Heartbreak of Addiction
My son is in the grips of addiction. Over the past decade, we have had to come to terms with what we can and cannot control. He is no longer a young man. He is on the “other side” of 35 years old now. I can’t ground him and send him to his room. I can’t make him behave like I would like for him to behave. The stark reality is he is in charge of his own destiny and there is little that any of us who love him can do to bring him back from the brink of his own destruction. I still struggle with the “letting go” part of being his dad. Of course. Anyone would. I love him.
I always say that I lost him the day I dropped him off at college. His dorm application was too late, and he could not get dorm space on campus and was randomly assigned with some older college students off campus. For me it was FAR off campus, thus he was not cocooned into an academic setting at all. He struggled from the start, although he was exceptionally brilliant. He had aced his advanced placement classes during high school and had always shown academic promise to a high degree. My husband and I always thought he would do great things in mathematics, or art, or music. He was talented in all of these things.
Although he did have some brief periods of success both in college and in finding and keeping a restaurant job, which he seemed to enjoy, by the second semester there were rumblings that all was not well…
