Forums » Relationships in Recovery

Letter From a Daughter (powerful stuff)

    • 30 posts
    March 19, 2022 3:12 PM EDT

    Hey my 14 year old daughter wrote this and is calling it the Life of a addicts daughter, I thought maybe you could share this!!! me losing my mom wasnt the same as you losing yours and me losing my dad wasnt the as you losing yours. the people who don’t understand what you’ve been through say over time you’ll heal and that things will get better. and that God gives his strongest battles to His strongest soldiers. but nothing could ever heal the hole i have in my heart from losing my dad. it’ll never make sense to me on why his life was taken and i could never find forgiveness for the person who took it. my life has always been chaos, before i was on this earth my life was chaos. i was born into a world where drugs, violence, loss and pain would forever be my life. the addiction is a never ending cycle whether it be the lifestyle or the drug. and there will always be someone else i know lose their-self to it. it will always be something i think about and the thought of it consumes me. to me it’s normal and i found comfort in that life. and as bad as it is that life makes me feel at home. you’ll watch two people who “love” each-other fight and you’ll think that’s the way people who love each other act. that fighting then staying is a way love and loyalty is shown. you’ll see the meth pipes and heroin needles you’ll find the cut up straws and you already know what they are but when you ask they’ll still look at you in your face and lie. they’ll take you to the trap house while their picking up their pills and hop into the car like nothing happened. growing up with addicts give you a different point of view on life and everyone you meet. you keep your family life to yourself, and most of the time dream of a life your friend has. you lie about your whole entire life. you get asked where your parents are, and what kind of work they do. most of the time lying is a choice but sometimes you have to. sometimes you lie for no reason like where you live or lie about things to make your life sound better than what it is. sometimes i lied because of the embarrassment that would take over me. i wasn’t embarrassed of my family, just of my life. you go without your parents and the people you love for periods of time, either when they get locked up or just whenever they decide to not come back. and you start hating them for it, untill they come back and every bad feeling you had goes away. the emptiness you’ve felt goes away and you feel complete again. and you hold onto it as long as you can until you know you have to give it up again. you never get a warning of when it will happen, it just does. sometimes you don’t know where they went and you mind is full of what could’ve happen to them. you get use to the cycle and eventually learn to live with it. but eventually when it keeps happening you don’t believe in the promises anymore and you stop forgiving. you become meaner to the people around you and to yourself. as the people around you are loosing their selfs so are you, but the difference is that you’re 9 years old with the mind of an adult and you were forced to grow up fast. you were forced to parent your parents. and to parent yourself. you meet a lot of people and you don’t remember them all. but you grow up and see how many of them have been murdered, you see how many of them have OD’ed, you see how many of them are locked up. you can’t help but feel bad for every other kid who’s going through what you’re going through. and you imagine what if that was my mom? or my dad? or my uncle? but your imagination if your reality, it was your mom and it was your dad and it was your uncle. and it’ll continue to be other people you love and know. you’ll find yourself doing anything to fill the void of the love and attention you don’t get. you want the love and the attention that the people around you fail to give. all your sadness and pain turns into anger you can’t control. you start getting into trouble and doing stuff you shouldn’t be doing. you start being compared to the people who are giving you this anger. the ones that you love. people will think you are a bad and uncontrollable kid. when really you’re not. you just have no guidance and you don’t know any other way to express what you’re going through and you’re alone. not physically but mentally. everything that you go through will be with you permanently. and it will forever affect you and how you act. no one ever talks about the life of an addicts kid and no one ever feels pity for the kids like me other than the ones who’s gone through it too. you’re not given a chance to be your own person or to change. you don’t get a chance to build your own reputation because you’ve already been given it. you never feel like you have a friend that understands you and the life you’re living. or someone you can just talk to. then over a decade later your mom will decide she wants to get clean. after you’ve already had to go through everything, after the damage is permanent. she’ll decide to get clean and to come