How do you abandon your children? How do you sit back and watch as someone else raises your babies? Why was it so easy for you to choose the drugs over me? Why couldn't you just love me more? -These are the questions I've had for my parents my whole life.
For as long as I can remember I've been the daughter of two drug addicts. I know I wasn't always though. My closest relatives always remind me that before heroin I had the best parents. My dad would take me to turtle races and just about any festival he ever heard of and my mom would spoil me with just about any My Little Pony set I wanted. I was the apple of their eye. The only thing that mattered. It's hard to believe at one point in my life I had a normal family with no sight of addiction.
By age six, I was taken in by my grandparents. We were living in a one bedroom motel room with my little brother, our cousin, my aunt, and my two parents. My grandmother picked us kids up and told us we would be staying with her and my poppop for awhile... Awhile turned into 14 years.
A year later, my mom passed away from a heroin overdose. I was only seven at the time but I remember only truly being devastated when it initially happened. I remember forcing myself to cry at her funeral because everyone would think I wasn't actually sad if I didn't. I was sad. I knew I would never see my mom again but I also knew she wasn't my mom when she passed away. She was an addict who just happened to be my mother.
For years after, my dad promised to make things right. He would come home from jail or rehab and make empty promises about how we would live together again and how jail changed him this time. In my heart, I knew they were all lies but each time I would get my hopes up. Maybe this really was the last time I'd have to press seven to accept a prepaid call from him. Maybe he would get his life together and we could live as a family again. But each time, the disappointment had me crying myself to sleep because I just wasn't enough for my own dad.
I still struggle with this today. March 2017 he will be released from a seven year sentence at a local prison. I worry that this won't be the last time I have to be patted down to visit my dad. I worry that the next funeral I attend will be his. I'm scared freedom will change his "High on Life" attitude to a more "Where can I get my next fix?" lifestyle. For the first time as an adult, I have to trust that my dad will do the right thing.
I wish more than anything I didn't go through any of this. I wish I could've had a normal childhood, not one I have to recover from. I wish my parents could have raised me and my grandparents could've spoiled me the way they wanted to. I wish I didn't have the memories that I do but I'm also very grateful for it all. Because my mom died when I was young, I knew how to cope when I lost a close friend in high school. And although my parents weren't fit to raise my brother and I, I matured much quicker than others my age and grew more independent.
Being a drug addicts' daughter isn't the easiest title to have. People look at you differently and expect you to become just like your parents. They don't want to talk to you about what's really going on but more so about your feelings. They try to protect you from the truth that you already know. It's hard being the only one at the table who actually understands what you're actually going through while everyone else is aimlessly trying to "help."
Addiction raised me and I've grown to accept that. For a long time, I tried to hide the thing about me that made me who I am... I'm an addict's daughter and I'm not ashamed of that title.
