenly felt premature and impossible. It was like coming out of a time warp. I was almost 50 but I had zero life skills: No idea how to pay taxes or when to rotate your tires or how to hold down a “real” job, let alone handle all my mother’s shit. Sure I had other life skills: making a crack bong out of a Mountain Dew bottle or how to hit a rolling vein or manipulating people into taking care of me. But these weren’t so helpful now.

    I was a grown woman but I still felt and honestly acted like a child most of the time. I still needed my mom but now she wasn’t available. I’d never felt like she “heard” me and now she really couldn’t hear me. I never felt she “understood” me and now she really couldn’t grasp what I was saying. I hate to use the “t” word but yeah it was triggering.

    We had grown closer during this sobriety but now, suddenly, she wasn’t somebody I could bring things to. She became somebody who brought things to me and they were all “emergency” needs: Afrin, salted nuts, Nars concealer. My mother had always been particular, snobby, and demanding. That didn’t change. I quickly accepted all of these things and began to lean much more heavily on my father.

    Gutted

    Then, about a week ago, my father was diagnosed with cancer. I was gutted. He and I are impossibly close; he is my mentor, my hero, my best friend.

    “You can’t go. You’re my person,” I wept pathetically into the phone. Everything good about me comes from him: my humor, my intelligence, my writing ability. And now he’s ill. Really ill. My first reaction, and I’m not proud of this at 6.5 years sober, was to kill myself or get loaded. My brain screamed “GET OUT.”

    We all have those things: if “this” happens, I’ll get loaded. My dad’s death was always that: my hold out, my exemption. When I told him that a few years ago he said, “Too fucking bad, Ames. It’s in my will if you get loaded, you get nothing.” Fuck.

    It’s all so selfish. Fuck his cancer, I’m hurting and I need to attend to that. Suddenly I was making it about me. I try not to cry on every phone call but am rarely successful. I feel weak and small. 

    I started to spiral, lumping all the bad on top of each other as we do: I’m single, I’m broke, I’m getting old. My parents are dying. But if I know one thing, it’s that a relapse would kill both of them faster than the diseases they were battling. It just isn’t an option.

    Still, every day I have the urge to escape my body, numb the pain, check out. Not because I don’t have a strong program or I’m not connected to my higher power or any of that bullshit, but because I’m an addict and we don’t like feelings and we get high to avoid them. Six and a half years of sobriety doesn’t negate a lifetime of drugs and suicide attempts as my top and most successful coping mechanisms.

    But if I’ve finally learned anything, it’s that it doesn’t matter what I feel like doing, it matters what I do. I can’t control my feelings or thoughts but I can control my actions.

    When I’m Not Crying, I’m Angry

    When I’m not crying, I’m angry. I’m so fucking angry. Fuck you, God. God never gives you more than you can handle?! Well this feels like more than I can handle. And fuck me. Fuck me for having been a complete wreck for most of my adult life.

    And then in between the tears and the rage, there’s numbness, where I feel nothing because it’s all just too much. I catch myself just staring into space, zoning out on the multitude of Pyrex dishes at Target. Not lost in thought, lost in nothingness. 

    I don’t think anything prepares you for the death of your parents. I don’t care how old you are or spiritually fit (insert eye roll). Sure, they’re in their 80’s; it’s bound to happen, it’s part of life, blah, blah, blah.

    But you still never think it will happen. And when it does, you are suddenly faced with an aloneness that is inconceivable, an unending void that will never be filled.

    I look back now at me mourning a break-up for over two years. What a fucking joke. You can get a new boyfriend. You can’t get a new mother or father. 

    How I’m Staying Clean

    I won’t lie, the urge to fix from the outside is constant. The helplessness is overwhelming, the grief indescribable. So how am I staying clean? Well, I started vaping again (judge away, fuckers). I’m talking to my sponsor every single day, I’m talking to my friends, I’m working with my sponsees. I’m crying. I’m trying to be kind to myself. I’m trying to be of service to my parents and process my grief elsewhere. I’m calling friends and asking for support. Sure I don’t always answer the phone, but don’t take it personally. Sometimes I’m just too shut down to talk. I sleep and nap, a lot. Depression or escape? Does it really matter? It beats the alternatives.

