How Do I Keep My Kids Off Heroin?
When I was pregnant with my oldest son, Joey, I worried about a million things; car seats and strollers, sudden infant death syndrome and folic acid. I worried he might be born a hermaphrodite, or with cleft a palate, or a pointy head.
(I worried about the pointy-head thing because my brother had a pointy head when he was a baby. He outgrew it though.)
Autism, however, never once crossed my mind.
When I had a houseful of infants and toddlers and preschoolers, I worried about them choking on hotdogs or falling down the stairs, running into the street or poking something into an electrical socket. I worried about diaper rashes and the stomach bug and ear infections.
And after I read an article online—one that so aptly described my chillingly silent 1-year old it took my breath away—I started to worry about a little something called autism spectrum disorder.
I no longer have plump infants or unsteady toddlers or inquisitive preschoolers. Instead, I have tall, gangly kids in elementary and middle school; a 12-year old and an 11-year old and a 9-year old and an 8-year old and a 6-year old, and my worries have changed and grown right along with them. Now I think about underage drinking, unsafe sex, and drugs.
Oh, and autism. Always, always autism.
Some things in life seem to be universal, crossing over the boundaries of race and gender and ethnicity and class. You know, like head lice.
And autism.
And addiction.
I had lice when I was a kid. Twice, in fact. And let me tell you, having lice is not twice as nice the second time around.
And we have autism. By we, I mean my 11-year old son, Jack, but some days I live and breathe and see and smell and hear autism so very deeply in my body and mind, it’s as if I have it myself.
I have never been offered a drug, if you can believe it. Not in college, not on the bus, not in the back of the locker room after field hockey practice. In fact, I know very little about addiction in general.
But it’s no secret that heroin is sweeping our nation, and like most parents, I read the news articles and Facebook posts with a combination of horror and curiosity and fear.
When I think about my early days as a young mother, I remember how lost I felt. And looking back, I realize what I really wanted was someone to forgive me for the unnamable disquiet of blame and hurt I carried every day.
I wanted someone to notice that I was doing the best I could, that my days were so long and hard and boring and overwhelming.
I was lonely. Not lonely as in no-one-is-around-me-I-am-alone kind of lonely, more like no-one-not-friends-or-people-I-work-with-or-my-own-mother-understands kind of lonely. I felt isolated in my pursuit to understand this boy and his diagnosis. It was just he and I, trapped in a silent, hushed bubble of denial and shame and worry.
I was terrified when we learned he has autism and I’m still terrified that he has autism, but the thought of drugs and addiction and heroin scares me more. Because let’s face it, he won’t go to jail because of autism. He won’t steal to get more of it or make long, painful track marks up his arm with it. He won’t die from it.
I look at my oldest son, and I worry that his easy nature and kind temperament will prevent him from saying no if someone asks him.
I’m scared Rose will fall into a group of daring girls who are eager to try the latest offering. I think about my middle son and his anxiety, and feel a rising panic that one day, he’ll choose to self-medicate himself for relief.
I’m afraid my youngest, Henry, will feel pressure to outdo everyone, to bend all of the rules until they break.
And Jack? Well, I don’t even know where to begin. His propensity for impulsiveness, his naiveté, the way his mind may never comprehend the idea of dependency or addiction or substance abuse.
I am afraid that I am hiding behind an unrealistic cloak of family dinners and church sacraments and chore charts, when really there is something else I should be doing in order to keep my kids safe.
Will there be one single moment that forever swerves their course? Or will every parenting mistake I’ve ever made—every low moment and small failure—mix and swirl together like the explosive ingredients of a Molotov cocktail?
You know, like the all times I turn a blind eye to Jack sneaking an extra cookie from the snack cabinet because I am too tired to fight about it.
When I ignore Henry to check e-mail, or tell them they can’t play travel soccer because it’s too demanding and I don’t feel like driving them all over the state every weekend, or let Joey watch a PG-13 movie even though he’s only twelve.
Or like one night last week, after a long, hot summer day of negotiations and bickering and boredom, I accused 9-year old Charlie of not brushing his teeth when I asked him to and he turned to where I was standing on the stairs and he had tears pooling in his huge brown eyes and he cried out, “Why do you hate me?”
Hatred. Fear. Insecurity. Addiction.
I don’t know a lot about heroin, but I do know this: every addict was at one time an infant, a toddler, a preschooler, a child climbing the bus with a backpack full of crayons for the first day of second grade.
