 |
|
COYOTE ARCHIVE
Dick Prosapio aka, Coyote is a member of the TMC Advisory Council, ceremonialist, psycho-
therapist (ret.), author, leader of men's experiential workshops, & Co-founder of The Foundation for Common Sense. He lives with his wife and daughter in Stanley, NM
For more info about Dick Prosapio, visit his web-site:
Spirit/ Earth Path
E-mail:
|
|
by
Dick Prosapio
She left the same way she came back, her clothes stuffed into black garbage bags. The look on her face was different this time though. When our run-away daughter came home, a year and a half ago, she look scared and a little relieved. Scared of my, and ultimately, our reception to her coming back into the family after a year of no contact and one aborted "rescue" attempt. (We had gotten the word through her girlfriends that she couldn't get out of her situation with her gangster boyfriend. We sent police on a look-see. She didn't want to leave.) Relieved, as it turned out, to be able to eat real food again and to not be living day-to-day expecting a narcotics bust.
Her look this time was sadness mixed with disbelief. Sadness at the parting of course, disbelief that we had finally stood our ground and said, "This far and no farther."
I've never lived with an addict before. I had a one year relationship with an alcoholic, but at that time I had no clue about what was going on. I just knew that I felt crazy a lot of the time not knowing how any given evening or dinner party would turn out. And always being surprised. Never pleasantly.
If you don't know what it's like living with someone who is drinking and/or drugging I don't recommend exploring it. With our kid addiction came complete with a set of behaviors which always accompanied her drug use. In fact, before we had a clue that she was using again for a fact, our suspicions were aroused by the slow and inexorable onset of the same behaviors we had seen before. The only reason the alarm didn't go off was that it was all so subtle and easily overlooked. Ultimately, she had to hit us over the head with it and come home so wasted, and this is exactly the right descriptive word to use, that she couldn't wake up for work and slept eleven hours to get out of the stupor she had put herself into.
The funny thing is, a lot of the response we still get from friends and relatives when we tell our tale sounds like, "It's just pot?" If we substitute booze for our descriptions of her use, then they can relate. But "just" pot? No problem.
Never mind the stuff of the addiction, it's all the baggage that comes with it that is the core of the thing. And there's this to consider; when whatever is being used to alter consciousness takes precedence over all other things in the users life, that's a problem. For our daughter, using "just pot" was more important than being with us. It was that, plus the dealing, the driving under the influence, which she does not do well, the nodding off, the sleeping for long hours, the broken promises, the incessant lying, the general chaos her life was becoming.it was all of it.
On the day I am writing this our hill top home is in the middle of a cloud, a literal cloud. We are blanketed in a gray, drizzly fog. It is a perfect outpicturing of our internal landscape. The only relief we feel is that we will not have to plan any more involved strategies to deal with what our daughter will be presenting us with tonight. We will not be using all our awake time and lost sleep time figuring out what is true and not true, which, in an addicts case is mostly the latter.
And the sun will come out tomorrow.
|
|
 |
