Mom Helped Me Get Through A Loss From Heroin - By Confessing She Secretly Used It Too

PLUS: This oddly juxtaposed Free Merchandise Alert!

Hi Girlies (in all open-minded senses of the word)!

I just got back to New York on the red eye. After extending my 3-day Malibu visit to over 2 weeks, I still wanted to maximize the waking hours that I was with my great friend, so I left on the latest possible flight. You know that syndrome where whenever you have to pee, the urge gets increasingly dire the closer you get to a bathroom (or in my case, a bush - once on a sidestreet off of Beverly Drive before a meeting and another on the shoulder of the PCH -during this trip alone)? Leaving my friend is like that where the need to talk and hug multiplies exponentially as departure time approaches. I was even frustrated when I got to the airport 45 minutes earlier than I needed to, because I could've had that valuable 3/4 of an hour hanging out with my friend instead, but oh well, unpredictable LA traffic.

As a final name drop (not a lifetime final, as it would be ridiculously unrealistic to promise that, but a final name drop from this trip) for those of you who graciously at least lied and said that you like when I do it, here is a still from a video taken by Michael that I can't show because my old pal and I are talking about our children in it and I know it doesn't seem like it, but I actually do have some discretion and boundaries sometimes. Bono came over for pizza after visiting with Sean Penn down the road and I won't go into everything, but we did get to hear some new music from him and from Michael and from his friend Gavin Friday, all of which I can't get out of my head in the best possible way.

I have known this guy for 30 years or so.

And now for something actually pertinent to your lives and even potentially useful: This week I will be debuting our entire line of new merchandise and asking you to pick the item you most want for yourselves that I will then send out to you lucky first responders for free. All you need to do is want it and deserve it, the second requirement of which you’ve already achieved. Below is my phone’s current photos page if you want to start looking around early.

While we are on the topic, winners of my last little giveaway - featuring the first ever Sassy shirts in an appropriate size range (up to 5XL) were Misses Robin and Lizzy! Your shirts are in the mail! Show us how they look when you get them, please!

I'm going to keep this semi-brief today, by popular command (you're welcome Andy and Charlie and everyone else too polite to tell me to shut up) and let you read this I think incredibly moving and spectacularly written story that I am so lucky Sammi sent in. I also hope you will talk more with me and her about it in the comments, because there is a lot to react to and relate to. Please send your own story submissions for the It Happened To Me column (est 1988) to me at jane@anotherjaneprattthing.com. I would love to feature yours also and pay you for it, of course.

Thanks so much for being here with me. It means a lot especially now that my BFF and I are back on separate coasts doing those extended FaceTimes that we leave open for hours while we run errands, pee, brush our teeth, etc etc - in an attempt to replicate living together as we were.

Be good.

Love love love, Janey. (Don’t mind me while I play around with punctuation. Do it too in your comments if you like and then I will know that you actually read this.)

Mom and me, today, at the Guggenheim Museum.

By Sammi LaBue

On our 18-month anniversary I stood alone in my first love’s unlit driveway. Later that night, instead of our highly-anticipated fondue date, I got a call from El Paso County Jail. Eighteen years old, he’d been arrested for sale and possession of heroin.

At this point in my life, a senior in high school, I was of two worlds — one that centered around Bible study and ministry and another that was experimenting with drinking and drugs. In both, I was yearning for healing.

My dad had died unexpectedly the day after I kissed Cliff for the first time in my Mercury Mountaineer after Youth Group. It was an unexpected kiss, followed by an even more unexpected death.

I hadn’t wanted my first love to be Cliff. Cliff, who was hilarious and cute to me, but not to the other girls on my tennis team who favored the cool Colorado uniform of the moment: Ugg boots, Soffe shorts, Abercrombie and American Eagle everything else. Cliff played drums, not sports, and wore skinny jeans.

But his ineligibility for prom court meant nothing to me. His contrarian behavior gave me the confidence to explore who I really was in a cliquish high school environment that envied Mean Girls in its insistence on following the status quo. He didn’t think my desire to cut off all my hair was weird. He thought it was great. He thought I was a gifted painter. I wasn’t, but because of him I painted more. As a conservatory musician as well as a screamo band drummer, the CDs he burned for me exposed me to a range of music that still speaks to me today. And most of all, he could handle the deep sadness that would often shroud me as a newly fatherless teen.

