willingtolove

I’m not playing anymore.

No more Mrs. Nice Christian.

I wasn’t given a spirit of timidity. I was given a spirit of boldness and strength.

It’s time I started using it.

Shame has a cunning way of convincing us that our ‘ugly’ is better kept in the dark and secret place. What would people say if they knew that thing about you? How would people react to you? How embarrassing, you can’t possibly expose that. ….

What a load of bull. When the ugly is buried it gets to take root and grow more ugly. As the roots get deeper the ugly gets stronger and multiplies.

Keeping our struggles with Robyn’s disease a secret made me sick. Really sick. It made me angry and irritable. It caused me to have low self worth and feel overlooked. As a result I reacted in ways that did me no favours and was contrary to who I am.

Addiction is a disease and that is how I am going to refer to it from now on.

Robyn’s disease is back. She made a choice to unlock it and is once again powerless over it. When this happened last time I was silent. I didn’t blog, and when I did I was very vague.

Not this time.

She was doing super well, but left a tiny gap in the God-shaped hole. It quickly got filled with a guy. Who relapsed. Within 48 hours she was right behind him. She surfaced briefly and we tried to get her into detox. And then chaos came in and it got weird and confusing. By that time she had unlocked her disease and two days later she was gone again. That was three days ago.

Having a general idea of where she is I could go and break down every door to find her. I could use my connections with social services and the police to find her and bring her back. Funny thing, though is that it never really works.

But God. The last thing her sponsor said to me was ‘she’s in God’s hands now.’ She’s right. I can pray. I will pray. I’m not going to be shy or stay silent. I’m going to pray and I ask all of you praying folks out there to pray to.

Pray for her to be healed from this disease. Pray for her safety and protection. Pray for her safe return. Pray for her to collide into people who God put there to bring her back. Claim the promises over her that she will not know death; she will not be devoured by the beast; that the plans for her are good and for a hope and a future. Let’s flood Heaven with our prayers to the point where we drown out the saints!!(I hope that’s not blasphemy!)

Prayer changes things folks. It’s the most powerful skill Jesus taught us. It’s the sword that cuts through the thorns.

Join with us to pray. Our gloves are off. Let’s kick the crap out of the disease of addictions.

The charismatic Christian community are grieving the loss of Beni Johnson, wife of Bill Johnson who is the leader of Bethel Church in Redding California. I’ve never met Beni nor have I been to Bethel, but I’m no stranger to their teachings and have many friends who’ve been. Through his grief, Bill spoke on Sunday and a quote popped into my Instagram feed

‘There are aspects of His presence that you can only experience in the valley of the shadow of death.’

He’s right.

We didn’t lose Robyn, but we came close. Darn close. It wasn’t her time yet because Jesus woke me up to find her. For a brief time she was gone.

It wasn’t in that moment that I felt God’s presence. Nor was it in the minutes that followed or when the paramedics came to take over. It wasn’t even when she spoke to me for a brief moment.

It was after they had taken her to the hospital. I watched them drive off and I sat on the couch. It was four in the morning and the house was quiet once more. I was just about to call her dad and then it happened.

He showed up.

It wasn’t flashy or electric. It wasn’t loud or scary or surprising. The Great I Am sat beside me and held my hand. We sat there for a really long time. It was intimate and beautiful and felt like I had just melted into the arms of, well, Papa.

He was for me something He could not have been any other time. Not because He was incapable, but because the situation had never commanded it. It was a level of revelation I’d not experienced before. How much He was for me – how much He was for us. How he took care of every detail – even making sure he put supernatural headphones on our son, who slept through the whole thing.

The rest of it is indescribable and too personal. But Bill’s right, folks.

He was there. He had always been there. He never left. He never will.

That memory of the valley of the shadow haunts me. The only thing that brings me out of it is choosing to remember when God showed up to hold my hand.

For the first time in two years I was able to articulate an answer to the question ‘how are you?’

I’m about 60%.

I was then asked what my recent dreams/goals were.

Oh no. I’m not that far. I’m not at the point of dreaming. I’m only looking to the end of the day.

Maybe I’m more like 50%. I spent the rest of the night kicking myself for not looking to the future. It’s just not my reality right now.

Robyn and her AA friends talk about ‘normies.’ Normies are people who don’t live with addiction. She says she doesn’t think she’d ever be able to date a normie again, and wonders if she will ever get to the point when she can have deep connections with a normie. Outside of her family, that is.

It seems far-fetched, and maybe even outlandish, but I get it. As a normie who grew up with an alcoholic mother, there was much more to her addiction than actively drinking. It continues to impact us for years after she got sober.

