Confessions

AD was supposed to have gone to Seattle (on the other side of the country). He was posting all over Facebook he was moving there..had hit up old friends for ticket & start-up money. I dared hope it was true..I wanted it to be true. After everything we have been through I honestly never want to see him again. I feel tortured in this life and the only peace I have gotten in the last 8 years are when he is jail or in psych holds. He told me when he got out of jail he was on Medicaid..when he was with me (lasted 3 days) I gave him a computer to look up therapists and doctors who could assess him and make recommendations for treatment/meds etc. He didn't do that and of course he is not on Medicaid so he remains uninsured and he does not want "another f- ing program which he calls "crap." So he is still very close and now we have to go to the county court for a PPO. I am also meeting with the chief of police in our township to apprise him of what is going on and get some guidance on what to do. The judge told me the mental health system here is very overburdened and very underfunded. I feel so trapped in this nightmare...AD won't help himself; we can no longer live with this horror and the system is designed to deny services or those services are inadequate to the scope of the problem we are dealing with. AD will not take care of himself, he will not stop using, he is intent on destroying himself and taking as many family members with him as he can. We are afraid of him..Period. He has those cold, dead eyes and he is chock full of hatred, bitterness and blame. Add in mental & emotional illness and addiction and I don't see where this will get any better...probably ever. He repeats over and over that he wants to die but he has for years. I just want to live the rest of my life for my other three and the ones to come. I want to be able to retire and snowbird it in an RV with the dog. The reality now is we are afraid to leave our home due to threats and life is lived in fear and uncertainty, always waiting for that other shoe to drop. Sometimes, in my darkest hours, I wish him dead so this will end. Then I feel like crap...

Today I blocked AD from messaging me on Facebook. I have ignored any calls I suspect are from him and delete his voicemails without listening to them. As expected, he has started sending me text messages through his email accounts. The messages were angry, threatening and hostile yesterday...today they are pleading and conciliatory. He says he needs another chance, he cares about us..different day, different tactics. I am not allowing him to rent space in my brain anymore.. Also, one of my twins set up a phone conference with his friend's dad (our District Court Judge)..we don't have any easy options but he gave me some legal advice on PPO and court-ordered treatment. No matter what happens, if he ever goes in front of any of these judges again..they are apprised and ready and will not fall for his crap..AD is very articulate and a very good actor...

Here is the fall-out..today is Day 1 of my new resolve not to enable..to "let go and let God"..to put "Nothing Changes if Nothing Changes" into practice. My sister dropped him off in his usual sleazy hotel in Ann Arbor last night..about 25 minutes from our home. She paid one night & that is the last we do. All day I have been getting threats and ultimatums from him. He claims to have gotten his old job back at the restaurant (he had for less than 3 months last spring) and he needs hotel until job starts on Monday. I blocked him on Facebook..and am blocking the number he is calling from (U of M Hospital). If he is on the hospital campus he should be able to seek help there you would think. He keeps saying he is coming back here and if we don't let him in he is going to "put us all on CNN, something spectacular"...all I have to do is give him a hotel, food and "nominal" spending money to spare us this fate. My other boys are taking me to the courthouse on Monday to file for a PO...He says he has nothing to lose anymore. Neither do I. I wish he was never born...so many years like this, I feel like I will never know peace or stop looking over my shoulder. The neighbor borrowed an ax and was just going to set it on the side of the house. We told him to keep it at his house and we would borrow it if we needed it. So this is how we live now...but no more wavering..this ends NOW...

My husband and I continue to support our son in every way possible as though he were a small child. He's been in the same job for going on two years and has been living in our rental house paying minimal part of his expenses for more than two years. Now he has a dog and we babysit the dog M-F with him picking up the dog and eating dinner with us after work. This is enabling at a really high level esp. since he continues to neglect all his adult responsibilities even to the dog. He's driving our car without a license. But he's also more normal in terms of his mood control and calmer in a general way. He is totally socially isolated, which is probably a good thing given who his friends USED to be. That is, his social contacts are not face to face but on the internet playing games. He works as a video game tester. He acquires his marijuana legally, but in great excess. With his insulin pump, his sugar is pretty much under control. He retains his disturbing hatred for his sister, cannot understand why her life is going comparably well or how her earning about 3 times as much as him is likely to influence her life for the good long term. We can probably continue to subsidize him maybe six months longer, but when the money is gone, his rage and hysteria will probably return. Like his grandfather and his uncle before him, he refuses to take his snout out of the family trough. He thinks we're suckers because we always worked instead of mooching off others or getting into the marijuana trade. Well, even in the absence of denunciations, rage, drama, constant crisis, I am getting sick of all this. I have been realizing that I actually don't like him very much. I am thinking that we need to list the house for sale next spring and maybe give him warning that he'll need to be out of the house by then. He always claims to hate living as far as he does from work. Or would I be aborting some sort of recovery prematurely?

Dog, I am hoping you are OKAY. I hope everyone is approaching inner peace.

Dog, I am hoping you are OKAY. I hope everyone is approaching inner peace.

Dog, I am hoping you are OKAY. I hope everyone is approaching inner peace.

My AD has gone to detox. She was worse than I have ever seen her, barely able to stand on her own. This is a testament to the progressive killing nature of this disease. Again, helping her to get funding, as she has no insurance, took every advocacy skill I know, and thirty years in advocacy has given me a good bit of knowledge. She wanted this. She asked me to help. All these years, ten of them, I am different. No begging. No forcing. No cajoling. I, no, we, my husband and I told her: if you want help getting to rehab, let us know. Otherwise leave us alone. And her current beau told her the same thing. As did the friend she sometimes stays with. The only one who did not tell her this was the evil pimp ex bf who of course, bought her H. And regarding that horrible person? I have realized that he is not worth hating, not with condemning, not worth damning. He is evil. Evil is already damned. So I am here again, with a little tiny bit of hope. I am not planning a funeral, which I truly believe I would have been, had she not gone on Friday. I am at rest that I have done all I can. I am powerless over all the facets of her disease. I can only control myself.

I've been reading a book, Loving an Addict/Loving Yourself: Top 10 tips for survival. It has some great insight on helping vs. enabling as well as the best chapter on co-dependency and manipulation I've ever read. I've got a lot of work to do (bummer).

I hope that when I give you all the reports on my son's ups and downs that one things remains constant--------I am working on me. Yes, I will still "help" my son, but continue to learn not to enable him. This is a "one day at a time" program for me too. Thanks for all the input and support. You all have great insight and ideas!