In my last post I described a little of what Mike and I’s teenaged years felt like. To continue on that thread I will tell you that by the time Mike was around 15/16 years old he was deeply buried in the swirling world of his constant drug use, trying to keep his demons from catching up to him. It was easy to go along with the painted perspective that Mike’s pain and problems and illness were all his own fault and that it was simply up to him to stop it himself, and even further: that it was justifiable to be angry with him for his suffering because when his pain spilled out and affected any one of us it was because of his “selfish choices,” as if he was selfishly choosing to annoy us with his bleeding out and cries of pain. It may seem harsh to describe this way, but that’s because what happened was harsh. It was dark, it was devastating, it was full of pain stabbing in from all sides. This is a story of a family engulfed by their collective pain.
By these years everyone was drowning in fear and anger and pain. My parents were distraught and at a complete loss for what to do about 2 sons lost deep in the trenches of their shame and addictions. They tried everything from moving to homeschooling to calling the cops on their sons to scare them into behaving. They tried to use religion to fix them, which only ever made things worse since the religion was so steeped in shaming thought patterns and beliefs that it only inflicted further harm. They did everything but see or address the real pain or acknowledge the ways in which the systems we were living in were harming all of us. They believed what my brothers were doing was sinning and that they were being bad, instead of seeing 2 sad kids that were disconnected, in pain, and trying hard to escape. Something they had learned from the church and other systems/institutions they had grown up in was to blame the “sinner” instead of taking a look at the system instead. This is something toxic systems do to keep people weakened enough to more easily control, and also to keep people from noticing the true source of pain as the systems so we don’t try to leave, overthrow, or change that system. It works well, because instead of ever seeing the system as the problem, people will spend all their time blaming the individual for making bad choices and then blaming themselves for not knowing how to have prevented it from happening. They think the only options available are to blame their kid or blame themselves as the parents, but never dare defy, question, or critique the system itself.
This is the atmosphere/energy that prevailed until I went off to college. At this point I was mostly angry with and disappointed in Mike because I was under the impression that he could stop using drugs any time he really wanted to but just chose not to and that must just be because he doesn’t want to stop badly enough. I was hurt by that. I was hurt that he would steal from me in order to pawn my stuff to buy drugs. I was hurt that he would drive a vehicle with me in it while high and crash us into construction barriers on the way to early morning seminary. I was hurt and I blamed him because I was taught only to see his fault in all of it.
While I was in college, our parents moved back to Brazil with our youngest 2 brothers (and by this time our oldest brother had come home from his mission, gotten married, and moved off to Arizona) and Mike and I were the only two left living in Florida. I had an opportunity arise where my roommate was getting married and thus leaving our lease, which would mean I would have the whole apartment to myself. I decided to extend an invitation to Mike to move in with me so he could get away from the crowd he was around and get clean. I had high hopes. I drove the hour and a half to where he was living and picked him up, all of his things shoved into a single black trash bag.
He humored me. More than just humored me, I do think he really convinced himself at the start, while he was still feeling good, that he could really do it this time: Just quit, cold turkey —Turn a new leaf and just magically be healed, cured, whole again… just like that. This was his fantastical dream and sometimes I think he truly believed it could be done like that: just skip the healing, avoid working through the pain, and go straight to the healed part. His healing was never going to come about without a lot of work, time, effort, and authenticity, born of love. His healing was never going to come without his tribe rallying around him expressing unconditional love and acceptance of him, without the people mattering most to him actively loving him sans conditions or judgements, sans shaming him.
So Mike and I went on just as naively and innocently as we had as kids, scheming up a plan to really for real run away from home and have a grand adventure together. This time the game of make believe was that we could get him clean simply from wanting to badly enough. We had a really good couple of days but he soon became violently ill from trying to detox completely cold turkey. He asked me if I knew of anywhere to get some methadone nearby. I didn’t. I was helpless as he would throw up in the bathroom and sweat through his sheets in the night. I took him to a priesthood holder for a blessing to help him get through his detox. Later that night Mike laughed as he described “shitting blood” into the toilet and reminded me that detox, especially cold turkey, ain’t for the weak of heart. Again, he asked if I knew of where to get methadone in the area. I could tell he was only getting worse. One more night of suffering and by morning he was gone. All that was left behind was a note saying “I’m sorry, I couldn’t do it. Got a greyhound bus back to Orlando” and a pissed off downstairs neighbor saying he borrowed their DVD set and didn’t give it back —plus a few missing DVDs of my own. I had lost him.
