On Sunday I went to visit my daughter for the first time since she was admitted to Rehab. She is so full of hope, it was wonderful to see. She was talking about finishing up high school in two years, maybe taking some college classes and working on a singing career. She told me things she had learned about drug addiction, particularly to hard drugs like cocaine and heroine. She had experienced things that she was afraid to tell me about before (like having visual and auditory hallucinations during withdrawal) but that she learned were normal. And she never wants to go through those things again.
She is also learning about eating disorders. Her therapist told her that kids who develop ED have had control issues starting from a very young age, things that happen when they were so young and are buried so deep that sometimes they never uncover them. My daughter talked about when we first moved into our own home without her father (she was just a couple of months shy of turning nine). I used to travel about one week a month for work and my daughter would call me several times a day when I was gone. She told me that she used to be so afraid when I travelled that I wouldn't come home, that I would die in an accident or plane crash.
I suppose I should have realized how stressed my daughter was when she was younger, but I was wrapped up in my own issues and did not see what was happening. I thought that, because I was leaving her in the care of her father and her grandparents whenever I went out of town, that she was fine. Plus, she was always such an easy child, even as a baby. I used to joke about how she would switch so easily between breastfeeding and bottle, as compared to her brother who was much more difficult. He refused to go back and forth between feeding methods so we switched to just bottle-feeding when he was just two weeks.
My daughter was not a child who threw tantrums; the "terrible twos" never happened with her. But during those last few years of my marriage, when things were at their absolute worst, she threw a couple of major, screaming, throwing herself on the floor, kicking tantrums. The first was when she was in first grade, at school (while I was on a business trip). When her teacher asked her why she was so upset (she was probably 5 at the time), my daughter replied that she was "afraid her mom wasn't going to come home." When the teacher asked if she was afraid something would happen to me, my daughter replied, no, that she was just afraid I wouldn't come home. The second tantrum happened about a year later, when the kids and I took a trip at Christmastime without their father for the first time. She had no recollection of either of these incidents.
We talked about what happened and I explained that I didn't think the problem was that I was gone so much but that I was so unhappy during her early years. When she was about 5 or 6, she overheard me talking with a friend on the phone and I laughed out loud at something the other person said. When I hung up, my daughter marveled at hearing me laugh out loud; she had never heard that before. And when I watch videos of myself from when the kids were young, I am mainly a solemn presence in the background, interacting only when someone speaks to me directly.
At the last Al-Anon meeting that I went to, the leader chose shame as the topic for the evening. A few parents (who have young children) shared what life was like before they came to Al-Anon, when they were consumed with trying to control the adult alcoholic in their life. They spoke with great shame and regret about how they were not present and available for their children emotionally. On the flip side, when adult children of alcoholics talk, they often share about how they felt like everything that went wrong was their own fault. That if they had just behaved better, their parent would not have drunk or (or did drugs or let life spiral out of control).
I think that shame and guilt are useless feelings, tools of the devil to keep us from where we could be. They lead to embarassment and the need to keep secrets. As my daughter told me about her fears and wondered aloud why she had control issues, I suppose I could have stayed silent. Let shame and embarrassment about being such a sad and absent mother (both physically and emotionallly) keep me from telling her what she needed to hear. But truthfully, since I am neither ashamed nor do I feel guilty, it came out very naturally, very matter-of-factly. It's just how things were back then and there is nothing I can do to go back and change them.
I think I saw a light come on in my daughter's eyes when she realized that there were things going on that she didn't understand, that had nothing to do with her, but that she took responsibility for and internalized at that young age.
We're having our first therapy session together on Friday and my daughter asked that I tell the therapist all that we talked about, in case she didn't remember to bring them up herself. And I will.
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