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No 1 brings dinner when your daughter is an addict
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Dina_B613




 
 
    
 

Post Mon, Dec 15 2014, 10:43 pm
When my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, we ate well. Mary Beth and I had both read the terrifying pathology report of a tumor the size of an olive. The surgical digging for lymph nodes was followed by months of radiation. We ate very well.

Friends drove Mary Beth to her radiation sessions and sometimes to her favorite ice cream shop on the half-hour drive back from the hospital. She always ordered a chocolate malt. Extra thick.

Our family feasted for months on the lovingly prepared dishes brought by friends from work and church and the neighborhood: chicken breasts encrusted with parmesan, covered safely in tin foil; pots of thick soup with hearty bread; bubbling pans of lasagna and macaroni and cheese. There were warm home-baked rolls in tea towel–covered baskets, ham with dark baked pineapple rings, scalloped potatoes, and warm pies overflowing with the syrups of cherries or apples.

Leftovers piled up in the refrigerator, and soon the freezer filled up too, this tsunami of food offerings an edible symbol of our community’s abundant generosity.

Although few said the word breast unless it belonged to a chicken, many friends were familiar with the word cancer and said it often, without flinching. They asked how we were doing, sent notes and cards, passed along things they’d read about treatments and medications, emailed links to good recovery websites and the titles of helpful books, called frequently, placed gentle if tentative hands on shoulders, spoke in low and warm tones, wondered if we had enough food. The phrase we heard most was: “If there’s anything I can do ... ”

In the following months, after Mary Beth had begun speaking in full sentences again and could stay awake for an entire meal, the stored foods in the freezer ran out, and we began cooking on our own again. Our children, Nick and Maggie, sometimes complained jokingly about our daily fare. “Someone should get cancer so we can eat better food,” they’d say. And we actually laughed.

* * *

Almost a decade later, our daughter, Maggie, was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and diagnosed with bipolar disorder, following years of secret alcohol and drug abuse.

No warm casseroles.

At 19, she was arrested for drug possession, faced a judge, and was placed on a probation program. Before her hearings, we ate soup and grilled cheese in a restaurant near the courthouse, mere booths away from the lawyers, police officers, and court clerks she might later see.

No scalloped potatoes in tinfoil pans.

This question is rarely heard: “How’s your depression these days?”
Maggie was disciplined by her college for breaking the drug and alcohol rules. She began an outpatient recovery program. She took a medical leave from school. She was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, diagnosed, released. She began years of counseling, recovery meetings, and intensive outpatient rehabilitation. She lived in a recovery house, relapsed, then spent seven weeks in a drug and alcohol addiction treatment center.

No soup, no homemade loaves of bread

Maggie progressed well at the treatment center. When the insurance coverage on inpatient treatment ran out for the year, she was transferred to a “partial house” where she and other women slept at night then were returned by van to the facility for full days of recovery sessions, meals, volleyball games, counseling, and horticultural therapy. This daughter who once stayed as far away from my garden as possible lest I catch a whiff of my stolen whiskey on her breath was now planting a garden herself, arranging painted rocks around an angel statue donated by a counselor, carrying buckets of water to nurture impatiens, petunia, delphinium, and geranium.

Friends talk about cancer and other physical maladies more easily than about psychological afflictions. Breasts might draw blushes, but brains are unmentionable. These questions are rarely heard: “How’s your depression these days?” “What improvements do you notice now that you have treatment for your ADD?” “Do you find your manic episodes are less intense now that you are on medication?” “What does depression feel like?” “Is the counseling helpful?” A much smaller circle of friends than those who’d fed us during cancer now asked guarded questions. No one ever showed up at our door with a meal.

We drove nearly five hours round trip each Sunday for our one weekly visiting hour. The sustenance of food, candy, and fiction were forbidden as gifts to patients at the treatment center. Instead, we brought Maggie cigarettes, sketchbooks, colored pencils, and phone cards. Any beef roasts or spaghetti dinners we ate were ones we’d prepared ourselves or bought in a restaurant on the long road to the center.