I tried to stop and see Mike every time I was in the Orlando area and through those visits I met a couple of the girlfriends he had at different times. There was one he was excited to introduce me to, “she’s so cool, she reminds me a lot of you actually. I think you two will get along.” This would become a sentiment he would express multiple more times about future girlfriends, each time as hopeful as the last. Unbeknownst to me at that time, this one would become the mother of his one and only child. She and I were introduced to each other and he told me he was so in love with her and just really wanted us to know each other and be good friends. He seemed to want me to approve of her I noticed, which surprised me as I hadn’t ever considered until then that he might care what I think. I didn’t realize just how much he cared what everyone thought of him. He always cared so deeply but wanted to act like he didn’t in order to protect himself from the rejection and shame he was so accustomed to feeling.
A few times Mike expressed to me how he had given up on trying to get any “good LDS” girls to date him because none of them would want anything to do with someone who had the kind of life experiences he had had: someone who never served a mission and also had an addiction problem. He was right because the church was actively teaching young women to seek out a returned missionary to marry, and to choose to date and eventually marry only young men with the highest moral caliber and strongest testimonies (AKA the ones following all the rules the hardest). He was very much an outcast within our community system. So, he confided in me that his plan was to instead find a girl who was as “messed up” as he was, and then convert her to Mormonism and they would get clean and mentally healthy together and basically live happily ever after. Even in the midst of all this pain he was trying to figure out a way to conform and fit into one of the systems causing him the most harm and damage on a day-to-day basis. He had been taught to believe everything was his own fault and that he deserved all the hardship he experienced. He was taught to believe that if others didn’t feel safe and loving towards him, it was because he was bad and made it hard to love him. It was so imbedded in him that he was the problem that it came out of his mouth constantly as if it were just fact. I would see a lot of this in the letters he would later write to family members from prison.
There’s a certain amount of mystery within Mike’s adult years for me as by this time we were not living under the same roof anymore and I was off doing all the things that were expected of me: going to college, getting married (to a returned missionary, of course), and starting a family. During that time Mike’s girlfriend had gotten pregnant mere months before I did with our first child. So, I found out I was going to be an aunt maybe just a few months before I found out I was going to also become a mother myself. Mike was ecstatic about this. He was envisioning his life as the daddy and protector of this little girl, and excited to know that she would also soon have a cousin near the same age in my oldest child. He was very excited when I gave birth about 6 months after his baby girl was born and he exclaimed to the world on Facebook that he was an uncle! He could feel his fantastical dream of just kind of “getting over” his substance abuse problem one day within his grasp. He had the romantic love, the growing family, and a future full of hope.
However, his girlfriend was suffering and struggling just as much as he was and unfortunately, they both were in so much pain and struggle that the relationship just couldn’t be healthy and thrive. By the time his daughter was born their relationship had ended and his name was decidedly left off of the birth certificate, much to his dismay and protest. Things had gotten ugly again. He kept trying to find his way into his daughter’s life but he knew that the best thing he could possibly do for her was get clean. So he relocated to Arizona in order to start fresh and get his life together, to prove himself worthy enough to be in her life. Again, he had every intention of finally and magically just ending his drug abuse by just wanting to badly enough. During his time in Arizona he had a lot of ups and downs. He would do well for a while and be earning steady enough income to send money back to his daughter to help support her, and beg for every opportunity he could get to be able to speak to her and see her in video calls. Then he would fall again, slip back into his old ways, and end up arrested and spending time in jail and/or prison again for possession of drugs. He was homeless for a period of time where he lost a ton of weight and looked like a completely different person. Those pictures are still the hardest for me to look at.
Again, he would get into new relationships, each time hoping that somehow redemption and grace for himself would be found within the newest relationship, the newest love. He was so obviously starved for unconditional love and acceptance and was desperately trying to find it anywhere he could from outside of himself. He drifted from person to person silently begging to be loved and accepted, trying to cover up the self hatred he felt with the love and acceptance of others. Always hoping the next person would be the one who wouldn’t judge or reject him or wish he was someone different than he was, who wouldn’t lay the blame for everything at his feet, making him feel that he deserved all the bad things that happened to him in his life. Someone who wouldn’t ever abandon him.
Unfortunately, what Mike truly needed was healing from all the shaming he had endured and was continuing to endure that made him into the bad guy he now fully believed he was. What Mike needed was a rallying support system that could continue to love and accept him fully without walls, without exceptions, without judgments, without criticisms. The thing that all human beings need in order to really thrive: a loving and accepting community. This was not something he would find for himself in this life outside of his relationship with our oldest brother and friends he made that were all drowning alongside him and thus unable to pull him out from the undertow. The most any of them could provide was a sense of camaraderie and understanding.
Thirty-Three 