These past few days have been the perfect example of how it is to be the mother of an addict. My son has been clean and sober for 18 months but still has the personality traits that he had when he was in active addiction. He still has the temper, the “me first” attitude, the “I will say whatever it takes” mentality and he doesn’t care who is caught in the devastation.

My husband, his Dad, noticed that there was a vacuum missing from our house. Sadly this isn’t a rare occurrence. He actually had dropped off our grandson and noticed the exact same vacuum sitting at my son’s house so he came home and checked to find our missing. For some odd reason we have a bunch of vacuums and I thought this particular one had been missing for a very long time. He assured me it hadn’t. It was a real nice Dyson vacuum that his parents had given us but anyway this began a new outburst from our son. He was asked to return the vacuum.

Of course his response was the he didn’t take it, he bought it at a flea market, how dare we accuse him, stay out of my house, this is the final straw, I want nothing to do with my family, I’m doing all the right things, you are all dead to me, I never want to see or hear from any of you ever again, do not ask or try to see your grandchildren. These were all the things that were said to me. Of course I was in tears because this just tore out my heart. My head was telling me that these were empty threats, he would never cut us off from his children because he needed us where they were concerned. But my heart was breaking from the pain of his words and the devastation they left. I know that he is speaking from anger and I know that anger will pass but at the same time I don’t need to be the brunt of his anger. I need this to change.

He hung up on me. The next day I sent him a text acknowledging his feelings but also explaining mine. He then texted me asking if I wanted to go with them to a museum this weekend. He will not speak to his father and says I am the only one who has always been there for him even if we didn’t see eye to eye. There has to be a way to break this cycle. There has to be a way to make him see what his words do. I also understand that goes both ways. He cannot be accused everytime something is missing, although there is no one else that has ever taken anything. Instead of jumping to conclusions I need to take a step back and think first, of course there is the very real possibility that I will still come to the same conclusion but at least I can say that I looked at other options.

Now he seems to think that everything is just fine and dandy. It’s not, it’s not fair, and things need to change. Just when I think that they are we have another day like this. Breaking this cycle is so hard. We both made mistakes in this situation but only one of us made it their goal to utterly destroy the other.