Then, late one night in June, Maggie and another patient were riding in the treatment center’s van on the way back to their house after a full day of the hard work of addiction recovery. The number of patients in the partial house had diminished from six a few days before, after a scandal involving small bags of ground coffee some smuggled from the house to the center and sold as though it were cocaine to addicts craving real coffee. (The center, like many, served only decaf.) Dozing off and comfortable in the seat behind the driver, Maggie might have been thinking of those coffee dealers who had been returned to the main facility or dismissed. Or maybe she was thinking about the upcoming wedding of her brother, Nick. A light pink bridesmaid’s dress waited in her closet at our house. Her release from the center was scheduled for two days before she and Mary Beth were to fly to Wisconsin for the wedding.

That night, an oncoming speeding car hit the van head-on.

The medics radioed for helicopters, and soon the air over Chester County, Pa., was full of them, four coming from Philadelphia, Coatesville, and Wilmington, one for each patient. The accident site was soon a garish roadside attraction of backboards, neck braces, IV tubes, oxygen tanks, gurneys, strobing lights, the deep thumping of helicopter blades, and the whine of turbines.

A newspaper picture later showed five firefighters, all in full gear, lifting a woman from a van—only her feet and an edge of the backboard visible. The van’s roof, dark and torn and jagged in the picture, had been removed by hydraulic cutters while the huddled victims, Maggie unconscious among them, were carefully covered with blankets. One of her front teeth lay in a puddle of blood on the ground.

When we saw her in the hospital, her face was a swollen mass of stitches, bruises, and torn flesh. Brown dried blood was still caked in her ears. Mary Beth carefully cleaned it with a licked paper towel, as if she were gently wiping Maggie’s face of grape jelly smudges or white donut powder just before Sunday school. At first, Maggie only remembered headlights, but soon she would mention “a cute EMS tech waking me up,” and the muffled chattering of helicopters.

The day she was released from the hospital, Maggie insisted on returning to the rehab center to complete her program, a heroine in a wheelchair among heroin addicts and alcoholics. On the way there, we stopped at a restaurant for lunch, where Maggie ate mashed potatoes, a little soup, and sucked a mango smoothie through a straw held carefully where her tooth was missing. Back at the center, we rolled her out to see her garden.

While Maggie was in the hospital, cards and letters filled our mailbox at home. For the two weeks that Maggie remained in rehab, and even while she flew to the Midwest, then wore her pink dress at Nick’s wedding and danced triumphantly with her cousins, offers of food crackled from our answering machine and scrolled out on email: “If there’s anything I can do ... ”

Larry M. Lake is a writing professor at Messiah College in Grantham, Pa.

http://www.slate.com/articles/......html
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amother


 

Post Mon, Dec 15 2014, 10:53 pm
I am an early childhood educator for 30+ years and I have seen it all. I've watched parents rally around a young mom dying of breast cancer and I watched another young mommy recover from invasive back surgery that required pain killers as she recovered. Unfortunately this lovely drum mommy became badly addicted and required rehab in order to get her life back on track.

Her children were shunned.
People whispered about her behind her back.

It was a horrible to witness and I could do little about a community that was judgmental and intolerant.

BH her kids survived this terrible period and so did she.

Her son is OTD but doing well-graduated an ivy league college and is studying law.

Not sure how her daughter is doing.

WHY do people have to be so intolerant when people are struggling with addiction?!
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ROFL




 
 
    
 

Post Mon, Dec 15 2014, 10:58 pm
Amazing article!
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amother


 

Post Mon, Dec 15 2014, 11:05 pm
amother wrote:
I am an early childhood educator for 30+ years and I have seen it all. I've watched parents rally around a young mom dying of breast cancer and I watched another young mommy recover from invasive back surgery that required pain killers as she recovered. Unfortunately this lovely drum mommy became badly addicted and required rehab in order to get her life back on track.

Her children were shunned.
People whispered about her behind her back.

It was a horrible to witness and I could do little about a community that was judgmental and intolerant.

BH her kids survived this terrible period and so did she.

Her son is OTD but doing well-graduated an ivy league college and is studying law.

Not sure how her daughter is doing.

WHY do people have to be so intolerant when people are struggling with addiction?!
Not just addiction. Its also being completely ignorant about mental illness (that was in the beginning of the article)

For me this article was extremely powerful. My husband suffers every day wit hmental illness and sometimes t is hard to just get a meal on the table. Nobody would ever know it but nobody would think to make a meal for us either even if they knew about his menta lillness as people dont put those two things together.
This article hit extremely close to home for me.
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ora_43




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Dec 16 2014, 5:40 am
I think it's complicated. The thing is, most people with mental illness do manage to feed themselves. And for those who struggle with it, the goal is often (usually?) to get them doing it for themselves.

