Drug Addiction Stories & Info

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.

I read a couple of the posts on here about losing mothers and I would like to tell you my story if that is okay. My mother needed a kidney transplant. No one matched her and her doctor thought it was going to be rough getting one. Why? Because she wouldn’t stop smoking and she liked to drink.

 My best friend’s mother, Ms. Shelby, got tested without telling any of us. When the doctor said she was a match, she told us. We were all thrilled. She went through the psychological counseling and was declared mentally sound. It really looked like it was going to happen.

Then my mother and her were called in to the doctor’s office. We figured they were setting up the surgery date. My best friend and I waited out in the waiting room with a couple of our family members. When my mom and Ms. Shelby came out, though, Ms. Shelby was crying. The doctor had told them that my mother was not approved because of her lifestyle. They would not take an organ away from a healthy person if the person receiving the organ refused to stop doing things that were not good for him or her.

Ms. Shelby protested that the decision was hers to make and she did not have a problem with it but the doctor said it would not be approved so his hands were tied. My mother turned to her in the waiting room and thanked her. “But I wasn’t able to do it” Ms. Shelby said. “It doesn’t matter. The fact that you offered means everything.”

I had never known my dad and my mom was the only family I had. A few months later she got really sick and didn’t come out of it. I went to live with my best friend and her mother. Ms. Shelby couldn’t save my mom but she she could and did take me when my mother was too sick to care for me.  Ms. Shelby promised my mother she would always be there for me and she has been.

Mother’s Day is coming next month. I’ll be going out to the cemetery to take my mother some flowers and I will be giving Ms. Shelby a card. In my mind and in my heart, I have two mothers.

I don’t smoke and I don’t drink. I don’t want to put the children I might have someday in the position that my mother had me in. She was hooked on tobacco and alcohol and I know she loved me, she just loved those vices, too.

One night, I thought about smoking and drinking but Ms. Shelby talked me through it. She said anytime I needed to talk, she would be there to listen. She told me my mother loved me very much and would be proud of me for learning from her mistakes. Seeing it from that point of view made it easier.

Thank you for putting these stories up. Knowing I am not the only one who lost a mother doesn’t make it easier for me or you but it helps knowing I’m not alone.