“So as he spiraled out of control, I spiraled emotionally. For the first six months, when I found out he was in active addiction, I went to bed for six months when nobody was looking.
My head was my hell. I’d create stories that I didn’t know to be true. ‘Was I a good enough Mom? Did I treat him differently than his brother? Did I love him enough? What did I do wrong?’ And it would just be like, ‘What ifs’, ‘Could-haves’, ‘Should-haves’ - will make us crazy.
And so about six months later, I had got out of bed and I was in my family room and a thought came and said, ‘You know, you didn’t cause this. This isn’t from you.’ And there was this sense of relief like ‘No, I didn’t shoot drugs into his veins. I didn’t crush Oxycontin so he could snort them. I didn’t go buy drugs for him. It had nothing to do with me.’
But in that moment, I realized, ‘Oh boy, I have a secret.’ So this is like, late 1990s to 2000s - you don’t talk about this.”
