Addiction

 Meeting new people is often tricky. I dread the question "How many children do you have?" probably much like anyone who has lost a child must dread it. They must make the choice to say either "I have 3 but one passed on" or just leave it at "3"...or maybe "I have 2 living children" but that seems to just invite more inquiries.

For the parents of an addict, this question only brings pain. Because often the next question is "What do they do?" and you know where that's heading. Do you brag about how well your other kids are doing, then drop the bomb? Do you just ignore the question as if you never heard it?

Being the parent of a junky, an addict or alcoholic is beyond hard. I imagine it must be a lot like being the parent of a child who has disappeared for years. Were they kidnapped? Did they run away? Are they alive? Dead? Happy? Tortured? Never getting the answers to those questions, and never being free to grieve the loss of that child, living in a kind of tortuous limbo somewhere between grief and hope. But hoping is a dangerous practice which can cause even more grief...best to stay away from hope. Yet how can we not hope...hoping for a happy ending to the nightmare story we have been dropped into?

All of the grief and hope and scenarios manufactured in our minds certainly wears on us. The pain is constant, never ending, and very cruel.

If we answer the above question honestly it usually causes an awkward silence from the one who asks. Probably because they don't know what to say or didn't really want to know the truth, they were just being polite. So we usually just lie and say our kids are doing well, in order to spare their feelings. But sometimes the truth does leak out, like on a particularly difficult day when that question seems the cruelest and we are just too raw and we can't ignore the elephant sized heartache inside of which we live every day.

Perpetually waiting for someone you love to love themselves enough to choose life takes a toll on your sanity. It stretches your capacity to love further than can be imagined. And it tests your faith in a good God to the very limits.

The waiting also teaches so many things, grace being a real biggie. We learn how to extend grace to others, recognizing pain is behind their harsh words or actions. We learn compassion for broken humanity. Our eyes become open to the "other" people in life, those whom we might not have noticed or felt compassionate towards without our hearts being broken. We learn that life isn't about some self-inspired standard of perfection or any sort of end goal. 

Life is fragile. It is a gift, no matter the wrapping. We learn to cherish the lessons, while we reside in the sacred space of the unknown. We press on, addicted to hope.