I recently described it as a totally different world. A world where Nigel and I are 100% okay with her not having a job right now so she can rest and recalibrate and focus on her recovery. We never would have had that attitude had we not learned about addictions and trauma and the effect on the brain. And took the time to really listen to her and trust her. Trust that she doesn’t want to be like this – that she has hopes and dreams and wants to see them fulfilled. One day at a time.

A well meaning acquaintance mentioned a job may give her a sense of responsibility. I’d say keeping herself sober and alive is a pretty big responsibility.

I think back to my many years as a child protection social worker and the unrealistic expectations we had (and still have) on parents. Expectations to complete a 28 day treatment program and then come out and sort themselves out to get their kids back and go to all these meetings and make all these appointments and change friendship groups and block family members.

I’m exhausted for them and ashamed at how us professionals have totally diminished substance abuse. The system sets people up to fail. To a certain point, so does society.

Recovery is not linear and there is no quick fix. There is no one answer. It’s not getting a puppy, or a job, or an apartment. Those are all things that are built in to wider recovery but to hang on one answer or another will only lead to disappointment.

Our family is walking in a totally different world than what we’re used to or what we thought we would. We are being challenged and stretched. But we are learning to listen to each other, be kind to each other and understand each other in a way we haven’t before. In a sense there’s been a great deal of freedom released while we hold our hands up and become open to new and different ways of seeing things.

Most of all, I’m seeing God in things I would not have otherwise.

I think I’m actually even starting to breathe.

It was the day I felt crucified and relieved at the same time. I had stepped through the looking glass into a world I had not known existed. It was scary and it was incredible.

It was the day I realized I was just as sick, if not sicker, than my daughter. It came one day as she continues to work her program in a treatment facility and learns how to live a different way. As she is recovering I realized I am not.

I have enabled, enmeshed and co-depended my way through the last seven years. It’s most likely longer but I’m not ready to go back that far. It’s all been in the name of love, parenting, maternal instinct, responsibility. Whatever term I could come up with that made it okay or justified my behaviour.

Justified to clean up the mistakes, fix the situations, pay the debts owed to the bad guys.

Justified to blame others, make excuses, turn a blind eye or simply look past the ugly to an imaginary reality that didn’t exist.

Once the ugly was so big that I couldn’t ignore it anymore, I let it swallow me. Like a blood pressure cuff wrapped around my entire body that just kept inflating. I couldn’t move and I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe. My entire existence connected to her situation. I just felt frozen.

Many times I still do.

When I think further ahead than today panic leaps from the back benches to take its place lodged in my throat. When I subconsciously create a running doomsday narrative in my head, anxiety clouds my thinking and I feel fuzzy and angry and scared.

I like the thought of loving detachment but how that works in practice is a foreign language to me.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change……

That’s not talking about the time, or the weather, or the latest election results. It’s not even talking about getting laid off or your favourite sports team losing the big game. It’s talking about accepting that I am powerless over alcohol and drugs and I am powerless over my loved one who has the progressive disease of alcoholism and/or drug addiction. Only my loved one can work to arrest the disease. Whatever I do or don’t do cannot control that.

Accepting this is hard. It’s kind of easy academically, but that’s about all the easy. The rest is pretty tricky.

Really accepting means no more stalking the phone, hiding the booze, making bargains or contracts. No more losing sleep, reaching out to the friends or asking to meet new ones to judge their integrity for yourself. It means no controlling the situation, no getting involved in the plan, and not orchestrating the outcome. It also means not lying to your own friends about how things are going, and deciding not to feel cast aside when those friends slowly don’t reach out to you as much because the situation you’re in is too overwhelming for them.

Accepting means that my emotional well-being is not dictated by my daughters current situation. If she stays in recovery and works her program for the rest of my life that’s great, but if it doesn’t happen it doesn’t mean my world falls apart too.

Accepting means understanding the role I played in her addiction, drinking, and using. It means me getting better so those relationship roles don’t play out like they once did.

Accepting means to not be fearful or anxious once she does come out and starts to live a new life. A life that doesn’t include me at her side 24/7.

It’s been 13 weeks since my last late-night hospital visit, that lasted three weeks. It’s been six weeks since we brought her to the centre, with four weeks to go. It seems a long while for me to still be on step one – acceptance.

I can’t rush this. I rushed it before and it made things worse. This time last year, for instance. I thought we were golden – she had resurfaced and was making the right noises so I jumped on the train. I was convinced that was it. It was over. Finally finished.

Yeah. No.

