Susa Burrowes - Off the Rails: One Familys Journey Through Teen Addiction

Copyright 2018 by Susan Burrowes

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

Published August 21, 2018
Printed in the United States of America
Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-467-7
E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-468-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018930867

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She Writes Press 1563
Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707

Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

Names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of certain individuals.

We must be willing to let go of the life weve planned,
so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
Joseph Campbell

W hen our daughter Hannah was in ninth grade, my husband Paul and I felt like we owned the world. We had healthy children, good jobs, a vibrant social life, and a solid plan for retirement. Six months later our fourteen-year-old daughter shifted from moody to malicious. Another six months and we were out scouring the streets for her in the middle of the night. Six months after that, we were staring down at her in a hospital bed, near death from an overdose.

When Hannahs behavior turned destructive towards herself and others, we found ourselves in a vortex of shock, upheaval, dread, and shame. Shock because things like this just didnt happen to nice families like ours. Upheaval because we were completely unprepared to address the terror that our daughter introduced into our home. Dread because we had no idea whether we were taking the right steps to help our daughter. Would our attempts to help Hannah scar her, drive her deeper into addiction, or push her further away? Finally, shame, always shame, at our inability to handle our own child, and shame for the things that she did that fell so far from the values with which she was raised.

Over the next two years, we exhausted our financial and emotional resources, grappling with what had gone wrong with our family, and struggling to make it right. Life as we knew it fell apart. We found ourselves lost in the frightening world of therapy, educational consultants, and troubled teen programs, uncertain of how to find the right support and professional services for Hannah. We didnt know how to save our daughter.

But ultimately we learned, and that is our story.

As we came to the end of our harrowing journey, I found myself spending hours on the phone speaking with other families who had gotten our number from programs, professionals, or friends. Dozens of families contacted uswounded, looking for a balm, praying for a cure. I never met Melissa, who called, worried about her daughter, but I knew her, and I knew her familiar story.

My daughter is getting in some trouble at school, she began tentatively, as they all did. Eventually her story spilled out, all in a rush like she couldnt stand to linger in the words. I think shes using, sometimes shes completely spaced out, and theres blood in the bathroom. I think shes cutting but she wont show me I dont know what to do.

More than anything, I wanted to assure her that everything would be okay, but we both knew that it was too soon to tell and too hard to know. Instead, I did the only thing I could do. I answered Melissas questions as honestly as I could. She asked me, What happened to your family? How do you know when its more than just regular teen behaviors? What programs did you consider? How did you choose? What was it like? What did people think of you? Are you sorry you did it? Big, important questions that made me feel small and ill-equipped. I gave Melissa the only thing I had. I gave her our story.

I am not a therapist, and do not claim any special expertise in parenting. Quite the contrary. I made many mistakes and took many wrong turns before finding my way back to my daughter. During our two years of treatment, I learned that there can be more than one truth, more than one way of thinking, and more than one path back to love.

While this book reflects our familys journey, I hope that it helps as you make your own difficult decisions about your at-risk teen. Off the Rails will show you what life looks like on the inside of several teen treatment programs, giving you a glimpse of this alternative universea glimpse we wish wed had before committing our daughter into their care.

This book is about teen addiction, but it is first and foremost about my relationship with my daughter, and how we saved each other, with help from our family, and lots of people who supported us along the way. My hope is that our story will bring clarity, community, and courage to those who may be going through similar challenges, or those who know someone who is.

I began writing together with my daughter, but she decided that she wanted to look to the future, not the past. In the end, this book is my perspective of the events that took place over the course of nearly two years, based on both my daughter and my journals, notes, boxes of letters, and hours of conversation. I have worked to acknowledge my daughters shifting feelings about her experiences, and her request for balance. I also tried to stay true to her wild spirit, humor, creativity, and her wise and soulful view of the world.

Some names in Off the Rails have been changed to protect the young people who played such an important role in our journey.

I watch the ugly bruise form on my upper arm, while I struggle to keep driving on the narrow rural road. Hannah remains poised for battle in the passenger seat, her pale porcelain skin flushed with anger, her lovely, long-fingered hands still clenched into fists. Her pretty cherubs lips, in a permanent pout these days, part to scream at me, Fuck you, you fat cunt, eat shit! Spittle sprays from her mouth to water the bloom of black and blue on my arm. Theres nowhere to pull over, nowhere to run, no way to escape this cage of a car. Im trapped, just me and this wild creature, and though I look for my sixteen-year-old daughter, I cant see her at all. Who is this child-woman, and where did she come from? If shes willing to hit me, what else is she capable of? Will she steal? Will she kill? Am I the mother of a monster?

She gets me in the car, and Im her fucking prisoner, and she thinks she can torture me as much as she wants. She is driving and lecturing me the way she always does when she has me captive. Its as though all my pissed off feelings roll down from my head into my hand and form a fist, and I hit her. Stupid, right? I almost kill us when I hit her. She swerves into the other lane on our wanky little road out in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere, and I know the look on her face isnt fear of an accident, its fear of me, and that makes me feel good. I watch the bruise form unevenly on her arm, like a map of the terrain weve just crossed, and I know that bruise will divide us forever.

The fact that Hannah was struggling was clear a long time before she ever hit me, before she turned angry, before she started tenth grade and decided that she didnt want to be anything like the person she was in ninth grade, and way before she became what she called a therapy kid.