It takes a village - Youth CVTC Speech

Being a parent changes us. It turns us into people who base our decisions on the welfare of others, people who take as much or more pride in the accomplishments of our children as we do in our own, people whose very existence is defined by our relationship to another.

Parenthood lifts us up to the greatest joys, giving us the ability to persevere through sleepless nights, find patience when we believe that there is none, and to live with teenagers.

It also makes us infinitely more vulnerable, as our world can also be shattered by our offspring. Their bad decisions become our own failures, their loss is the end of existence as we know it.

I have felt that vulnerability for years. First as the mother of an addict, and with increasing intensity with every relapse. And over the last 21 months I have felt that vulnerability as someone who lost part of what was most precious to her.

When my daughter died, I started counting life by days, and eventually by months. I’m not yet to the part where I think in terms of years – much like when we first have a child and we count each new joy by the hour, I count life by the emptiness that was left behind when my daughter died.

I want you to understand who we are. I have always been a bit of a wall flower. I would much rather watch events than be the center of attention. My daughter, Elannah Rose, was my polar opposite. She was ready to take center stage from the moment she was born. She ran head long into any adventure she could find.

Elannah Rose barreled through life without fear, she collected loved ones along the way and continuously impressed us with her ability to be confident and comfortable in any situation. She started out with such an extreme measure of confidence that it was hard to see beyond it into the troubled young lady she became. She was precious to us, and we were prepared to do anything to make her life successful, including uprooting her from our original home in northern California, to come to La Crescenta, and all it offered.

We picked La Crescenta not only for the proximity to my husband’s family, but also for the schools, and the somewhat small town atmosphere that seemed so appealing and just a bit surprising this close to the city – at least to me, since my hometown actually was one of those typical small towns where you can’t go to the grocery store without catching up with everyone you know, every neighbor is in your business, and as a kid when you stepped out of line, your parents knew before the dust settled.

The first few years here seemed like paradise, even though this neighborhood was probably always a touch out of our budget, we found a way to make it work because it was well worth it to have our kids grow up here.

When Elannah Rose got into middle school, we knew that she was struggling a bit with the more complex social structure and relationships, but there was never a sign that things were desperate for her. We were still sitting down to dinner together every evening, her dad still checked her homework every night, and we saw many of her friends on a regular basis. She still seemed to confide in us about all the right things, and we made sure that we had all of the important conversations with her, so that she could make wise choices about boys, drugs, school. In all of the areas that we were supposed to provide guidance, we made sure to.

By the time Elannah Rose got to high school, things seemed to settle down. She found her niche in the drama classes, she joined comedy sports, and her social circle grew. We thought that she was thriving, as a matter of fact, I regularly confided in my friends on how lucky I was that her teenage years were so easy.

Our idyllic life was shattered when, at sixteen years old, Elannah Rose confessed that she was using heroin, and had been using drugs of one kind of another for the past three years.

I can’t describe our horror. Elannah Rose had, in recent history, displayed complete shock and disgust over stories of drug use at school, being particularly disgusted when one of her friends was caught smoking pot. How could that girl be the same person who was now telling us that she wasn’t sure she could control her drug use anymore?

At this time, Elannah Rose was working part time and doing incredibly well at her job, she was also generally doing ok at school, and I can’t say that we ever noticed any specific decline. She was still highly involved in her extracurricular activities at school and was excelling in her dance classes. I kept wracking my brain… how had we missed this?

We missed a lot. In hindsight, I almost guarantee that if I was more alert to the risks, I would have seen the signs. Like any other parent of an addict, I can find a million ways to blame myself. But I also know this…

Elannah Rose was what is considered a high functioning addict. High-functioning addicts like Elannah Rose appear to be extremely successful, happy, and productive individuals who on the outside, just don’t give off signs of their addiction.

How terrifying. Even now I don’t know what to do with the idea that I could have had a person with such a horrible problem living under the same roof and not have seen it. What a complete failure. As a mother, as a human being. To not notice that this perfect creature that I made and raised was in such a dangerous state of mind and of health.

I don’t know if I will ever live through another day and not feel how much I failed her. And if every person in this room were sitting in judgment, I would understand. Because I was her mother. I was supposed to see it. I was supposed to be alert and to be paying attention. What was I doing instead?

I mentioned that Elannah Rose had already been using for three years by that time. She tried speed for the first time when she was thirteen, in the girls’ bathroom at Rosemont Middle School. She got the drugs from another student. In her time as an addict, she found it exceedingly easy to get access to any drugs, whether she was obtaining them from another student, or from people she met at our local convenience store, she could find someone to give her drugs if she wanted to.

