None of the pretty words on your “do better” page mean anything to someone from “the ditch.” That’s where I and my husband of 30 some years have come from and for most there is no way out.
My husband quit smoking, years later I quit smoking. We walked away from our smoking, drinking, drugging family, the Drug Culture & That World and have not looked back since. We have no one but ourselves but there are no middle-of-the-night phone calls for someone in jail or stuck w/a flat out on the interstate. No niece or nephew has been beaten to a pulp or been put on the missing persons list. We told our family why we were leaving and that they were welcome to come along but no one “took the call.”
We sat by the sides of my husband’s parents who both died too early from tobacco and alcohol related illnesses. They died terrible deaths. We did our best to watch over my elderly parents in their last years but they had put my alcoholic brothers on the legal papers. Their endings were filled w/neglect and we were powerless to intervene. But we did the “right thing.”
We said when we left “that world” behind; we would do the right thing until we could no longer do the right thing and that motto has served us well. I am in my 10th year of starting my own business while hubbie is rounding the bend towards retirement. We have volunteered in the community. We have tried to make friends but all the persons who care for themselves and others have all the family and friends they need.
We haven’t found a church yet where we might find friendship. We just don’t fit anywhere now but we try to be content with our health and growing sense of accomplishment in this personal quest, this Herculean step out of the Dysfunctional World. The Co-Dependent World. The place where everyone owes the other guy something. A place where lots of secrets are kept. We have lots of scars but we don’t stumble anymore. The word success neither of us knew until we made the choice to leave that life.
I haven’t seen this truth about the state of our world anywhere: That we are two worlds. The sober world and the stoned. Is that too harsh for your tender ears?
The sober world forms clubs like “Just Say No” and all their sober kids run the programs while all the stoned kids are out back smoking up a storm. The sober world creates drug prevention programs but they can’t include the parents because than the kid who needs help will disappear. There are no psychiatrists on TV talking about drugs. When talk of poverty and the inner city begins rarely is addiction mentioned.
And so round and round we go.
And so by practicing tough love, which has been erased from the lexicon, we two have created value where there was nothing but sorrow and chaos. We are earning successes everyday in spite of what we were dealt.
No one will hear our story though. That there are two worlds and not a bridge between them has been the secret of the ages from time immemorial.
Melissa Whitehead
Driedbydesign.com
