Portwood Amber - Never Too Late

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-61868-959-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68261-327-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-61868-960-3

Never Too Late
2014 Amber Portwood with Beth Roeser
PUBLISHED AT SMASHWORDS
All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Cover photography: Tyler Andrews

Post Hill Press
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Franklin, TN 37067
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I owe this all to my baby, Leah.

Without her, I dont know where I would be today.

What Happened?

How to Make and Break a Family

Adventures in Anderson

Facing the Music

Happily Ever After, For A While

Falling to Pieces

Behind the Scenes Destruction

Theres More Than One Way to Rehab

Nothing Left to Lose

Crash Landing

Shelter from the Storm

Thinking About Tomorrow

Y ou remember when the bell rang on the last day of school before summer vacation? That explosion of freedom you felt? If you could multiply that by a million, you still wouldnt be close to the joy of walking out of prison after seventeen months of being locked inside.

Seventeen months. I was twenty-three years old and Id been in prison for seventeen months. Other people my age were getting used to life after college, hanging out with friends, finding jobs, and building their futures. And here I was, Amber Portwood, age twenty-three, a single mom, recovering drug addict, and MTV reality star, walking out of freakin prison after serving seventeen months.

What the hell happened?

How does a regular girl end up in a situation like that? Or had I ever been regular? How did I get so far away from the kind of life I meant to have? What was going through my head when I made the mistakes that brought me here?

Its a complicated story, Ill tell you that much. But thanks to those seventeen months in prison, I had had a lot of time to think about the complicated things. Every night for over a year, I lay awake in my bunk staring out the window, just thinking. The lights in the yard were so bright I couldnt even see the night sky. I just lay there alone and stared at nothing, going deep into my thoughts and trying to understand who I was and what I had done to my life.

Those nights changed me in a real and serious way. They made me figure out who I really was and what I needed to do. And that gave me the focus I needed to put my heart and soul into changing myself for the better and getting out of that hellhole. Youre not living in a normal way when youre locked up. You feel like youre barely living at all. Physically and emotionally, youre trapped in there just knowing that nothing you do really matters until the day you get out. And thats if youre lucky enough to be getting out. So what do you do with the time until then? You can drag yourself through it like a jailhouse zombie. You can let it beat you down. Or you can do what I did, use that time alone at night and take a long, hard look at what got you into the situation in the first place, and how youre going to repair all the damage thats been done.

When I walked into that prison, I had a drug addiction that seemed completely invincible. One minute I was earning money and fame being featured on MTVs 16 & Pregnant, giving birth to a daughter, and learning to be a teenage mom on camera. The next minute I was swallowing ungodly handfuls of prescription pills and losing myself in a haze of drugs as my life fell into pieces around me. My family fell apart. I lost custody of my daughter. The worse things got, the more pills I took. Nothing could make me stop. Two months in rehab, three months in jail, criminal charges, probation, drug court, and suicide attemptsnone of it even made a dent in my addiction to pills. As the MTV cameras rolled, I was on a secret mission to destroy myself. I didnt just go downhill fast. I motorcycled off a cliff.

The people who followed 16 & Pregnant and the spin-off series Teen Mom are familiar with a lot of the main events in my story, not just from watching the shows but from the endless tabloid coverage they brought me. For some twisted reason, my life as seen on MTV became part of the entertainment news cycle, and sometimes it felt like half the world was watching me mess up. They watched as I struggled with anxiety and depression in the months after I had my daughter, Leah, and they saw me get my first prescription for Klonopin. While I wrapped myself in a cloud of painkillers and sedatives behind the scenes, audiences watched my world fall apart on the surface. The tabloids kept a close eye on me as my life exploded in one disaster after another: custody drama, battles with CPS, and fights between me and Leahs father. There were even cameras in our home when one of our fights turned physical, a television moment that shocked the media and the public and eventually caused the court to press charges against me for domestic battery. To the outside world my life looked like a tornado of tears, anger, and ugly fights, and I looked like an irresponsible, immature kid with an uncontrollable temper, not fit to be a mom.

But the reality was even darker than what people saw on screen. By the time Teen Mom was done, I was stuffing myself with insane amounts of prescription drugs, from anxiety medications to heavy-duty painkillers. I took myself to the edge of death with the amount of pills I swallowed, and that was only after I destroyed my relationships with friends and family to the point where there was nothing left but me and my addiction.

I walked out of prison knowing it had saved my life.

But still, Id been there long enough. It was time to get the hell out of there and throw myself into getting back as much as I could of what I had lost. I had to believe that was possible, and I did believe it, with all my heart.

My mom, brother, and nephew all came to pick me up from prison, and Id never been happier to see them. I walked into their arms trying to play it cool, even though inside I was freaking out. Inside, I was doing the whole movie scene thing, falling to my knees and screaming for joy, kissing the ground or doing cartwheels. But on the outside, I didnt know exactly how to act. In prison youre always being watched, and you learn to carry yourself a certain way. Its a different world with different people in it, and you adapt to it in ways you dont even realize until you get outside. You have to adjust to the normal world again. It takes a while to let it sink in that you can spend the rest of your dayand your week, and your month, and your lifehowever the hell you want to. Thats a crazy change in lifestyle, and I was kind of reeling as I took it in.

There was one thing I wasnt uncertain of at all. When I got in the car with my family, I had my sights set on seeing my daughter, Leah. I was so excited to see her I wanted that car to hit warp speed. During the entire seventeen months I was in prison, I only saw my daughter three times. The first year, I didnt see her at all. It was the most painful thing about being behind bars, and you better believe that every night I spent crying in there, I was crying over my daughter. But missing Leah was also what motivated me. I knew the worst effect my addiction had on my life was the distance I let it put between my daughter and me. So I worked my ass off to change myself in prison, to learn and grow and take control of my life so that I could get back to being a mother to my daughter. Now I had entered the next phase of that mission, the real phase, and I couldnt wait to see her and start the rest of our lives as a family.