For weeks after we first found out she was using drugs, I felt like I was living with two different people – my daughter who was so together that you couldn’t believe that she was doing anything, and this other person who picked at their own skin, couldn’t keep her hands from shaking, and hid homemade heroin pipes in her room. I remember at the time I wondered if she was exaggerating her behavior to mess with us. At some point, I did actually convince myself that while she may have tried drugs, her actual use had been hugely exaggerated.

At Elannah Roses request we kept her addiction a secret, even from most of our family. A few people knew, but only just enough to keep her in line – to scare her with cop stories about drug busts and jail, addiction stories from another recovering addict, and anything else we could think of to help her. Keeping that kind of a secret takes its toll.

When Elannah Rose seemed to get it together again, we believed that she was sober. We thought our home detox methods were actually successful.

We were so naïve. I later found out that she was only behaving normally because she was using again.

Unfortunately, this realization came after a few more cycles involving relapses. Each time we would threaten to send her to rehab, and each time she convinced us not to, and to continue with her horrible secret.

During this time my husband and I fought daily. We talked about divorce. I was convinced that it didn’t matter how much we loved each other, we would not make it through Elannah Roses addiction. This addiction, which wasn’t even ours, was going to come between us because we could not agree on how to handle it, and how to handle our daughter.

This whole time, we were trying not to let life suffer for our other children. And we may have fooled ourselves into thinking we were doing a good job, but looking back I can see how unhappy our household was.

I became so frustrated that I regularly snapped for no reason. I was a different mom, a different person. I think it was kind of a safety mechanism, I tried to control everything else, because I couldn’t control my daughter’s addiction.

This went on for about two years, during this time Elannah Rose lied to us regularly, successfully passed home drug tests while maintaining her drug use, and refused to acknowledge her problem with any real conviction.

Shortly after her 18^th birthday, Elannah Rose was arrested for possession. She didn’t tell us, like everything else in her other life, she did everything she could to keep it a secret.

I found out about the arrest one day when I opened our mail and there was a letter from an attorney offering their services. This was what life had become. A series of nightmarish surprises that ruined any comfort we could find on a regular basis. Now we were dealing with court, trying with renewed effort to get her into a rehab program. Desperate for anything that would save her.

My desperation made me believe that she was clean at an opportunity. I’m sure it’s easy to judge, from the outside, how stupid we were. How gullible. But let me remind you that, yes, we caught her doing bad things, but she was always functional. Except for the first time that we found out, she never displayed signs of her addiction. Her performance at school didn’t change, she was still dancing, and she was still working and had received a great promotion at her job. She was still highly functioning. She was still lying every day.

A few months after her high school graduation, I caught Elannah Rose smoking heroin in our garage.

Even when caught red-handed, Elannah Rose wouldn’t admit to using. By now we knew that she couldn’t continue to live with us without endangering her brother and sister. We agreed to kick her out of our home, as she still refused to go to a detox or rehab facility.

It only took a few weeks of couch-surfing for Elannah Rose to realize that she wasn’t willing to lose her family over her addiction. She agreed to go to a rehab facility and we checked her into one in Tarzana.

After two consecutive visits where we heard about other patients being caught with drugs on hand, we agreed that it would be best to move her. Elannah Rose moved to a recovery center in Culver City, which appeared to work.

The change was amazing. Not only was she in rehab, but she was going to counseling and surrounded by people who wanted to overcome their addictions.

Elannah Rose did very well for a time. Eventually, she slipped and used marijuana. Her relapse changed her. She became moody and difficult. She stopped participating in her recovery, begged regularly to come home, and eventually became deeply depressed. She began cutting herself to fight the need to do drugs.

Eventually she cut her wrists so badly that she was transferred to a lock down medical facility. I cannot describe the horror we felt at seeing our pint sized daughter, arms bandaged, locked up in a fenced in area with deeply sick people. It might have been the best thing for her. By this time her chemistry was so altered from the drugs that she needed medication to help her achieve normalcy. Her doctors were given the chance to find the right medication to help her to do so.

Once her chemistry started to normalize, Elannah Rose recovered beautifully. She went from the ward to Casa de las Amiga’s in Pasadena, where the strict program worked for her. She once again seemed to thrive, to fit in well and start to make connections. She started to seem happy, like her old self. It was a dream come true.

We looked forward to our weekly visits. We attended family therapy with her. Once she moved to sober living she would walk down to my office to have lunch with me, or visit after work. She was my baby girl again. It was amazing.

During one of our family therapy visits I broke down. The theme for the night was to talk about our biggest regrets.

After years of desperately trying to keep it together, I couldn’t answer this question without losing it.

 I am sorry that I wasn’t a better mother. I am sorry for everything I missed. Maybe if I had been older, wiser, had more to offer her, maybe she would have been ok. It was my fault. All of it. She was just a little girl that first time… I should have been there for her, she would have made better choices.

