Until this moment I have skillfully (subjective opinion) danced around an area of my life that in many ways is my life but for reasons that will become obvious to any reader shortly, has remained deep in a soft, holding cell at the frayed and care-worn center of my heart.

If you go there, you will find every filament, fiber and microcosmic tissue throbbing harmoniously in the unifying thrust of unconditional love protecting the essence, image of and ultimate hope for, my son – Griffin.

My firstborn child and only son is a drug addict and has been so in one degree or form since he was about eighteen years old. In late August he celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday under the same conditions in which he has celebrated all but one of his birthdays since 2005: as an inmate in a state correctional facility.

Given that he is a young man of extremely high intelligence, he managed to fund his addiction by the cleverly-executed scheme of prescription fraud, which is what he was sentenced for. Again.

The first time around he spent eighteen months at different facilities in two states and several counties satisfying the various infractions in each; but at no time in any facility did he receive any sort of rehabilitative counseling or aid. None.

And they wonder why recidivism is so high.

He was released on Halloween 2008, yet just over one year later he was on his way back in. For a few months he was doing well, but over time, as those same buttons were being pushed yet still without recourse to viable coping methods, he slowly retreated to the only form of consolation and escape that he has known: prescription pain medication.

Griffin is a charming guy. A HUGE charming guy standing nearly six foot six and weighing around three-hundred and fifty pounds. He was a huge baby and a huge child. He was very congenial, loquacious and affectionate too; I would often have to warn him not to speak to every single person, down every single aisle, about every single thing, every single time we entered the Supermarket.

Because of his size people assumed he was always much older than he was, which did put a certain amount of pressure on him from a young age. When people assume you are five and yet you behave as though you are three, they tend to draw some unflattering conclusions about your emotional maturity and mental capacity; unfortunately, many had no reservations about voicing their asinine opinions and observations right in front of us.

People can bring astoundingly damaging energy to the function of opinion.

If Griffin has one weakness of character, it would be his incessant desire to please with an even more intense need to be loved and admired.

When he was very young, his peers were afraid of him due to his massive size and animated exuberance and had a tendency to run from him. Bringing him to the nursery school playground would sometimes evoke a scene similar to when Godzilla entered Tokyo and sent diminutive Japanese denizens scrambling frantically in every direction.

But as he grew and the other kids realized that he in no way regarded his physical presence as an advantage and a tool of intimidation, they took the opposite position and he became the goat. He was a sweet, affable, sometimes gullible and gentle giant; just what the predatory types like to consume whole.

Nothing makes a small bully feel more empowered than by taking a larger kid down.

He played baseball and basketball in elementary and middle schools and excelled at both; especially baseball where he still holds the record for balls hit clean out of the town ballpark and into the woods. But because his size so greatly exceeded the height and weight requirements of the Pop Warner Football league, he was not able to participate in the one sport most suited to his monolithic frame.

That all changed when he reached high school.

By this time, too, he was so eager to find peer acceptance that I do believe he would have taken up wing-walking or bull running if it would have earned him their regard. But he didn’t have to do anything that risky. All he had to do was be big, put on a helmet and knock people down on the football field; simple as that, and he did so readily.

Suddenly, he was a hero and with his brilliant mind, gregarious nature and humor he quickly became one of the most popular kids in school.

But within his own mind absolution from his history did not fully come and the reality of his earlier years kept him a prisoner of disbelief and insecurity. He felt as though he still needed to be continually vigilant in his quest to please or he might just as suddenly find himself once more the target instead of the bullet.

But for the time being he was the largest bullet any high school coach in the history of the school had ever seen. Not only that, the kid was fast, and scouts from colleges all across the country were coming to take a gander. He was a mammoth, treasured, testosterone-fueled commodity.

So, when he hurt his shoulder during fall practice in his senior year and the team doctor (who had formerly been so for a professional football team in another state) began prescribing him injections of steroids and pain medications, the ramifications escaped our notice.

Sadly, they didn’t escape Griffin’s. What these jock-cocktails provided most was a steady emotional lift with an undercurrent of invincibility and euphoria. He was happy and a part of the team, only now if anyone didn’t like him, he didn’t care. Not consciously, anyway.

