Day 102 – “What they did wrong?”

Monday, 5 March 2007
Day 102 / 25 (59) – “What they did wrong?”

We had lunch yesterday with my brother’s soon to be inlaws. It was quite an interesting and eventful day. It was the first time I’ve actually spent a whole afternoon with all of them and I would welcome them to the family any day. The subject of my heroin addiction came up, as it is common knowledge in most of our families. Since one of their family members had the problem, their dad as somebody who technically speaks from experience had a chat with me.

He said two things to me. One which I’ve come to know as truth since starting my recovery and something completely new to me that maybe I’ve never thought of before.

The one thing he said to me was that this choice lay with me. No matter what I did, what happened, who tried to do what for me. In the end the decision to take or not to take lay in my hands and mine alone. If I really wanted to – no force on earth would stop me to get it. He saw it in his family – I knew it to be true in mine.

But the second part of the conversation caught me off guard. I knew my parents probably blamed me many times for the pain and destruction I caused the whole family. None of them started using heroin but all of them were thrown into this whirlpool of affects due to heroin abuse. What I never considered was that maybe at a time my parents thought it is all THEIR fault?

Could they really have been asking themselves all this time what they did wrong? Where they slipped up? I guess all parents want the best for their children and this life wasn’t exactly the best for me. I haven’t been the most model of kids after high school. I shocked them year after year with yet another truth that probably made them wonder what they did wrong?

My parents haven’t read the blog yet. I’m hoping they’ll start soon and whenever or wherever they start to read it, they’ll get to this day eventually. I want them to read this entry and remember...

Not the bad things I’ve done, thinking that they could or should have done something differently, because nothing they did or said could have changed the course of these events. I’m hoping it all happened for a reason, and so it would have found a way to happen, anyway. I want them to remember what a strong boy they raised. Able to make his own mistakes and more importantly learn from them. Able to count his losses and rise up from them more determined, more positive – and stronger. That is the boy they raised – and in my eyes there is nothing wrong with that.