Addiction Journal

The Baby Photos

Sometimes discussing the emotions that are associated with having an Addict in the family helps me. These emotions seem weird if left internalized and I wonder if others feel the same way as parents of addicts.

We look back at our child’s pictures when they were infants, young toddlers, early grade school, well before the addiction entered their lives and we ponder. We look and say “What the hell happened? How did that cute young boy, dressed in the nicest clothes, end up being a heroin addict?” Hopefully we grasp the Three C’s of Al Anon and learn that we truly did not contribute to the start of our child’s addiction. However the feelings parents or loved one’s of addicts have are unique to this family disease. We can not control the occurrence of these common emotions, only how we deal with them.

When my son was actively using I would mournfully look at his old baby pictures. His mom had him dressed so wonderfully;cute bow times and Osh’Kosh B’Gosh were the fashion choices of the time. His outfits screamed “I am loved!” The pictures of him playing soccer, little league, basketball are mixed in. How could a child that was so loved opt to strap his arm off with a leather belt and jam a needle into his vein. The image haunted me until I began my own recovery.

We hear from other parents that if we had only kept our child in sports or other activities such a fate would not have occurred. However these pictures of little league and youth basketball say otherwise. The fact that many all star athletes are now addicted to pain medicines put the exclamation point on this argument.

My emotions are also stirred when I see small groups of young children playing in a playground or youth event. I wonder not “IF” but “WHICH” child will fall victim to a lifestyle I would not wish upon my darkest of enemies. It is a sad realism that runs throughout my thought process. The young 20something parents have no idea of the addiction freight train that is roaring down upon one or two of the children in that group.

I would figure that most people that read this “ADDICTION JOURNAL” are already soldiers in the war. I sincerely hope this blog helps alert a few parents and others to the fact that, those kids in the baby pictures are good kids with a disease. They were raised properly in good homes all across the USA. Wake up and take a look at Wall Street and the companies like Purdue Pharma who have marketed the poisons that have ripped the souls from our youth basketball stars and cheerleaders.

Tagged with: addiction, baby pictures, children, choices, sports, youth

Categorised as: Journal Entries