He or she maybe went to the beach, and sat for family portraits at JC Penney’s, and threw icy cold snowballs in the winter. They lost mittens, and looked for the full moon at night, and found pennies on the floor of the grocery store.
They were—they are—just like you and me.
But at some point, their own course swerved and their direction changed. The memory of warm, sandy beaches is blurred by heroin’s dangerous high; the family bonds captured in pictures broken and splintered and shattered into pieces.
It’s true, I don’t know much about addiction, but I do believe behind every addict there is a weary mother, a frustrated father, a family in turmoil. There is isolation and shame and regret. I imagine there is also a sharp, burning longing for mercy.
Forgive yourself.
You are doing the best you can.
You are not alone.
I don’t think I could have prevented Jack’s autism, even if I wanted. But maybe I can prevent my kids from turning to drugs. I just have no idea how.
Sure, I could open Google and search terms like the warning signs of heroin and how do you keep your kids off drugs, but that’s just statistics. That’s just words on a screen or a piece of paper. It doesn’t answer my questions.
I want a different kind of research. I want a glimpse of the baby, the toddler, the child, the man or woman behind the addiction, the same way I long to show the world the blue-eyed infant and the wandering boy and the tall, gangly middle-schooler behind the autism diagnosis.
I want to talk about the un-talkable. I want to talk about what it was like before heroin came in like a thief in the night.
Did he have a lot of friends? No friends? A few friends, or mean friends?
Was she a Daddy’s girl, or the apple of his mother’s eye?
Was she bullied, or a bully herself?
Did she watch a lot of television? Did he play soccer, or football, or sing in the chorus?
Were there red flags; subtle warning signs that something was amiss?
Did he get hurt playing football and start taking pain medication and then turn to something stronger?
I may not know a lot about addiction; I don’t know what the battle inside the heroin bubble looks or feels like, and I don’t know how to prevent it in my own family or anyone else’s.
I can only hope that no matter what the battle–autism or addiction or a head full of creepy-crawly lice–we each remember the lyrics to our own fight song, and in our lowest moments we whisper them and shout them and think them and know them:
We are forgiven.
We are doing the best we can.
We are not alone.
August 24, 2015 @ 12:31 pm
Carrie,
I have been thinking about this a lot, too. I keep reading about young adults dying from heroin overdoses–kids from ‘good families, good towns.’ I have been told that heroin is ‘in the high school’ in my town, a town full of professionals, big beautiful lawns & houses, team sports & a school system always on the “top schools” lists. I have watched these kids grow up. I know these parents. I wonder how did we get here?
I don’t comment much…mainly because of time. I love reading your weekly posts. I relate to so much of what you share. You put words to my thoughts.
When I think about my early days as a young mother, I remember how lost I felt. And looking back, I realize what I really wanted was someone to forgive me for the unnamable disquiet of blame and hurt I carried every day.
That is exactly how I felt. It took way too long before my younger son with Aspergers (and anxiety, sensory issue, etc…;-) ) was properly diagnosed (not for lack of trying.) I blamed myself, thinking ‘What am I doing wrong here??’ and “Why does it look so much easier for everyone else?” when seeing the other moms at school, playgroups, library, everywhere…while my little wild one was melting down. “He’s intriguing” was what I kept hearing at all the evaluations both by the school and privately. I tried so hard. I started to question myself at times like ‘is what I am seeing and experiencing here with my son not really as challenging as it seems to our family?” I half-joked to a therapist I started to see about parenting him that maybe I had “munchausen by proxy’ for developmental disorders or something. He had been on an IEP since Kindergarten, with no real services because no one could really figure out what his needs were, but knew he needed to be watched over, or as one teacher ‘he’s going to fall apart’. He doesn’t fit the stereotype for Aspergers in so many ways–which as we all know with Autism Spectrum Disorders and kids/people in general, they’re all different. By age 9, a neurologist at Boston Children’s diagnosed him with a bunch of different acronyms, including PDD-NOS, but her main diagnosis & that of the first neuropsychologist we saw was “he’s intriguing (not kidding!! I heard this over and over again…) and we won’t know what’s really going on until we help with his anxiety–the anxiety that he didn’t know he had, we didn’t know that certain odd behaviors like tightening his pants & pulling them up really high were signs of anxiety. Ugh, my poor boy. Now I know so much more about anxiety, how overwhelming the world can be for my boy, that he would keep it together at school during those elementary school years and then explode when he was home. Oh the blame, the hurt I carried and still do. By 11, after another round of evaluations & some amazing Developmental Pediatricians at the Developmental Medicine Center at Children’s, his diagnosis was tweaked to Autism Spectrum Disorder (Aspergers is the closest way to describe where he falls on the spectrum.)