back after my whole childhood is over after all the hard parts are over. you have hard feelings about it but you still are so happy to hear those words even though you’ve heard them a 100 times before. you cherish the 3 days you get to spend with her before she leaves to go to rehab. because you don’t know if that’s the last 3 days you’ll ever spend with her or the last 3 days you’ll ever hear from her. you want to believe that when she leaves she’ll be going to rehab and that she’ll get clean. but once you’ve heard it so many times you stop getting your hopes up. and all you can do is hope and pray that it’s the truth. i guess i can’t blame my mom for deciding to get clean after the damage had been done. because at-least she got sober. at-least she wasn’t sticking a needle in her veins anymore. but it’s hard trying to forgive someone you spent your whole childhood forgiving. and trying to forgive the people you continuously worried about even though you weren’t even on their mind. you are their child but they weren’t even thinking about that. i wasn’t enough to get my mom clean. and it’s heartbreaking to think about. im your kid why couldn’t i be enough? why couldn’t you do it for me. and sometimes i still think about it like that. but that’s what addiction is. nothing will ever be enough to get someone clean other than their self. i’ll try to forgive but i could never forget even if i wanted to. your favorite times will be when you hear from them or receive a letter in the mail from jail or prison. those letters will be something you make sure to not lose. and you’ll read them repeatedly just so you can read those words again “ hey my princess. hope this letter finds you safe and doing great.” and “ i promise to you this is the last time i will have to say sorry to you for anything bad.” most of the times you hear the exact same things in every letter. and the broken promises continue to add up. and what’s messed up is that i’ll have to pay the consequences for the stuff i had to go through. and i’ve been paying them throughout my entire life. parent days at school with no parents to show up, plays with no parents in the crowd supporting you .my list forever continues. but i find beauty in my life at the same time. i’ve always been thankful for everything i’ve ever gotten and i’m humble. i’m thankful for the childhood i experienced and everything it taught me. i’m thankful for my awareness. i’m thankful for myself and my intelligence. i’m thankful for my street smarts. i’m thankful for the people i’ve met and what they’ve taught me even for the people who’ve taught me what’s wrong. i don’t find the beauty in all of it because not all of it is beautiful. i mostly find the beauty in the lesson vs what happened. i think that’s what it means to heal you don’t have to forgive but at-least find the decent in it all. i’m a soldier and it’s not because God gave me the strongest battles it’s because i got through them by myself. i’m a soldier because at the end of the day i defended my people even if i didn’t have no hope in them. the real gangsters are the kids of this lifestyle. no one will ever have your back like the kid you left behind no one will have as much loyalty and love for you then the kid you left behind. the realest ones aren’t the addicts the realest ones are the kids of the addicts. i’m not an addict but i had to live the life as one so where’s my chip? me losing my mom wasn’t the same as you losing yours and me losing my dad wasn’t the same as you losing yours. it will always be different and it’ll never be comparable. when i close my eyes i can see my dads lifeless body. and i can picture everything that happened to him. i can feel the pain he endured. it’s a suffering feeling that i will always have, but it’s a suffering feeling i’ll always hold onto because it includes my dad. i’ll never have him again physically and i never really did. but i’ll forever have him apart of me. i’ll never understand why someone could take his life over something so little such as a drug and money. but now i will always have to live with it. my moms alive but when i close my eyes i can see her soulless self whenever she was on drugs and the way she lost herself when her mother died. i never even really saw my mom clean but you could just tell more of her started dying over time. i lost my mom from drugs even though i never really had her. i can feel the pain she had too. i suffered without my mom and i’m just now finally getting her back. she’s lucky and anyone else who is an addict or was that’s still alive is lucky . y’all take y’all’s life’s for granted and don’t appreciate them enough. y’all take y’all’s kids life for granted too. don’t even realize how many times y’all could’ve lost them putting them through what y’all did. but i find every person who’s gotten clean strong. and i find everyone still in addiction strong. i find the ones who lost their life to it strong. i find the ones who got killed for it strong. me losing my mom isn’t the same as you losing yours and me losing my dad isn’t the same as you losing yours. and that’s just the life of an addicts child.