Maureen Cavanagh - If You Love Me: A Mothers Journey Through Her Daughters Addiction and Recovery

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This book is lovingly dedicated to Mariah Lotti and Brian Murphy, all of those who have been lost to substance use disorder, and the families and loved ones theyve left behind.

May we all carry on boldly in your names.

I pray this book opens the doors of understanding and connects those lost and alone, as I tell this story in honor of each person who fights this disease, especially my Ladybug, Katie Harvey, and all of the others who have become like extended family to me.

Stay strong and know you are loved!

Im not sure how I get into the car, but I know Im on my way to kill Bob.

I dont want to take my eyes off the road because Im feeling unsteady and its important I get there. I dont want to miss him. A few minutes can make all the difference. I can see in my minds eye the bat cracking across his skull. I wont stop there. I will beat him, a man twice my size, in front of whoever is there, despite his cries for mercy, over and over, until he stops moving, stops crying out, stops destroying my beautiful Katie. I wont quit until he isnt breathing. Then I will spit on himsomething Ive never even considered doing to anyone in my fifty-four years of life. I will do all this and I will never have a moments guilt over it.

I reach over and touch the top of the bat. This is long overdue.

The calm exterior that the world sees is about to shatter. This last chain of events has broken something. I know what I need to do. I cant remember the last time, during this horror show of the past two years, when I was so clear about anything. So many unanswered questions, so many late-night pleas to God, so many theories about what I did wrongits a relief to finally have an answer, even this one.

I feel as if the bat is also begging to kill Bob. It is my son Liams bat. The Golden Child, his brother and sisters call him half-jokingly.

I am lost in thought, the last of the days sun slowly fading into dusk, and stop abruptly at a crosswalk, my arm accidentally hitting the car horn. It startles me as well as a woman crossing the street. She glares at me. Relax, lady. I notice that her coat is buttoned incorrectly, so that her entire front is askew, with the right side of the garment riding high above the left. Shes limping to the same side. I think Picasso put her together. I mouth the words Im sorry. She quickens her step, pulling something out of her purse. She doesnt understand what Im saying, so I roll down the window. Im sorry, I say. She begins to scream, Im writing your license plate down, Im going to the police, Im going to the POLICE!

Is everyone walking around just about to snap? I wonder if most people are just holding themselves together by a thread. Im grateful for being so calm. The thought that often strikes me nowadays is how little we know about what goes on in the lives of others. The face we show to the world is rarely the one we wear in private.

Its been so very long since I felt anything other than heartbroken that Im pretty convinced its never been any other way. I look down at my body, twenty pounds heavier. The doctor had warned me about that, two years ago, when I started to take a daily 50 milligrams of Zoloft for the paralyzing anxiety that looked a lot like sadness, but somehow the weight still snuck up on me. Its not the small pill causing the gains, I know that. Its my secret relationship with Ben and Jerry. Nothing other than Peanut Butter Cup will do, and Ive hunted through store after store until I find it. Then I go home, climb into bed, watch a sitcom with a laugh track, and comfort myself with on-demand mindlessness and empty calories.

It could be worse, I tell myself. I know this is true because Ive seen much, much worse. Ive seen so much pain in the last few years. I hadnt known just how much pain the world could contain. It crushes me sometimes, not just my own but the pain of so many others also trying to hang on to whatever shred of their loved ones they can.

I dont know how I got here. There is never a day that goes by that this does not feel very surreal.

I cant save my daughter Katie, and sometimes that feels like the only certainty in my life. I cant make her stop using drugs any more than I could keep her from leaving any of the forty treatment centers she has left or safeguard her from the double-digit number of overdoses. Ive finally come to the realization that there is nothing I can say or do that will make a real difference. She is going to leave the facility shes in now. I know because she has called and told me so. I tried to talk her out of it, saying all the things Ive said a thousand times before, the things that have helped a hundred people before her, but I could hear the venom in her voice. Some switch has flipped, and she is ready to run. Not the first time, but I know it could be the last. This will be one of several treatment centers where she has been doing well and suddenly she decides to leave, courtesy of a fifty-six-year-old piece of shit named Bob.

Im drifting to one side of the road when my phone rings and snaps me back to attention. I hope for a brief second that it will be the call, the one Ive dreamed about that will tell me this is all a mistake, nothing to worry about, go home and eat your ice cream. And when I realize that this isnt happening, I wonder briefly if people on the way to kill someone answer the phone. There really isnt a rule book or protocol for this, so I reach for it and study the name of the caller.

I am waiting. Snow falls. Over five feet in February, with a record-setting ninety inches between January 24 and February 15. Lucky for me that during several of those days I was happily soaking up some vitamin D with my boyfriend, Randy, in Puerto Rico. We love it down there, the sun as opposed to snow, but also the ocean, the way we can stare out at where the sky meets the sea. While I was gone, Katie and her boyfriend, Chad, had stayed at my house, since Liams away at college, in exchange for keeping the driveway and steps shoveled.

But now its March, and I am the one shoveling. Or trying to. Ive put my layers back on. If I dont keep the driveway and stoops cleared of accumulation every few hours, it will ice over and require a pickax to get through. As it is, theres no opening the front door, and if not for the garage door that slides up on a hinge, I wouldve had to jump out the window and shovel my way back to the buried entrance. Time is not on my side.

Im hoping that one of the four men who constitute my neighbors will offer some assistance, because they have two things I dont. They all have snow blowers, and they all have wives looking out the windows, warm and toasty in their houses, patiently waiting for them. I know I should go over to one of them and ask for help, but goddamn it, I shouldnt need to. What is wrong with the people in this small town northeast of Boston? Back in New York, specifically Long Island, where I grew up, this wouldnt happen. My girlfriends back home would be out here with a shovel, too, and no one would head back home until everyone was shoveled out. They cant possibly think I dont need their help?

Fuck them , I think, stepping deeper into the whiteness.