I was sitting in a room full of parents and their daughters. Most of them probably financially better off, some of them less well off. I was the youngest mother, some of them were grandparents. Addicts and parents alike corrected me, if it was my fault because I was a young mother, what was their excuse?

My daughter held my hand and did her best to explain that these were all her choices, and that nothing I did made her an addict. She lovingly explained to the room what I had given up in order to raise her, and everything she loved about me.

I think about this almost daily. It is a gift to have heard it, I carry it with me because I cannot carry her with me.

Eventually, Elannah Rose came home. She wanted a chance to be a good sister, and she was. She helped Abby, our middle child, with her homework every day. She spent every moment possible with her brother, who was three at the time. She had their names tattooed on her wrists so that if she ever got the urge to open them again her love for her brother and sister would remind her of what she had to live for.

We had months. Amazing, wonderful months in which she was perfectly her old self. I thank god for this gift, because it ended swiftly and suddenly.

One night, she didn’t come home on time. I was so angry. She had skipped her AA meeting to go out with a friend, she was supposed to be doing homework, but she was not. She was shooting up heroin, for the first and last time.

I was in our bedroom, my husband had decided to wait up for her in the living room.

I heard the door open, and something fall. It was my husband, when I came out he was sobbing on the floor. There was this woman standing there, repeating over and over that Elannah Rose was at the coroners, and I kept asking if I could see her. I don’t know how many times she had to repeat it. I started screaming, I couldn’t stop. At some point I turned around and Abby and Noah were standing in the hall. Still screaming, I bundled them up to take them across the street to my in laws house.

I still can’t pull the details together in my mind. I remember trying to get my brother in law to understand what had happened without actually saying it. I remember that woman asking to speak to someone who could keep it together.

I remember that the whole time that I was ranting about my daughter being late, she was dying. I was angry at her while she was lying alone in a gas station bathroom, breathing her last breaths.

I kept asking to see her. I wanted to hold her. It’s not like the movies or TV, I never got to say goodbye, I didn’t identify her body, and in later, weaker moments, I would pretend that there was a possibility that it wasn’t her.

Time became fragmented as we prepared for the funeral. I would sneak away to comb through her Facebook page, to look through pictures of her and to watch videos. Someone uploaded a picture of her laughing and I couldn’t stop watching it. I couldn’t stop because I would never hear it again.

I will never see her again. When she was an infant I had nightmares about bad things happening to her, now I have nightmares about her decomposing body. I can’t sleep on my own and I have to sit in my car every morning and cry so that I won’t cry during the day, or in the evening when my kids need me.

It’s been 21 months. I don’t know when I will be better.

My poor kids, Abby and Noah, now have to deal with me worrying about everything. It might be worse for Abby, who can remember a time when I didn’t freak out and assume she was dead if she didn’t answer the phone.

Strangers have to deal with the discomfort that comes after they ask me how many kids I have, because I refuse not to acknowledge Elannah Rose, and eventually I have to tell them that she is gone.

I’m sharing this with you because I hope that my loss can do some good. I hope that my daughter, who wanted to make a positive contribution to society, can do so through her story.

I was careful not to use the word “overdose” tonight, after reading an obituary for Phillip Seymour Hoffman last week in which the writer says that Mr. Hoffman “did not die from an overdose of heroin — he died from heroin. We should stop implying that if he’d just taken the proper amount then everything would have been fine.”  It’s such a simple and true statement. My daughter didn’t overdose. She died of her addiction, which was an illness she couldn’t manage, and there was no amount of the substance that she was addicted to that was safe for her to take.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about how I will keep my remaining children safe, since Elannah Rose died. I am not in law enforcement, I am not prepared to fight a war against drugs, and I am not interested in living a life that feels like I am at war with any part of my environment.

What I can do, is live like I am in a village and look to my neighbors to do the same. I love OUR children too much to live in my home like my neighbors are strangers. Having come from a small town where everyone is in everyone else’s business, I can tell you that that is much preferable to living in a town where not a single neighbor came running when I was screaming bloody murder. Or the code of silence that kept my daughters friends from telling me when they learned she was using. Or that same code of silence that allowed me to keep my daughters addiction a secret when I learned she was using.

I will never pass by a child who is in need. I will make sure that my home is open and safe to any of my children’s friends, I will be there for any of our kids who need help or who need help recovering from poor decisions. As much as I prefer to stay in the back ground, I will stand up in front of any crowd to raise awareness and wake up my community. And it is not our kids that need to be awakened, they see what their peers are doing, whether they speak up or not (and they must learn to speak up). It is our parents that need to band together for the good of our children, to wake up to the dangers that face them, and to do everything in our power to be the village that watches out for them together.