    When I asked other people in recovery how they made it through a parent’s illness and death, almost all of them said the same thing: They didn’t. They drank and used during the whole process to escape the pain and it was the biggest regret of their lives. Whether the parent had known or not was immaterial. They were haunted by the guilt they felt and if they could do it all over again, they’d stay sober, give their parent the gift of being completely present, and not run from the feelings. I can and will do that, as ungraceful as it might be. 

    I said to one of my sponsees: “You are about to witness a magic trick. You are about to watch your sponsor go through one of the most painful times ever and not get loaded.” I think I was telling myself as much as her.

    Have you had to deal with a parent’s illness or death in sobriety? How did you cope? Tell us in the comments.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Dear Daddy, Why Didn't You Protect Me?

    Dear Daddy, Why Didn't You Protect Me?

    Instead of worrying about being attacked by some random person on the street, I lived with my attacker 365 days a year.

    My stepmom couldn’t remember if he whipped out a knife or a pipe of a similar size, but she recalled the moment the perp appeared over her left shoulder. She was leaning against my dad’s car, parked in front of the apartment building he owned on George Street in Norristown, Pennsylvania. They were there that night cleaning up after the first-floor tenant who’d recently moved out after dodging his rent for months. My dad was still inside when my stepmom stepped out for a cigarette. That’s when she says she was attacked. But just as the man who appeared over her left shoulder was winding up to bash or stab her, my dad popped out from the darkness and swatted him away. The details at that point get fuzzy because as my stepmom recalled, she was in shock, her body trembling as she collapsed into my dad’s chest like a wet noodle.

    “Your father saved me,” she’d lament whenever she told the story. “He’s such a good man…such a good man.”

    My dad began dating my stepmom before my parents divorced when I was four years old. As part of my parents’ agreement, my two older brothers, practically residents at the local juvenile hall, stayed with my dad while I moved with my mom to East Falls, Philadelphia. With the three of us kids figuratively gone, my dad was free to court my stepmom, and he did so with fervor. Newly divorced herself, and emotionally impaired by her allegedly abusive ex-husband, my stepmom basked in my dad’s undivided attention and unsolicited protection. It was through her stories about my dad’s acts of chivalry — rescuing her when her car broke down in a blinding blizzard or refusing to let her enter her apartment before he inspected every room and closet — that greatly influenced my perception of my dad. As a little girl, my father was more than a good man; he was my superhero. Until I realized he wasn’t.

    The disparity between my dad’s willingness to protect my stepmom and his inability to express even the slightest concern over my wellbeing became painfully clear while I was living with my mom and the man who eventually became my stepdad. They were both alcoholics with ravenous appetites for violence and our home was a war zone. Instead of worrying about being attacked by some random person on the street, I lived with my attacker 365 days a year. I spent many school nights and weekends watching my stepdad choke my mom on the living room floor. I scrubbed her blood off the sofa when my stepdad split my mom’s lips open, and when she turned her rage in my direction, I dodged the knives she thrust at my back and hid the patches of hair she ripped off my head.

    Literally and figuratively, I wore the scars of an abused kid. But unlike the thick coat of protection my dad offered my stepmom, he couldn’t be bothered to do anything about the hell I was experiencing. And it wasn’t because he didn’t know. My mom and stepdad didn’t keep their lifestyle a secret; on many occasions, amid a drunken fit, my mom called my dad.

    “I’m gonna kill your fuckin’ daughter,” she threatened. There would be a short pause while my dad responded.

    “Come and get your little bitch,” my mom screamed into the receiver while looking right at me.

    “You hear that?” she said. “Your dad’s not comin’, he doesn’t fuckin’ want you.”

    Despite the many things my mom got wrong when she was drunk, she wasn’t lying about my dad. He only lived a quick 30-minute drive away, but she was right. He wasn’t coming.

