My brother and his wife have failed their child.
This last weekend, I went to my nephew’s 6th birthday. We went bowling and he was surrounded by his friends, their parents, and his grand parents and one of his two aunts (me). I watched him laugh and play with is friends and having the time of his life. But every now and then he would walk away from them and take a seat where it was quiet.
When he sat down you could watch the happiness drain from his face starting with his eyes. You saw the light leave them, and then get clouded with pain and confusion. Then you saw his smile disappear, and the corners of his mouth would start to fall like he was going to start crying, then he would notice that and bring them back up into a blank stare at the ground. At one point I saw him look down and his bottom lip just barely quivered and I thought he was going to cry. And just like it had appeared, it disappeared.
His parents weren’t there because they put their addiction before him. About a year ago he was taken by CPS and put in his maternal grandfathers custody while he was a ward of the state. My brother and his wife have failed showing up to court, taking their drug tests, and doing everything in their power to regain custody of their son.
If you decide you want to have children, you are no longer your only responsibility. That child you decided to bring into this world now is the center of yours until the end. It’s your job to put their needs and wants before your own. You made that call when you decided to make that child, to put them before yourself.
I’m not going to blame the drugs for the mess they have made of our family. Or the heartbreak they are causing your only son. I’m blaming you, the parents, for making the conscious decision to use again. I don’t know if she was the one that started using first or if it was my brother. Either way, they chose to take the pill, do the line, or how ever it is they took their drug of choice. Both suffered from addiction in the past and they met through clean and sober houses.
They were together for a few years before deciding they could try drink again. “It’s just a glass of wine that we are sharing, it’s really not a big deal” that should have been a red flag right there but we wanted to give the benefit of the doubt. One glass, leads to two, which leads to no longer sharing but each having their own glass. That one glass turns into two glasses, which then changes from wine now to liquor. We should have said something, and we could have attempted to reason with you more. But we didn’t try to reason, or even truly say what we thoght. We failed you by not saying anything and letting you start with that glass of wine.
I would have thought that us losing our cousin to a overdose of the same drug would have woken you up and showed you that this disease will take your life if you didn’t stop using. But it wasn’t. And I don’t think anything will ever wake you up. She’s even overdosed and been luck enough to be revived the two times its happened but that didn’t even wake you up.
Right now I’m just waiting for the call that I got when we lost our cousin. I’m waiting to have our mom call me in hysterics again because this time it wasn’t her nephew thats dead, its her son. I’m waiting to hear that she also has over dosed but this time wasn’t able to be resuscitated like the last two times when she got lucky.
God forbid this happens any time soon and your son has to have his papa tell him that his mommy or daddy have passed away. How do you explain to a child that his parent(s) decided to start taking drugs, and those drugs eventually killed them? How you tell a child about addiction when they don’t have any idea what that is?
Why are you putting him in this situation? Why do you not care anymore? When did you decide that he was better off without you? What made you think that a child doesn’t need his mom or dad?
There is no good reason to think any of that or to have even put him in this mess of a situation in the first place. The only things you will tell us as to what you “think” the answers are, are truly piss poor excuses because the day you decided “I can take opioids prescribed to me and not abuse them like I have in the past” was the day you lost your battle with addiction.
Once an addict, always an addict. Sure you can recover from this, and you can turn your life around, but you have to stay strong and not go back to the substances that destroyed your life in the first place.
You both think that the world owes you something for the shitty hands you were dealt? The world doesn’t owe you a damn thing. No one owes you anything, not even those who have wronged you. Figure out that everything that has happened to you is because of a decision YOU made. You burned your bridges with those that cared about you and you are the only one that got you to where you are. Once you can accept that then maybe there will be hope for you in the long run, but until then, you’re gonna have to keep laying in the hole you dug yourself.
areudirty
stormborns
gummygunk
blakekathryn
tangentwithtanner