When I read your blog, I feel understood. I feel forgiven. So thank you.
August 25, 2015 @ 6:55 am
JulieP, we are struggling to find a correct diagnosis for our 7 year old son and your story really sounds familiar. I would love to ask you more if you are willing to connect. If you are willing, reply to this and I will leave my email (or you could me on Facebook, I don’t really want to publish my email)
August 24, 2015 @ 12:41 pm
There was a wonderful experiment on opiate addiction during the 80’s called “The Rat Park.” The theory was that caged isolation in previous rat experiments on opiates made the rats more likely to prefer opiates and foster addiction. I don’t want to misquote or make any assumptions in my inexperience, so I greatly advise you to research this and read about it yourself here:
http://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/rat-park/148-addiction-the-view-from-rat-park
I also have son with autism; he just turned 11. If the key to preventing addiction is really to make sure our children don’t feel isolated, then, as mothers with autism, we have an uphill battle. Fortunately, I see the world changing every day to make space for autism. I see kids trying to relate to my son and including him and showing much more patience than I think the 11 year olds of my day would have shown. So there’s something.
August 24, 2015 @ 1:42 pm
I read this as a parent and saw in your writing the laments and concerns of all parents…very intuitive and very on the mark…you speak so well for so many of us…not just from your perspective on autism but as a Mom concerned about ALL her kids and whether she and Dad have done what they can or should to parent…to guide…to teach…hats off to you Carrie…
August 24, 2015 @ 2:41 pm
I’ve been a mom for 35 years. I’ve had many of the same fears as you do, Carrie. I tried to arm my kids with the knowledge that they likely would develop some kind of anxiety, because it runs rampant in both their father and mother’s family genes. I thought that if they knew what might happen they would be less likely to self-medicate. I thought that If I made our house the one that all the kids wanted to hang out in, I could be there to keep a closer eye on my own. I spent countless hours with my children, first at home when they were young, then driving them to sports, friends’ homes and school. By the time he was 16, my oldest was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and put on medication. I heaved a sigh of relief. Little did I know then that his two younger siblings would find a vial of ketamine, or Vitamin K, in his desk drawer and bring it to me. After a long heartfelt discussion, my son told me that he had been self-medicating with everything from alcohol to heroin. What did I do wrong? Was it because we made a long distance move during middle school? Was it because I became pregnant with his brother when he was 8 and had previously been an only child? Was it because he never got to know his biological father? Or that the man I married who then adopted him liked sports while my son liked computers? I’ll never figure out what made my son turn to drugs instead of me. I can tell you that he managed to turn himself around. He finished high school, went on to junior college, four-year college and then med school. He is now a practicing radiologist. I can’t take “credit” for that any more than I can take “credit” for him getting into drugs. I guess what I’m saying is that you really can’t do any one thing to keep your kids off drugs. Keep doing what you’re doing. Stay involved. Keep talking to them. Laugh with them (a lot). Listen to them; really listen. Be open and honest. Then let your worries go. And know that you are doing the best you can. 🙂
August 25, 2015 @ 11:18 pm
It’s a very scary fact- and having a grown son with autism, I only think that his unique personality and openness kept him away from drugs; plus the personal education he received from home. He is now 25 and has never had alcohol or any desire to experience any mind altering substances. We are parents who grew up in the 70’s – yet, there is no substance use in our home at all- his sister is another story!- as tight as your family is, I can’t imagine one of the kids having an issue without another knowing or intervening!! Good Italian Brood!!
August 30, 2015 @ 11:14 am
Thank-you for sharing what every parent feels in this climate of Heroin etc. We do the best we can with the knowledge we have. When we go to bed at night we can end our day not without worry, but knowing we did our best even for just that day. The rest we give to God.
August 31, 2015 @ 11:38 am
It’s ironic that someone shared this image with me a few days after your article:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CM3z6ovWUAAJcFV.jpg
The caption is:
Teach your kids photography and they’ll never have enough money to buy drugs.
As an amateur photographer it totally resonated.
When I googled it to find a link to the image so I could share it here I found a similar sentiment about Magic, the Gathering. YMMV.