    When I was eight years old, my mom effectively kicked me out of her house. Oddly, it was the idea of me being homeless and not my mom’s drunken threats to kill me that motivated my dad to act. And although I was relieved to be moving away from the chaos, living with my dad and stepmom became a nightmare of a different kind.

    Slowly I realized it wasn’t only boogeymen lurking in the dark or tales of abusive ex-husbands that my dad protected my stepmom from. He was also willing to shield her from me if she felt she needed it, no questions asked. Once at a family gathering, my stepmom grew increasingly annoyed when I wouldn’t get off the couch and play with the other children. At ten years old, I was painfully shy and didn’t know how to approach a group of kids I’d never met before. When I wouldn’t budge, my stepmom stormed out of the house and my dad and I followed. On the front lawn, she turned to me and said, “Great, now everyone is going to think you’re retarded.” As I started to cry, my dad wrapped his arms around my stepmom and looked away.

    To this day, my dad has yet to acknowledge the life I lived with my mom and stepdad. He never asked me what it was like to watch my stepdad bash my mom’s face into a mirror or how sick it made me feel to have to tell my stepdad I loved him when there wasn’t a cell in my body that did. No, he never once inquired, but on several occasions he brought up my stepmom’s childhood. He shared how her father died when she was young and how her mother was never around. And while my stepmom’s upbringing may have been less than ideal and could have affected her behavior in certain ways, I’ve never understood how my dad could compare my experience to hers. I don’t know how he could look me in the eyes and say, “You know, your stepmom had it bad too.”

    A few months before my 18th birthday, my dad was hit by a car. One of his hips was nearly shattered, and after being released from the hospital, he spent weeks laid up in bed. One night we got in an argument over something trivial. As our exchange escalated, my stepmom burst into the room, grabbed me from behind and shoved me towards the bedroom door. Although she had occasionally spanked me for misbehaving when I was younger, this was the first time she put her hands on me as an adult. As I regained my balance, I turned towards my stepmom and paused. Although my body was still, in my mind I’d already lurched forward and pinned her against the wall.

    What happened next snapped me out of my fantasy. Off to my left, I watched my dad, who’d been bedridden for weeks, thrust himself out of bed. Although he barely had the strength or the balance to stand, I knew if I caused any harm my dad would call the police and I’d be the one leaving in handcuffs. Given my lack of options, I did the only thing I had the power to do. I walked away. I knew who my dad would choose to protect and defend.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Deeper Cleaning: How I Came to Accept My Mother’s Hoarding Disorder

    Deeper Cleaning: How I Came to Accept My Mother’s Hoarding Disorder

    About 50% of all hoarders have blocked access to their fridge, bathtub, toilet and sinks. 78% have houses littered with what could be deemed garbage. My chances of finding a spot to sleep were next to nil.

    For the second time in my life I was saying goodbye to my mother and moving to California, and this could have been a very sentimental moment if it we hadn’t found it so damn funny. With all of my worldly possessions packed up into two great Jenga towers of luggage, Mom and I were doing our best to control the fits of laughter while maneuvering these teetering carts of death toward the terminal. It was the irony that had finally gotten to us. There we were—wrestling with this stuff that could at any second escape our control and come toppling down on top of us—when for the past two months we had been living through a very similar scenario; but one that had been nowhere near as funny.

    And one where my mother’s life had been quite seriously at risk.

    My mom suffers from a clinical hoarding disorder. According to a recent survey by the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI), about 5% of our entire planet’s population struggles with this condition typically characterized by the cluttering of a home with personal possessions to an often debilitating degree. A type of anxiety disorder, hoarding is still working its way into the medical books, but thanks to a steady stream of reality TV shows featuring the worst case scenarios of the condition, social awareness of hoarding has reached an all-time high.

    These were the shows that I YouTubed as I tried to better gauge the house that I had walked in on during a surprise visit to Mom’s. Compared to the episodes I watched, my mother and her hoard weren’t ready for primetime just yet—though at the rate she was going, next season was quickly becoming a strong possibility.

    Mom had turned her two bedroom, single level ranch style house of around 1,400 square feet into a storage unit, filling it up with everything from groceries on clearance to thrift store finds too good to let go. As toys, crafts, books, tools, plants, snacks, clothes, shoes, bags and boxes slowly rose to the ceiling, my mother’s home began to look like the bottom of an hourglass, only the sand was her stuff—and once filled up there’d be no easy reset.

    Once her cover was blown, so to speak, she felt the time had come to not only admit she had a serious problem but to finally accept some help dealing with it. And as fate would have it, Mom’s epiphany just happened to coincide with a major shift in my own life. After 15 years of working through my own addiction (drugs and alcohol) I was moving back to California, clean and sober. But, since there was a two-month gap between the lapse of my lease and the end of my teaching year, I just happened to need a place to live.

    So we came up with a plan.

    I would spend those final two months living at Mom’s house, helping her get the clutter under control. At the same time, we would go scouting for some professional help, agreeing that therapy to address the hoarding was in Mom’s best interest. We had a plan: by the time I left Connecticut, Mom would have regained a sturdy foothold on the road to recovery and I could move away, assured that I had done my part in helping.

    And it worked, too. Until it didn’t.

    In that previously mentioned survey by NAMI, about 50% of all hoarders have blocked access to their fridge, bathtub, toilet and sinks. 78% have houses littered with what could be deemed garbage. My chances of finding a spot to sleep were next to nil, though the toilet wasn’t too tough to get to. A garage sale seemed like the perfect solution for opening up some much needed space. Plus, instead of just throwing things out (and to be fair, a lot of Mom’s stuff did have some value) this would give my mother and me an opportunity to really start working together as a team, as opposed to simply strangling one another—which started to have its own appeal once we realized what we were up against.

    Hoarding is a disease based very much on feelings. Boston University Dean and Professor Gail Steketee LCSW, MSW, PhD, who has been studying the condition since the mid-1990’s concluded that “Hoarding may induce feelings of safety and security and may reinforce identity.”

    In other words, Mom’s things helped her feel safe.

    Her stuff was in many ways who she was.

    So emotions began to run high as we debated on what in the house could be sold. At first we were able to work for just a few hours before Mom had to quit, visibly shaken, promising better endurance for the next attempt. Sometimes a span of days would pass where no progress was made at all. Because my mother had the final say on every item’s fate, during these times of indecision there was little more for me to do than just sort through the piles. This part of the process was most challenging for me.

    Finding myself truly face to face with my mother’s disorder, I often spiraled into great bouts of anger and deep depression. Getting lost in the work for hours, I would start dissecting a section of the hoard, piece by frustrating piece, trying to make sense of it. It was during these times that I began to realize my mother was in the grips of a very serious and complex mental illness.

    Hoarding has been listed as a symptom of OCD for years. As defined by the Mayo Clinic, people who have obsessive compulsive disorder experience unwanted thoughts that incline them to perform an action repetitively—usually outside of their control—in hopes of alleviating stress, when in actuality the behavior is only compounding the discomfort.

    Did this explain the bags upon bags of clearance items and price-reduced canned goods? The gathered pile of expired and stale holiday candy? The drawers of zip ties, rubber bands and Tupperware lids. That infuriating metropolis of 7 Eleven cups always collapsing off the microwave. The balls of yarn, rolls of fabric, reams of paper, baskets of shoes. Bed sheets, power cords, energy drinks, sun catchers. Nesting shelves, cleaning fluids, shampoos and conditioners. Paper plates, napkins, condiments—bags of them. If I was disturbed while sorting them, I had to imagine what it must’ve felt like to always need more of them.

    But what I really needed was to seek out that professional help Mom had agreed to from the beginning. In addition to the increasingly alarming nature of the collected stuff, according to a report by Compulsive-Hoarding.com, “A hoarder’s problem will not be solved by someone else throwing away or organizing their possessions.”

    Another invaluable online resource, HoardingCleanup.Com, offered an impressive roster of psychiatrists and psychologists dealing specifically with the disorder. Fortunately, we found a local doctor with whom Mom felt comfortable with right off the bat.

