When we all go through life everyone faces hard times. We all make choices and one choice can make ripples in the pool of your life. Here is the second in my series of blog posts of women that suffered with Addiction. Crawling through the fire and rising from the ashes.
I decided to do this series to show other mom’s and women out there that no matter how hard life is, it can be better. That you are never alone and that no matter how hard it is, it is never to late for you to start over. You might have a few set backs but everyday you get up and try again and again. This is your life, not a dress rehearsal. God will get you clean, and get you better.
We will be talking to, Melissa. Melissa decided to pull her life back together after years of addiction. As a Mom she knew that she needed to change, in doing so she had to face major life changes. This story breaks my heart. As a mother I couldn’t even imagine the heart break Melissa must have felt.
I’m a thirty four year old mother of five. My life has not always been bad, from my teenage years till about three years ago it was like I was living in hell. I know that I have struggled with addiction for most of my life. I come from a family that is full of alcoholics, many are junkies. This was just part of what I grew up with. Living in a home with two alcoholics was a major influence in what I thought was okay. What I thought was normal. My drug of choice was always meth, I started my addiction loosely with alcohol being at a young age when I started, it was easy to get. Especially when my mom or step dad didn’t notice. Here is the truth though. I would take or do whatever was available. It didn’t matter what it was, if it would get me to feel numb and like nothing else mattered in the world then that is the drug for me.
There really wasn’t a reason that I started rebelling at a young age. Never no rhyme or reason I just did. By the time I was in the eighth grade I quit school, I don’t know why I was even allowed to quit school. I ended up in Juvenile detention, better yet known as Juvie. I was their for a while. While I was there I had a very structured and regimented lifestyle, responsible for daily cleaning duties as necessary. no television or radio amenities within the pods that we lived in. The food was so horrible I can still remember the taste like it was yesterday. The uniforms that they put you in are starched so much that when you take them off, they stand up by themselves. I was there a total of three times and one of the times I tried to escape. I had become friends with a few of the girls and then we made a plan. We beat the officer down and got her keys, leaving. It didn’t take long for them to catch up with me. Sadly this is the way I made it on the cover of the Bremerton sun.
The other girls were mean and in their for far worse things then being a run away. When I got out it didn’t take long for me to figure out that I didn’t want the calm quiet life of little Bainbridge Island any more, I wanted bright lights of the big city. I felt like a captive looking out over the dancing lights on Puget Sound of the Seattle city skyline. Its there that I felt like I would fit in and belong. So off to Seattle to live with a man that I had met that was so much older then me. It was as if this older man knew that I was young, impressionable and starved for love and attention. He knew I needed a place to go and I thought that I would find safety and love from him.
Within a few months, the older man became the father of my first baby and then a year later the second baby came along. Here I was a baby myself and was going to have two babies that were only twelve months and three weeks apart. I felt like I didn’t really have anything else to do but get married to him. Here I was at seventeen married with two babies. I left him shortly after that because nothing made us get along. It wasn’t something I thought that the babies should be going through. He being so much older then I was it started to show just how little that we had in common.
During the Divorce I then moved back home to the quietness of beautiful Bainbridge. Thinking this would be a great place in the country for me to raise my babies. Shortly after moving back I hooked up with a guy who was quite the catch when we had been in school. Feeling like I was on top of the world and that this was picture perfect. We were around the same age, knew the same people, from the same little town. We knew what growing up on Bainbridge was like. We were the it couple for a while, feeling kind like the high school prom queen and king, He had been really heavy into the drugs, not that I hadn’t tried most of them but it is crazy just how heavy into using the drugs he really was. My life started to go down hill, there was tons of fights but just as crazy the fights were our love for each other was passionate, hot and never dull. Until we got together shortly into the relationship we were weekend warriors until I turned twenty one. That is when I started bar-tending and the alcohol and drugs became a daily thing to do. With my then boyfriend, using as much as he was, lost his job. We has a bright idea that selling would be a great idea. Needless to say that idea was terrible, it just made the drugs take our lives over.
After a couple of years I was making more selling the drugs then I was making bar tending so I quit working, making a living selling meth and pot. I could get you whatever you needed and whenever you needed it. I was on top for a while. In 2004 I got pregnant with my third baby but my addiction was really bad I couldn’t quit and I didn’t quit. I smoked meth up until the day I gave birth. To this day this is one of the hardest things that I have to deal with. I know that these choices will haunt me for the rest of my life. I still was able to bring her home from the hospital. I continued with my addiction and selling the drugs still. I never thought of quitting either. We were home for about four months when they raided my house and took my kids. I had just lost everything. I ended up going to prison I did sixteen months on a DOSA sentence. You would have thought that was enough to change my life around, sadly it wasn’t. When I was released, I was using before even leaving the parking lot of Purdy. ( Women’s prison.)
At this point in my life I felt like I had nothing, everything had been taken from me. I had nothing to loose so my addiction went to needles. I became an IV user and I completely destroyed everything including myself. I lost my two oldest as they went to live with there father. While I was in prison my mom watched my children the entire time. I lost my third baby, that I had used with because of my choices and actions she was adopted out. I have not seen her since she was two now she is almost nine years old now. By the grace of God she was also born healthy with no mental or physical issues at all. I call her my miracle child, I miss Mary every second of every single day.
Then after a year of using I was busted again, I was looking at prison time and I was lucky enough to do the Drug Court program, that program saved my life. I thought at first i would fake it until I made it, I was gonna use again but six months into the eighteen month program my life changed. I never wanted to do meth again, how ever I never really drank even though I had heard about cross addiction i didn’t think it was gonna be part of my story yet here i am telling it. I thought I could drink like a normal person so i graduated from the Drug Court program and started drinking more and more. My boyfriend and I broke up after almost 12 years because he wanted to use meth again and i just couldn’t go there again. Now at this point I had my two oldest back in my life and had a fourth child with my boyfriend and this was a way to kinda fill the loss and void of the one I lost. I lived on my families property in my own house and thought life was fine but my drinking getting out of control.
Then I was told that I had a large brain tumor and had to go in for brain surgery which they were not sure if i was gonna make it so riddled with fear my drinking got even worse. I had surgery and pulled thru it. Even after that I kept drinking A LOT finally on November 19th 2011, I woke up early hung over knowing that I couldn’t go on like this anymore. Taking my second chance with my babies I realized that I was not a mother. I was a drunk bar slut that was nothing. After all my fight to remain here I was still killing my self and showing my kids the wrong way to live. That morning I went to a meeting, after that first meeting I went every day after that for the first few months.
I Detoxed myself at home which was a painful process. I started to clean up my life. I sold my acre on the Island and moved away and bought a home in Illahee. I continue with my sobriety, with knowing that God does still love me today. I can feel it! What a great feeling it is. I have my kids except for my Mary. and my son because he turned eighteen, he now has ventured into the world.
I was blessed to meet a man that knows where I have been and how far I have come, along with the decision to remain sober everyday. He came from the same destruction and today we have a beautiful baby boy together. Today I can lead by example and I owe everything to God and would never change it for anything. I still attend a lot of meetings. I am now leading by example for my children and some day I hope I can meet my other daughter and she will forgive me for all the wrong I have done. When I look in the mirror every morning I now know that I am doing the best I have ever done. I not only owe my children this, and my husband, but most importantly I owe this to myself.
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