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Addiction and all that it ruins
So another quite heavy subject.
I have had addiction close to me almost my entire life. But this isn’t going to be my story about addiction, nor is it going to be my feelings to be a bystander to someone using some kind of drug or substance. Today I will try to do my best to describe the story of someone who is really close to me, this is her story of alcoholism that surrounded her and how it ended catching up with herself at the end.
This could be almost any place in the world, at any given time. A little girl is celebrating her 14th birthday, happy but sad at the same time because her mom is unfortunately not feeling to great, maybe she has a flu or a beginning migraine. Well, the circumstances don’t change that it is a normal school day,and this pretty girl is taking the hands of her siblings and runs of to school this beautiful morning. She can’t wait to come home again and getting celebrated by her loving family. Her parents don’t have much, but they get enough to make ends meet, most of the days. But it is okay that they sometimes go to bed with hungry stomachs, because they always know that they have enough love to go around and share.
She sits in school on her regular chair, all the way out on the edge, while she watch the clock closely. The time is slowly walking by and she is just waiting for the moment that the bell is going to ring. When it rings, she is going to run out of the room, find her sisters and head home. The seconds ache in her as she almost holds her breath in total eagerness. It rings. She gets surprised by the sound, even though she has been waiting, she runs out the hallway to find her sisters and heads home in running speed.
They turn the corner, but instead of birthday celebration, she sees the tears running down the face of her aunt with her parents nowhere to be found. No cake, no surprise, no happy faces. She gets stopped by the heaviness in the air, once again she is keeping her breath, but this time it is because she is so frightened. She is still grabbing on to the hands of her youngest sister, almost hurting her in her own desperation over the situation. She is looking at her aunt, but the moment she gets eye contact, her aunt turns away and starts crying again. They walk down the driveway in what feels like slow motion, scared of what will meet them when the reach the door. The door is open, and inside they still hear the sniffles. The atmosphere tells her that nothing good can come by walking inside but they cannot stand out on the porch the whole day, so being the oldest she mans up and steps in as the first. Once again they see their aunt but this time she turns around to meet the little girls’ questioning eyes and she answers the unspoken question with one sentence that will change everything for the girls, “Your mom wasn’t feeling so well this morning, so your dad toke her to the doctors, but honey, it was to late.”.
This event had so little impact on the universe and though it totally shattered four small girls’ lives.
Their dad, who without any doubt loved them, started drinking, and he drank heavily. He wanted to comfort his daughters, but he couldn’t figure out how. He struggled everyday with so much pain himself that the only answers he found was at the bottom of most bottles. He wanted to pick all four girls up as if he was Hulk and tell them that he wanted to give up everything if that would bring back their mom, he would sacrifice a sense to give them the opportunity to say one last goodbye. But he couldn’t say these words, because he couldn’t make them come true. So in his own total despair, he kept drinking afraid to look into his kids eyes and seeing the pain he could not take away. So now, that little girl, who got her birthday permanently crushed, had to grow up within a second and take care of her sisters, because she was all they had left.
The little girl grew bigger, but not much. She was the mother of her sisters on a daily basis and she felt the huge responsibility of taking care of her sisters, making sure they where happy, full and clean. So when she met a boy who showed interest in her she took the opportunity to go wild for once. So the little girl and the boy fell in teenage love with each other, and feeling like grown ups, they did what grown ups do when they are in love. Nine months later the little girl who now had become a women gave birth to a beautiful baby daughter by herself, but the boy was nowhere to be found anymore. Once again, she had been abandoned by someone she loved, and once again she had to toughen up and take care of someone else.
Fast forward some years, and now the little girls baby had become a girl. The mom, as she now was, had found love in a new man who overwhelmed her with gifts and affection, mostly to cover up for his guilt of drinking to much and getting violent. Not even 21 years into her life, and she was convinced this was what life was about. So time after time he would come home drunk and time after time she would let him beat her, because she knew how sorry he would be in the mornings, and everyone knows that you have to make sacrifices for love. She had tried to leave him, but he always found them and brought them back home. So she gave up. That was until the fatal night he came home a little to drunk and a little too angry over absolutely nothing. The big sum up for this evening; she screamed, her daughter screamed, he yelled, he beated and he almost killed her, right there, right in front of her little girl’s eyes. She knew she had no choice anymore, they had to get away, NOW! So she took the first weapon she found, a big barbecue fork, and she jammed it through his knee, giving her and her kid enough time to run out the door, and never look back. The only thing she had in her baggage where more feelings about hurt and devastation.
Being a single mom had its difficulties, so when a young soldier came by and starting curting her, she had a hard time saying no, even though she really wanted to let those words slip over her lips. He could give her a life she had only dreamt of until now, but as with every dream come true their is a dark side too. This soldier lived more then towns away, he lived more than countries away, he lived an ocean away. So she tried to not like him, but he charmed his way into her life. And what started out being a innocent flirt to feel good about herself, the sad little girl got another life to take care of when she got pregnant with her second child. So she thought long and hard and she decided to give up the last parts of her life from where she grew up and all alone she moved her now two beautiful girls an ocean away to start a new fairytale. Or so she thought.
She loved her girls and she loved her soldier, but as with any summer romances, they tend to end when summer ends, and summer did end. And instead everyday began, and she found herself in another situation controlled by the man in her life she loved. This time older then before and therefore she divorced him and in realization of the better conditions he could offer, she temporary gave her youngest daughter to her father. Just until she would get back on her feet again. The lost may had been a short term solution, but the pain of losing someone she loved tore her apart again.
Still not turned thirty years old, she fell in love for a third time with a man just a damaged as she was. So they beat the slots together. Well, unfortunately this mans the solution was the same as her father’s and she had no strength anymore. No strength to move, no strength to fight the battle for him, no strength to say NO anymore, so she, herself, started to drink. And oh my gosh, she toke her revenge for all the time she had tried to fight all the pain so bravely.
She turned thirty and drank, she turned forty and she drank and she turned fifty and she still drank. People had tried to help her stop, but the problem was that even though the little sad girl was now grown up, in her head she was still that little girl that needed comforting, but she ended never letting people close enough to do so…
So she is still struggling daily, and she still loses her battle sometimes. But halfway through her life, she has decided to get the help she needed, even though she knows that this will be a battle for the rest of her days.
So what is the point about telling the story about the little girl? Before judging people for the life decisions stop and think if they perhaps have a story in their baggage that you can’t imagine. Maybe even a story you can’t bare. People don’t make bad decisions because it seems fun or the right thing to do. The get caught up in bad spirals, and even if you want to help someone you can see needs it, you have to wait till that moment where they want to help themselves. That can take 5 minutes or 3 decades.
Spread positive energy and be kind to everyone, give them a hand instead of turning your back at them, you just never know when your kind deed will save someone.