    Then, suddenly, positive results were coming in from every front.

    Once the garage sales got started, they quickly gained momentum and we were setting up the driveway with Mom’s wares every Friday through Sunday. So by the time my departure date rolled around we had become old pros—and one hell of a team. There was nothing at the airport but sincere gratitude and a shared sense of accomplishment. We had done it! We’d beaten the monkey off of Mom’s back, shoved it in a box and sold it in front of the house for a dollar.

    No, fifty cents!

    Seventy-five!

    Okay, seventy-five, sold!

    Over the following months, as I worked on getting my own home together, I would check in with Mom to see how things were coming along. She continued with the garage sales until the weather no longer agreed. The therapy continued unabated. Her psychiatrist was big on baby steps, discouraging Mom from taking on too much at once. Instead, the piles were shrinking through consistency and perseverance, my mother showing him photos from week to week. Also, my father was visiting the house regularly so he was able to give me a report every now and again. 

    According to an article in Psychology Today, “willful ignorance” occurs when a person knows the truth, or at least fears it, but chooses to ignore it altogether. Turning a blind eye was an especially easy behavior for me to indulge in from 3,000 miles away, so I was flabbergasted when one night my father called and told me that Mom’s house had reverted to its previous state of congested disarray and that her hoarding was back with a vengeance.

    What an awful moment of deja vu. Were we really right back to where we had started, just like that?

    Though my 12-step meetings and sponsor helped calmed me down with some much needed perspective, for the first time in recovery I found myself resenting the solution that was being offered—which was, as always, acceptance. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” blah blah blah.

    No.

    I refused to accept it. I would not sit idly by while my mother sat on the one spot she had left on her sofa, watching a TV she had to crane her neck around piles of junk to see—the same piles that were slowly but surely burying her alive. Somebody had to take charge of this mess. Who was responsible? I blamed her, her doctor, my father, myself. I blamed thrift stores, dollar stores, America, God.

    What went wrong? How could Mom go back to hoarding after such encouraging progress? This had been the strongest attempt at complete recovery from her disorder so far.

    There was a night I called Mom up ranting and raving, horrendously demanding to know exactly what was the problem—and her timid response to me, plain and simple was:

    “It’s hard.”

    That was a mouthful. And it’s actually the one thing all the research and professionals in the field agree on. Recovery from hoarding is incredibly difficult. The statistics tell us it’s downright unlikely. A study conducted by the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry on patients with various forms of OCD, including hoarding, found that after five years only 9.5% of hoarders achieved and maintained full recovery from their condition.

    But then this begs the bigger issue—and it’s where my eyes opened.

    When we’re looking at recovery from hoarding, are we also looking at recovery from OCD? This experience showed me that my mother isn’t just struggling against shopping and filling her house up with stuff—but she’s battling an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Unlike my substance abuse where complete abstinence from drugs and alcohol is the solution (though of course there’s lots more to it), my mother is dealing with a behavioral disorder. And when it comes to long lasting recovery, therapy continues to be the key.

    Compulsive-Hoarding.com told me that if a hoarder’s space is just cleaned out, “The clinical compulsive hoarder will simply re-hoard even faster and fill up their home again, often within a few months.” However, that NAMI survey showed that as much as 70% of hoarders responded positively to cognitive therapy.

    So Mom is on the right track.

    It’s just that the odds are not in her favor.

    But so far she’s beaten a lot of those odds, hasn’t she? My mother’s already admitted to having a problem when NAMI reports that only about 15% of all hoarders do so. And she’s in therapy where her recovery has the highest likelihood of success. How many attempts will it take before Mom finds long term recovery? Nobody knows.

    All I know is that recovery from hoarding seems to be an inside job and that’s the stuff that really needs to be worked through. Once I accepted that about my mother and her hoarding condition I knew the best thing to do was leave that work to her.

    Find info about hoarding here:

    https://namimass.org/hoarding-and-ocd-stats-characteristics-causes-treatment-and-resources

    View the original article at thefix.com