Just a kid with a Polaroid camera, on the way to youth group...and then a party.

On our anniversary, I pulled up to his parents’ house like I had countless times in the last year and a half, this time with a sense of mature wonder at our milestone. But something was off. Finding the long driveway empty of cars, the blinds closed in the windows, all the clues Cliff had deftly debunked with excuses over the last few months returned to me. His absences at school, tardiness for our dates, distant or missed phone calls, his car approaching the Starbucks parking lot from a different direction than I thought he was coming from, my Youth Group leader asking if he was OK while I waited at that same Starbucks, the scabs on his cheeks he attributed to picking acne.

Neither Cliff or his parents would pick up the phone. I drove down to the dark end of their cul-de-sac and cried over the same center console I had leaned over to kiss him that first time 18 months ago before my dad died and everything changed. I imagined approaching my mom about this would only cause more pain. It would either make her retreat further or come fighting to my defense, neither of which felt like the response I needed.

All my childhood, like Cliff, Mom appreciated my uniqueness — she took me to get the pixie haircut and drove me to painting classes — while I wondered who she really was. To me she was all the makings of a mom: affection and order and worry. But I knew so little of who she was before me, it was like that was a different person I would never meet. As if as her daughter, I was supposed to accept that she was and would only ever be “Mom.”

One way to get Mom to smile was to surprise attack her with my Polaroid camera when she came in from the garage.

She wore parts of her past on her body. Like the long, jagged scar on her thigh, so evident she’d had to tell my sister and I how it happened. In her 20s, she’d gone to bring her carpet layer boyfriend lunch one day and kneeled behind him while he was working to say hello. The carpet knife in his back pocket was so sharp she hadn’t even noticed it had slashed her before she saw the wound.

In Middle School, I’d been given a sex-ed assignment to interview my parents. I sat in front of a bowl of popcorn in the sunroom off of the master suite where we sometimes watched “Trading Spaces” or “Queer Eye” as a family, eager to be told a story about my mom, like the ones about donuts after church and the high price of milk nowadays like my dad had just told in the living room.

But she did not relax into the leather recliner or cuddle up to me on the love seat. Her pacing filled the room with anxious energy. I followed her with my eyes, my schoolwork packet opened to the page labeled “Mother.” Finally, she sat in the armchair looking past me at the black screen of the TV as if to will it on for some distraction.

I started with something I hoped she would enjoy, sliding my pen down the page to the final section on Love. I asked her about the difference between love and lust, her past boyfriends, and what her first image of love was. The questions, admittedly odd for a school assignment, landed on her like spotlights. Fidgeting, she answered the best she could, not sarcastically or incorrectly but swiftly, concisely.

Finally, I asked her how she knew she loved my father. Then she cried, she wept, and eventually mumbled, “He saved me.”

“What?” I asked.

“He saved me, ok?” she responded in a burst. The kind I hadn’t had yet, and so I didn’t understand. A broken dam of emotion. She went to the bathroom to finish crying, my interview cut short.

That night, I laid in bed wondering what it was my dad had saved her from. I knew that as a girl she grew up in an abusive household in Coney Island, that she and her mother and sister escaped him by taking a cross-country train to California when she was only 12, and that marrying my dad felt like a new life to her. But maybe there was more in between than I’d ever thought. I imagined rescue scenes based on what I’d seen in movies. My dad catching her from a long fall, stopping a car headed toward her, building a fire to warm her through the night. He was a good man and strong, but a goof, an indoorsman, and I couldn’t quite see him as this knight in shining armor.

In my prom dress, which featured a then-new tattoo of my dad.

Now, sitting dumbly in my idling car I felt that maybe I was beginning to understand what needing to be saved meant. Since Dad died, Mom’s loving yet coy attitude had become a vacant one, and I didn’t know how to reach her. I used to lie on my dad’s chest to watch TV like he was a life raft. Now I was out to sea. I took to drinking, smoking pot, reading the Bible, and developing an eating disorder — I would try anything in my search for a preserver.

Being with Cliff felt close to salvation. On dates, we walked the smallish network of streets in downtown Colorado Springs taking artsy photos of people and places with my Polaroid camera and an angsty kind of youthful joy. He taught me about dark humor. About how things can be riotously hilarious and absolutely in ruins at the same time. With him, my grief and my future didn’t feel like they would fight forever. The grief would be there, but so would the future.