What he gradually discovered was that as long as he was taking these substances, he felt good about himself.

But when news of his bad shoulder was leaked to the colleges that were courting him, one by one they dropped their offers, and as the offers stopped, so did the attention.

By graduation day, the glory days had ended but not his dependency on the glory drugs.

In the years after high school I watched my son disappear. He had a few unsuccessful attempts at college, culinary school and a variety of fairly respectable jobs, but all were undermined by his increasingly insatiable dependency on chasing happy.

It wasn’t happiness. Happiness is a state of being; a subjective emotion that wraps around our outlook like a sacred ribbon around our best day. Griffin was chasing some sort of safe boxed thing: a stagnant puddle of compartmentalized indifference; a chunk of calm ringed by bursts of artificial joy; a hollow parody of self-confidence. He had never fully known happiness and the congenial rush from trustworthy peer support, so he didn’t really even know what to look for.

Of course, over time all the concomitant ills of addiction came into play as well: the nearly pathological lying, stealing, manipulating, chronic irresponsibility and connivance. He was no longer recognizable by habit or attitude and after a couple of suicide attempts, neither were we.

Our lives had been voluntarily hijacked because we could not turn away, and all that we had emotionally, financially and prayerfully went into trying to help him find his way to a point of peace and a place where he could start over.

I’ve discovered that if a pattern continues long enough where you are able to fool yourself into believing that you are in control while in reality you are playing both sides of the game, eventually you will be buried by not only your addiction, but by your deception, as well. Soon every single out-breath you release becomes deadly until nothing whole and good can stand in your presence, and those who try become either victims of your declivitous game at self-destruction or they become casualties of your indifference to anything except satisfying your pharmaceutical craving.

Griffin has been incarcerated this time since early December 2009, and while the deep sorrow attendant to his situation as a recidivist addict and offender and the purgatorial consequence of his actions never leaves me for one minute, I can honestly say that at this moment I am not only filled with hope for his recovery – but I am filled with pride as well. He is owning his actions and fully accepting the grim consequences.

This may not sound like much, but denial is a major part of addiction, and I have heard him blame everyone but the Pope for his problems in the past.

I still grapple with ragged grief over the situation in general and missing him in particular. On my visits I am not able to hug or hold him or come any closer then the bullet proof glass partition will accommodate and our conversation is over a phone receiver. We have come to greet and leave one another with the ritual of pressing our hands together and matching them up against the glass. Even as a man, to me his giant hand remains that of my child and as it engulfs and extends well beyond the silhouette of my own, I am reminded only of the corresponding enormity of his great and loving heart.

His heart suffers physically now, too. As a result of his years of excessive abuse, he has developed cardiac arrhythmia and has already had two mild heart attacks; one before he was taken into custody and another a couple of weeks ago. The concern for his health has driven me to my knees more than once and keeps me firmly grounded in prayer and awake deep into the night with predictable regularity as I barter with God and the angels and any celestial intercessor who will listen for the restored health of his body and his soul.

I am committed to love and lift my magnificent son out of this wretched pit of abuse and self-sabotage just as he did for me.

Twenty-seven years ago I was spiraling out of control on a chemical vortex of drugs and super-charged apathy after leaving a grossly ill-conceived but blessedly brief, nine-month-long marriage of violent abuse and cruelty.

At twenty-five years old, in the aftermath of yet another one of my many compendious failures I felt devoid of hope, saw few options and had returned to the derelict risk-taking of my teens with abandon and little regard as to whether I lived or died.

I became pregnant. But from the moment this reality became known to me, so did another life-saving conception. The idea of PURPOSE.

I had a purpose and a reason to rededicate myself to seeking the transcendent in life, and his name is Griffin.

Giving up is simply not an option.

Susan Creamer Joy | Contributor

Susan has been writing the whole of her adult life but has no literary awards, professional successes or degrees from academia to weight her efforts with temporal achievements. It has only been recently that she has chosen to share her thoughts publicly. She writes and reads incessantly. She also draws, paints, makes jewelry and creates art in any medium she can manipulate without risk of severe injury. At this time she is a semi-retired Domestic Space Cadet and current arbiter of mid-life dysfunction. It is a full-time job.

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