As a young girl, Alana Levinson struggled with the shame of her father’s substance abuse. But when she looked more deeply into the research on children of drug-addicted parents, she realized society’s “conspiracy of silence” was keeping her—and possibly millions of others—from adequately dealing with the experience.
___________
By the time that I was six and my brother was five, we were used to waiting—and waiting—for our father to show up. On one particular afternoon, we sat in a pool of sunlight that poured through our living room’s bay windows. In the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco, the fog usually burns off by midday, and we were baking in our little jackets.
Would he be late? Would he come at all? What would he smell like? I’d started sniffing his trademark leather jacket in search of the new scent of cigarettes. I knew that it meant something—maybe that he was different, less safe. My parents had separated a year before, and when my father came to pick us up for occasional visits, his gait was often wobbly and his words slurred. My mother was working at an insurance company, supporting us on her own, and our nanny would be left to handle the mess. Sometimes she wouldn’t let us leave when she saw his condition, once going so far as to physically pull us out of his car.
That day, as we peered anxiously at every car that rolled down the street, my brother was phoning him non-stop, sick with worry that he wouldn’t show. Suddenly, I got up and walked away. I’d made a decision. “You’re so stupid,” I said to him. “He’s never gonna come.”
To read the rest of this story by Alana Levinson, go to: http://www.psmag.com/navigatio...rug-addiction-94354/
Comments (0)