I was evidently also looking for salvation through my flat iron.

But after a year of dating, Cliff had turned vacant, too. We had one class together — choir — and I loved to choose a spot on the edge of the alto section so that I could stand next to him at the edge of the tenors. But suddenly he was late or absent. If he did show up, he’d sit moodily on a folding chair, slipping out before the director could confront him. Like always, we still met at the Fruitopia machine between classes to smooch, but he was always tired and started wearing the same hoodie every day, letting his hair grow longer, where he’d taken pride in his outfits before. After a few weeks of questioning, he claimed he’d been diagnosed with long mono. He had an excuse for everything, and I fully believed our love would endure.

My hazards clicked mockingly. Since it was a Saturday, I decided to tell mom the date had ended early and asked if I could spend the night with a friend.

At 4 am my phone buzzed across my best friend’s satin duvet. Unsleeping, in the outfit I had meticulously curated for the anniversary that never was — black in case of fondue splatter, but lace to keep it classy, the little pearl necklace he gave me for our one-year-anniversary adorning it all — I pressed one to accept an inmate’s call, my heart pounding. He’d used his one phone call the night before on his parents and called as soon as he was able. He told me he’d been using heroin for months. Selling to support his addiction. The truth arrived cold and disappointing as a late dish to the table, though at least whole and something to chew on.

When I made it home, I approached my mom with a determined, desperate energy. I fell apart crying, yelling that it wasn’t who he really was and that she couldn’t break us up. I imagined she would do the Mom thing, yell back, forbid me from speaking to him ever again, but instead she spoke to me gently as if from the end of a long tunnel made of her own grief. Was this Mom, I thought, or someone else? She said she was so sorry. So sorry for Cliff. That she would reach out to his mom. That she felt for him.

The next morning, his face was in the newspaper. Just as my mind began to imagine the judgments and whispers my peers would fill the halls with, Mom announced that I could stay home from school as she calmly poured coffee into a thermos for work.

That day I treated my bed as a rescue boat, the only safe place in a roiling adolescence that was trying to break me. I clutched onto my blanket and the darkness it provided imagining what I might try next for salvation. Harder drugs? Emptying my breakfast into the toilet? Another party?

When Mom returned from work she sat on the edge of the bed and said in an even voice that felt like a different version of herself, “I want to tell you something.”

Her relationship with the carpet layer had gone south because of their shared addiction to heroin. Living together for a short time in Montana, supporting their habit had escalated into burglary. They were hiding from the police behind separate bushes when she decided to make a break for it and leave him behind, buying a bus ticket to Los Angeles where she was eventually set up on a blind date with my dad.

My mom and me on my sixteenth birthday. My first without my dad.

I was stunned. Her long, manicured fingers played with the fold in my quilt, her eyes cast down. She was a little ashamed, revealing such a chink in her Mom armor. But what I heard was the story of a hero. Someone who literally ran through the night away from a very bad situation to give herself a shot at life.

I remembered the way she’d blurted those words — he saved me. But now I imagined her before my dad: Young, scared, and sick, leaving someone she loved for a better version of her life, though she had no one to fall back on. “It may not be time yet, but if you really love Cliff, you have to break up with him. He needs to lose it all to start over.”

She opened my blinds letting in the day’s final golden ray of light and left. I had imagined a brawl, a mom commanding her daughter to leave the love of her life. But here we were instead, two people having weathered our own storms, all full of holes, but capable of moving forward despite them.

Because of her honesty, I was better prepared to approach my boyfriend’s addiction with empathy and maturity. I could have begged to stay with him. I could have gone looking for the drug myself to cope and feel closer to him. But when Mom told me that stepping away was the best course of action, I believed her, because she’d shown me all her cards. At 17, a person was easier to listen to than a parent

After the breakup I drove down his driveway one last time. Instead of meeting my weed dealer, I met my mom at Starbucks where she was waiting, right on time. When they called her name, “Linda,” I smiled, knowing her for the first time. A knowing that would blossom and save me over and over again.

Yes, she was still the woman who had made me dinners I was too picky to eat, who I’d taken turns reading “Harry Potter” with in bed, and who drove me to tennis practice. But that person was Mom, not Linda. At my deepest moment of teenage turmoil, I needed them both.