The Drug Addicts of My Childhood

Here's What A Meth Addict’s House Looks Like:

Nauseating chemical-type smells, overwhelming, probably “cooking” it, mixing drugs on the stove.

Soiled diapers on the kitchen counters.

Bits of food encrusted on the inside of the fridge—the fridge has its own putrid smell. Ditto for the microwave, where she simply shoved food in—no napkin, no plate—and threw it out on the floor for her children. “That’s where it will end up anyway.”

A brand-new $800 washing machine, picked apart piece by piece. It’s in about a hundred pieces on the floor. She does not know how to put it back together. (Sometimes meth addicts like to pick things apart when they’re high.)

Spoons in her bedroom, with strange white stuff encrusted on them. (Meth that didn’t get drawn into the needle and dried there. She mixed it up in spoons.)

There was food bits all over the furniture, crumbs in the beds.

This woman’s housekeeping style was much like that of the hoarders on the documentaries on TV. But TV cannot describe the smells and stuffiness, the sickening atmosphere of it. I was too intimately acquainted with the next-door neighbor and her house. It was like my unfortunate second home for many years in my early teens.

Sure, my mother and I shouldn’t have been so involved, we should have simply called Child Services instead of waiting for her to “get it,” but we were just being good Christians, right? We had to help her out, for she was raising two little boys all alone.

Why didn’t we see at the time that she was on drugs? Was it because she was a mother? Had horses and pets? Lived in the country, spoke coherently (most of the time), drank a lot of coffee and got hyper?

For being so discerning and discriminating as to throw out stuff we thought was demonic or an “idol,” (that we loved, usually), how could we have been so blind?

(I use the word “we” a lot when thinking about that time in my life, for it seemed my mother and I were unhealthily joined at the hip. Thus, it’s “our” life and what “we” went through, even in my own mind.)

Here’s what I learned about “bad” parents, incompetent parents: They don’t reform. My mother was very gifted at taking care of children, and tried time and again to show her how to do it. Eventually she accused my mom of calling her a bad mother behind her back, and took the baby away, the baby that we had raised for almost two years. So no matter how subtly the maternal magician tried to “train” her, to show her, she knew exactly what Mom was doing. And she didn’t like it.

She didn’t learn how to clean her house, after we stepped in and did all the hard work for her, maybe four to five times. She never appreciated it, and once we got in big trouble for “throwing things away” when they were in their proper places after all.

She went through the trash every time after we finished cleaning, probably looking for her lost meth. We might have thrown it away, thinking it was a white rock.

So I learned eventually not to bail people out. I became very cynical for a number of years, depressed and unhappy and angry that I did not have a happy childhood. I had excruciating, unexplainable pain in my right shoulder and arm constantly. Still have a little pain, sometimes, and it’s still painful to write by hand.

I had no energy, could not get up in the morning, struggled with severe constipation, and kept an extremely late schedule. I think all of these things were mostly symptoms of my emotional turmoil.

I was watching a documentary on hoarders recently and flashed back to the past. I wonder how many “hoarders” are on drugs.

So what’s the point of all this reminiscence? The moral of this story is, when you’re in the thick of it, it’s hard to see you need to make changes, that you can’t go on like this. What would have happened if the neighbor had not taken the baby away from us? Would we still be helping her, hoping she would change, never dreaming that she could have a drug problem?

Ignorance is never bliss. Yet so many people choose deliberately not to see what’s right in front of them. I paid a huge price because of ignorance.

Never again.