Comeback

A close friend of mine gave me a copy of this book to read after she finished it. I had a long trip to Bergen yesterday so I have read quite a bit of it on the plane. There are so many parallels here to my own life that it has been a difficult read. At first I found the mother very hard to relate to or like, but half way through I also saw a lot of me in her. It is that same fear that I have had for my own children. I suspect it is the fear most people have when they realize their spouse is an addict. I have often thought that I could not bear to re-live addiction with my kids. I don't think anything could be more painful. But what often happens is that we shut down and become practically dead so that no one can hurt us. What I have hoped is that I could somehow control their lives to the extent that it would never happen. What I realize more and more is that they are on their own journeys. And, painful as it may be, I have to let them live those journeys. That said, I do believe the stability we offer our children growing up does count for something. While I can't stop them from making bad choices, I do believe that children come back sooner than they would without strong families. Sometimes, without that, they don't ever come back. This is a beautiful story about the love between mother and daughter. I'd highly recommend it to anyone dealing with family addictions. "Sometimes, we have to give birth to our children twice....Once your child becomes the "garbage" other parents are afraid of, you never look at any teen, or yourself, the same again. All you see is the child they once were." "Nor did I grasp the capacity of love's absence to destroy, that my lack of love for myself made my own life unbearable. You take someone whose life experiences have taught them they're worthless, string them out on drugs, and you have one miserable person. How could I have given what I didn't have? It's hard to value another life when you view your own as dispensable, hard to understand how you can have so great an effect on someone else when you don't think you matter." - Mia Fontaine

Sharing our Recovery with Our Children

I just finished this book and I thought it was fantastic. But I was most excited to see a chapter devoted to children, as I don't think this is talked about enough.

Here are a few quotes I liked.

...children need something more. It doesn't do us any good if someone else is recovering and we aren't. If our children have lived with parents with active alcoholism, food, or sex addictions, unresolved adult children issues, or with parents lacking the ability to deal with feelings and be nurturing, then our children may have these problems too. If our kids have lived with parents who have been in pain, then our children are probably in pain too.

Not every child from a dysfunctional family will have troubles in his or her life, but many will. Some will adapt and people please until they bottom out in mid-life. Some won't know they're in trouble until they've had enough time struggling through life and relationships to understand they aren't doing well at either. Some will crash head on at a young age into jails, mental institutions, and morgues.

One of these days, and maybe that day has already arrived, we're going to collectively slap ourselves on our foreheads and wonder why we're waiting for our children to grow up before we give them the hope of healing and recovery.

We don't have to wait until our children are addicted or in trouble to intervene. We don't have to wait until our children hate themselves before we begin to teach them how to love themselves.

What can we do in our families, schools, and communities to reach the children? What do they need? They need the same things we need on an age-appropriate level. The children need to lose their invisibility. They need to be recognized as people who need their own healing process...Children need to know about the effects of alcohol and other drugs, but they also need to learn how to stop their pain. They need to learn how to love, nurture, and accept themselves. They need to know the family problems are not their fault.

We need families, churches, schools, and communities filled with healthy people so our children will have healthy role models and adults to interact with. They need to be surrounded by people who are enjoying life and doing their own recovery work, so they can see what the good life looks and feels like.

...there is hope for our families, our children, and ourselves. I believe in recovery. I believe in changed lives. I believe in children. I even believe in childhood.

- Melody Beattie, Beyond Codependency, "Sharing our Recovery with our Children"