Walter was a typical upstanding citizen and a deacon at Wilsonville Baptist Church in Shelby Baptist Association. No one ever would have suspected that his youngest daughter, Maria, would become addicted to crack cocaine.
But she was instantly “hooked” after being introduced to the drug six years ago, Walter explained. That was when everything else became secondary to getting a fix.
“Eating is secondary. Breathing is almost secondary if you can get your hand on some crack,” Walter said. “The addiction is so bad even if you have to give up everything, you don’t care.”
But he and his wife didn’t know about Maria’s addiction for a long time.
“Her flirtation with drugs started in high school,” Walter said. “She had hid it well.”
But when Maria was 26 years old, married and rearing two daughters, things changed.
Walter said he can look back and see the clues, such as Maria always being broke, losing a lot of weight, having drastic mood swings or being sick, but he didn’t know about the crack cocaine until he got a phone call.
The caller said, “We’re taking your daughter to the hospital because she got an overdose of crack cocaine.”
“It was like, ‘Are you talking about somebody else? Crack cocaine, are you kidding me?,’” Walter remembers.
But he quickly knew this was not a joke.
Over the course of the following years, Maria was in and out of rehabilitation centers more times than Walter could count.
And each time, the story was the same: “She would constantly cry about wanting not to live like this, and we’d want her not to live like this so badly that we’d run and help. And then she’d go and do. And then she’d call back. And she’s your daughter, screaming, saying, ‘Please help me. I don’t want to be like this. I want to have my normal life again.’”
This is a constant cycle many families face, said Bill Heintz, executive director of The Foundry Rescue Mission and Recovery Center in Bessemer — an in-house, Christ-centered, 12- to 18-month recovery program “to restore hope and rebuild the lives of the addict, the ex-inmate and the homeless.”
“Because they don’t want to see their child hurt, they want to believe they won’t do it,” Heintz said. So the child thinks, “‘if I don’t have to change, if I’m always going to be bailed out, why change?’ It’s building up a reason not to get better. … If they get rescued, if they don’t hurt enough, they probably won’t want to change.”
Walter and his wife finally came to that realization, but getting to that point was not easy.
Fumbling for words to describe his emotions during this time, he said, “It’s not tough love. That’s a bad term. It doesn’t quite describe it.”
Pausing, crying, Walter continued, “People used to have old clichés: ‘I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.’ Think about that, the one that hates you more than anything on earth, the one that wants to kill you. There’s something that hurts you so badly you wouldn’t want to wish it on anyone.”
For him, this was such a case.
But he and his wife will always have “a million” regrets, he said.
“We regret we were naïve to think it couldn’t happen to us. … The magnitude just doesn’t strike you. This always happens to other people, not to you.”
Despite that mentality, Walter said, “You always feel like you can fix things. You always feel like you can stop it.”
He can remember sitting down with Maria many times and pleading, “You can’t live like this. This has to stop. You have to change.
“And being a dad and a grandfather, that’s it. I just fixed it. It’s over with. But that doesn’t come close. It’s almost laughable to think now. I didn’t fix it,” Walter said.
Now Maria is living in Argo, where she is maintaining a steady job. Her husband left her and Walter and his wife are rearing her two daughters. Last Christmas was the first time Maria had seen them in more than two years.
Although she is currently “clean,” Walter said, “[Maria] is still hooked. She’s straightening herself out but she has to do it every day.”
For more information about The Foundry, visit www.TheFoundryOnline.org or call 205-424-HOPE(4673).
EDITOR’S NOTE — Walter’s and Maria’s names changed for anonymity.
_________________________
Signs your child is using drugs
- dramatic changes in style of clothes, hair and/or music
- dilated, red or glazed eyes
- changes in attitude and personality
- dramatic mood swings
- sudden bursts of anger
- paranoia
- changes in sleep patterns
- eating too much or too little
- isolated from family
- hanging out with a bad crowd
- tardiness and/or truancies
- lies
- excessive spending or money disappearing
Share with others: