I have three children. Jessica 37, Jamie 34 and Tiffany 28. My two oldest are my steps kids (I don’t like the word “step”) as I have known them for 32 years and we have all gotten along, including my husband’s first wife.

Tiffany, our child who didn’t have to deal with going back and forth from mom’s house to dad’s house or any of the divorced parents’ stuff, is our child who became addicted to substances. Tiffany is very smart! She loves to read which means she has an amazing vocabulary. She is a very good cook and has always been loving and kind. My husband and I found out years ago that my younger sister, Tiffany’s Aunt, let Tiffany try alcohol at her house. I don’t know what possessed my sister to do this! I think she was just trying to be the cool aunt. Anyway, that was the beginning of Tiffany’s journey with substance use disorder.

My daughter got married and after having two children, she was not happy and divorced her husband. I know she drank some during this marriage. When she met her second husband it went downhill fast. She got pregnant before they married. She didn’t want to get married but did. Her husband was narcissistic and treated her horribly.

She started smoking pot with him. She did anything he said. She would drink at night and get drunk because it helped her deal with him. She did become a CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant) during one of her “I’m going to make something of myself” periods. Because they never had money she started working through the night and tried to stay awake during the day with the kids by doing meth after someone told her you could stay awake a long time with meth.

She was with her second husband for about four years and during that time she lost custody of her first two children and had to have supervised visitation. She also tried to kill herself twice and was put in a mental facility on both occasions. The four years with him was terrible on us.  Sometimes we wondered if she were going to make it through the night or would we get a call saying she is dead. We would receive text messages from her cussing us out.

Worrying about our grand-kids was probably the hardest part until the first two children were finally taken from her. We just prayed the third one would be safe. We gave her money so they would have electricity. We bought groceries so our grand-baby would have food. We acted at times like nothing was going on just to have peace. We were ALWAYS available.  I cried for one year straight, every day!  My husband and I were struggling because I wanted to talk about it, and he was sick of talking about it.

I started a new job, and my boss gave me the book, Four Seasons (which I read in 1 ½ days) and he introduced me to PAL because I had shared with him the struggle we were having with our daughter. My husband went with me because I asked him to, he really didn’t want to. When we drove home after the first meeting, we looked at each other and said, we needed this and will go back.

One of the things that helped us both (because of the guilty feeling) was “I did the best I could at the time with the information I had.”  We have learned not to give instant answers. Don’t enable  with money. After leaving her husband and living with us for a year, our daughter has moved to another state and has her own place.  She is paying her own bills and has been drug-free for 14 months.  She knows we go to PAL and is very happy we are getting help because she now realizes what we have gone through too.

PAL Parent