Not this time. Pressing into the feelings; fighting through the fear and the pain with the goal of coming out accepting. It’s the only way I’m going to get better, and in turn be the healthiest me I can be while she makes her sobriety her number 1 priority.

I will find Serenity, but this time I’m not going to rush it.

‘Why do you look for the living amongst the dead? He is not here. He is risen.’

No doubt about it, Easter is about rebirth. The greatest victory to end it all. Jesus beat death. And in doing so we live.

This Easter has been especially reflective for us. We didn’t spend it together. In fact we were in three different places, but it was the most special one we’ve ever had.

I was at a church small group meeting when a person at my table stated that God doesn’t go to hell. I silently disagreed with that person. I think Jesus went when He was crucified to stick his middle finger up before He beat death, and I think God does go – I am convinced He’s taken me with Him a few times.

Over the past year I have gone into drug dens, gang houses and back alleys with Him to get the lost. In the last few months I have performed life saving measures while she died in my arms for a brief moment – only because He woke me up. More recently we have been a tag team as exhaustion got the better of me. Yet one more time He dove into the pit to lift our girl out again.

And this time she’s on higher ground.

She’s on higher ground because He went to get her. He didn’t shake and tremble at the gates of death. He didn’t knock quietly and wait for an answer. He burst in, ripped through the flames and the dark and grabbed her.

He made promises that she would not know death. He keeps those promises.

It’s no coincidence that the weekend of His resurrection and rebirth is the same as her new chapter. Right timing, right hospital, right healing, right program, right people. Looking to Jesus.

If this post doesn’t make sense then I’ve done a good job at giving you a snapshot at how our lives have been for so the past six months. It’s made no sense, but God….

This isn’t meant to be a blog full of self-deprecating cliches and ‘passive-victim-of-circumstance’ statements. Quite the opposite actually. Stick with me.

I’ve been a social worker for 25 years, with much of that work protecting children from all forms of abuse and neglect. I’ve done thousands of assessments on parents and caregivers to determine if they and their parenting was ‘good enough’. It either was or it wasn’t. That’s that.

And then I started to question my own parenting.

I’ve been told countless times that I’m a good mother. Heck, I’ve even told others the same thing. The compliment that stuck to me like Velcro when awards were won or achievements were celebrated bounced off and fell to the ground in the middle of a crisis

This journey has left the door wide open to doubt myself as a parent. Am I doing a good job? Am I doing a bad job? Did I do a good or a bad job? The good/bad dichotomy has become my sparring partner; zapping me of any energy I had left. I’ve spent many intended sleeping hours convincing myself I am a good mother or stamping out the inner voices telling me I’m a bad one.

How does a good mother miss an ADHD diagnosis in their little girl? How does a good mother overlook the development of Borderline Personality Disorder stemming from untreated Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after spending years working with women who have the same thing? Does a bad mother refuse to back down, even when standing out of the way is the right thing to do? Is a bad mother oblivious to their adult child’s drug and alcohol problem until it is right under their nose? Isn’t it the good mother who performs life saving measures until help arrives? Is it the bad mother who missed or refused to acknowledge the signs that it was heading that way?

I don’t know the answers. I’ll never know them.

The quest wasn’t lonely. I had a friend named Someone Special. Someone Special convinced me that I was the only one going through this; we were the only parents, the only family staring down the double barrel of mental health and addictions. It’s so hard. Nobody understands. I can’t have a life because of this or because of that. I’m special. This isn’t happening in other peoples lives that we know. Only us. Only me.

Someone Special isolated me. Good/Bad exhausted me. Depression and Hopelessness were at the door with their suitcases ready to move in.

Lately I’ve started to smarten up. Call it coincidence or a melancholy moment. I call it Divine. Memories started showing themselves. Those first few weeks of motherhood; how speechless I was before God that He could ever choose me to steward such a precious gift. How He trusted me with this child; a child He knew first. A child He loved first.

It was then that I realized I’m not a good mother. I’m not a bad mother. I’m neither.

I’m chosen.

I’m chosen. Both of my children were given to me to steward. I’ve dug deep. Everything I have is theirs. There’s been gains and there’s been losses. Sometimes I got it right and sometimes I got it wrong. It never made me bad or good. I was chosen and I’ve not backed away or refused the job.

Someone Special got kicked out when I started talking to other people who were dealing with the same issues. I’m not special. We’re not a special family. Millions of parents and siblings are dealing with the impact of a loved ones mental illness and substance abuse. Someone Special got replaced with Us Too.

It isn’t a quick fix. Someone Special and all her friends still comes knocking every now and then. Hopefully the more I ignore them the less they will come around, at least I think that’s how it works.