Drug Addiction Stories

In one week, my son turns twelve.  I had him when I was 19.  I gave him life.  I also gave him fetal alcohol syndrome.  I didn’t even know what that was.  I had seen other girls and women drinking from time to time when they were pregnant.  They smoked just as much when expecting as they did when they weren’t so I didn’t think it was a big deal.

Till Billy was born. He was so small, I nearly lost him.  My ex-boyfriend took off when he heard I was pregnant and I did a little too much drinking to deal with the pain.  When Billy started school, he had problems with understanding and learning. 

Today, Billy is sort of an outcast.  He argues a lot with other kids and from everything I have researched, I am worried.  His counselor said he could be prone to acting out and even end up in trouble.  However, he also said that since Billy has been coming to for the past year, that he sees a difference in him and in me. 

Sometimes I used to get aggravated with Billy and then I remembered that I caused this.  How am I going to feel if he does some day get into trouble?  I try to keep him busy.  I keep him in church.  I have given him chores and responsibilities to do around the apartment.  I spend time with him and I am actively involved with his soccer team. 

He is going to be twelve next week but in some ways he’s so much younger while in others he is just so different.  But he has taught me one thing for sure: I LOVE HIM.  He is my son and I adore him and I am going to work hard every day to make sure that he does not become another statistic in the fetal alcohol syndrome books. 

I did this to him.  Therefore, I’m not going to let him down again.  I pray for forgiveness every day and I am even involved with a counseling group that tells our story as part of their way of helping others and educating teens on drinking and drugs and what they can do not only to the users themselves, but their unborn children. 

Next week, Billy turns twelve.  I’m proud of him and working hard to make sure he gets through life without any more fallout from my mistake of drinking while pregnant.  If you are reading this and you are pregnant, I am begging you, please, PLEASE, don’t drink.  It really will hurt your unborn child.

I can’t tell you the exact moment an occasional drink became an every night thing but I do know the time-frame quite well. I was engaged and happily planning a wedding when I found out that my beloved fiance was married. Married and still quite involved with his wife. Seemed the two of them had what is known as an open marriage. Even with four kids, they happily went about their lives both separately and together. In this instance, instead of the wife not knowing, it was the girlfriend in the dark.

I was easy to fool. His friends and even his family members that we associated with never breathed a word to me about it. Here I was, planning a wedding, and there he was, never even filing for divorce when all along I thought he already was.

One night, he didn’t come home. I was worried and called his sister. She told me he was probably with his wife. What? He said he was divorced! She said that yes, that was how it was with the two of them. One or the other would meet someone and then the other would get involved with someone, making each other jealous. It was a game they had played for nearly twenty years.

I was numb. I remember drinking an entire bottle of wine that night and eventually changing to Jack Daniels. I didn’t go out with friends, I didn’t socialize after work. I was an idiot and I was broken-hearted. Till the day one of my ex-fiance’s own family members helped me.

His wife’s cousin came to see me. She told me she knew what I was going through because her husband’s best friend had fallen for the guy’s wife and been played as well. But my problems could not be solved in the bottom of a glass. She knew because she herself had once been an alcoholic. She knew about my trips to the local liquor store, that’s right, still another of his family members worked there, the cousin’s son.

With the help of a person related to the one who broke my heart, I began going to meetings and have been sober for four years now. I am also dating a really nice guy who is serving in the military and last week, he surprised me with two bits of news: he received orders to transfer three states away and he proposed.

Today, as I once again plan a wedding, I look back and can not think anything but relief and gratitude that, instead of being married to a man who cheats, I am preparing for a life with a man who is sincere, strong, caring and loving. He knows about my time as an alcoholic and he accepts me for who I am.

I had urges to drink for a long time but honestly? I haven’t had them in over a year. I’m volunteering with my local chapter of AA and plan to do so when we move as well. I hope my life’s turnaround will help someone else just as it has me…just as a woman who owed me no favors did a huge one for me the night she helped me seek help.

As she stood there in her wedding dress, I smiled. My daughter was beautiful. Still, I knew this special occasion would have a touch of sadness about it as her dad would not be there to walk her down the aisle. He had died several years earlier while she was still a teen. He had fallen ill one day and while at the doctor, we found out he had severe liver damage. He had been a drinker since the age of 12 and it had caught up with him. At the age of 37, my husband died.

Dana was cautious about drinking. She would not go with her friends unless they promised not to have alcohol. I knew that she could have just as easily gone the other way as many kids take up the very thing that takes control of their parents. Still, there are many who, while learning a painful lesson, use it to enhance other areas of their own lives. Dana was one of those young people.

I stepped forward. “Dana, sweetie, this is for you.” I handed her a locket and she looked inside. A picture of her father was in it. Just because someone lets drugs or alcohol take over their lives does not mean they don’t have loved ones and my husband was dearly loved. Dana hugged me as the tears fell between us. “Thanks, Mom, now Daddy can walk with me down the aisle.”

I know my husband did not set out to purposely hurt our family. He was an alcoholic when I met him although I did not realize how bad it was. Back then, it was simply partying to us. But his drinking got worse and worse and when he lost his job at the plant, he began drinking around the clock. He was never a mean drunk, but he did get depressed during that time. Still, when he got the diagnosis, he never acted like he was a victim and left letters for our two children and me. Dana’s brother would be walking her down the aisle in their father’s place. Like her, he has steered clear of drinking as well.

Dana had read the letter from her father the night before, one he had requested be opened when she got married. He was the one who had requested the locket be given to her for this day. I know he would have given anything to be here and that he would be proud that his beautiful daughter and handsome son had stayed away from the very thing that had killed him, alcohol.

“We did good” I whispered to my husband as the music started and one of the groomsmen led me down the aisle to sit at the front as the mother of the bride. “We really did good.”