Holiday Blues

This time last year my daughter had just come home from rehab. We were going on walks every night and as we would walk through the neighborhoods fully decked out with Christmas lights we debated over how to properly decorate a Hanukkah house.

I remember how normal it felt, how peaceful – and how much I felt like I finally had my baby back. It was really the first time since her addiction took over her life (and ours) that I started to feel hopeful that everything would be OK.

Tonight, as I drove by all of the fully decked out houses and parked in my bare driveway, I felt so sad. Even after everything we had already been through I think back on those nights and think of how naive I was. Hopeful is a better word, but tonight I find myself thinking that hopeful is just naive dressed up.

It’s hard not to feel robbed and ripped off and angry. My daughters struggle is over, and oddly I sometimes feel grateful for that – for all of the things that she didn't get reduced to, for the fact that she doesn't have to fight her own demons anymore.  But even though she is now at peace, I can’t seem to find any.

I can practically hear people thinking “it’s been six months, when is she going to get her shit together?” I honestly don’t know. Every few weeks I manage to moderately pull myself together, start responding to phone calls and emails and text messages, start to manage my calendar and my bills, and then everything falls apart again and I’m trying to pull everything together at the last minute because my mind won’t manage the finer details anymore. Six months doesn't feel like all that long any more. Time is dragging, but it’s also speeding by – so that occasionally I am shocked that she’s been gone so long.

I keep trying to figure out how she felt, why she made the choices that she made. I can’t get my mind around the lack of caution that causes someone to try those kinds of drugs and the chemical or emotional reaction that makes them keep going back. It’s so confusing and devastating to know that nothing we did mattered in the end and that I can never truly understand. It doesn't matter how many times I comb through her notebooks or talk to her friends or to any expert. I am lost and even though I am traveling through this awful time with my amazing and supportive family, I am somewhat alone.

I imagine what people think about my girl, what I have thought about addicts at various times and I think of who she was - all of the "hers" that existed over the course of her life. She was someone perfect and precious and I am trying so hard to focus on those things that I did understand about her.

I want it to be last December, and to be able to find some way to save her. I want to understand what I did wrong so that I can protect and guide my remaining children. I want to stop having to explain that I had three children, and now I have two. I want to be hopeful again, I want to have faith. I have a feeling it will take awhile.

My baby girl