So I think even if people would be happy to help, they aren't so sure that help would be welcome. Bringing over food could be taken as a sign that you think depressed = invalid.

Another big issue is that very few people are open about having mental illness, or struggling with addiction. I can say with 98% confidence that I know which of my friends/relatives have had cancer, and which haven't. I can't say that I know who's dealt with mental illness - I only know that regarding the people closest to me, and the few acquaintances and more distance relatives whose illness was so severe it couldn't be hidden.

I doubt I'm alone in that. And the inevitable result of all that secrecy is that a whole lot of people have no idea what to say. If someone's aunt had cancer, they knew about it, and learned about cancer and treatment and what people might need during that time. If someone's aunt had depression, or drug addiction, odds are good they never knew. Therefore, they didn't learn about the issue, didn't learn about treatment, don't know what people might need... etc.

It probably never occurred to most of the author's friends that having a child with a drug addiction would be the kind of situation that would lead to a need for home-cooked meals. People know that a parent going through chemo probably can't cook; they don't realize how often a parent with a severely mentally ill child is out of the house running around to various meetings.
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heidi




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Dec 16 2014, 5:47 am
It probably never occurred to most of the author's friends that having a child with a drug addiction would be the kind of situation that would lead to a need for home-cooked meals. People know that a parent going through chemo probably can't cook; they don't realize how often a parent with a severely mentally ill child is out of the house running around to various meetings.[/quote]
This!
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Raisin




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Dec 16 2014, 5:49 am
Its also the mother vs the daughter being sick. I've seen in my community when a woman goes away the husband gets lots of meal invites. Not so much when a man goes away.

Likewise, when a woman is sick, people assume she does most of the cooking, so the family might need help. If someones adult daughter is sick people may not think the family need help with day to day stuff like meals.
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33055




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Dec 16 2014, 6:09 am
In my community I have seen an outpouring of warmth and support when the moms are in crisis. Contrary to the myth they would be shunned, they were supported. Their meals are cooked and their children were taken care of for years. The moms would talk non responsively at simchas and the ladies were unfailingly polite. A schizophrenic girl was hired for office work even though she couldn't produce what others did.
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southernbubby




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Dec 16 2014, 6:37 am
I think that it depends on the size and make-up of the community. I don't love to cook and I do get involved when there is a short term need such as a person who is sitting shiva or someone who just had a baby but if someone needed meals for months or years on end, I would not or could not be the one to organize that.

But then, I live OOT and am part of the Chabad community which is small here and most Chabadniks are not wealthy and they don't have money for hired help or constant extra food. Most people are fine with making a Shabbos dish or two or an occasional meal but would not want to do that on a daily or even weekly basis.

That being said, people with short term needs will be helped but if it is a chronic or long term situation, they probably won't get that much help. There were volunteers that helped take a child who needed daily IV antibiotics for 6 weeks for an infected toe so that the mom would not have to miss so much work. There are people who visit the young woman who has been in a semi-coma for 7 years after being hit by a car.

With cancer treatments, those on chemo are out of commission one week out of every three or four weeks, depending on the treatment cycle. They usually don't need help every single night of the 12 weeks or so needed to complete chemo. If the list of friends is being stretched thin, it is best to concentrate on those days of the treatment cycle that help is most needed. I know people who went to work during chemo on the "good" days.
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greenfire




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Dec 16 2014, 6:56 am
I don't think people can fully understand a situation they've never been in ... however, when someone is in the hospital they do send bikur cholim food - regardless of the reasons

it is truly sad though that mental health issues - including drug addiction - is not on people's radar as much as cancer - it's just as deadly
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southernbubby




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Dec 16 2014, 7:04 am
greenfire wrote:
I don't think people can fully understand a situation they've never been in ... however, when someone is in the hospital they do send bikur cholim food - regardless of the reasons

it is truly sad though that mental health issues - including drug addiction - is not on people's radar as much as cancer - it's just as deadly



this is very true, often after people go through something, they get involved with others going through the same thing
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amother


 

Post Tue, Dec 16 2014, 7:21 am
As the spouse of an addict, this article really hit home. I TOTALLY don't blame people for not supporting me more because how can they help me if I don't share with them what I'm going through? The thing I do blame the frum community for (to some extent) is, that I don't share with them what I'm going through because it doesn't feel safe for me to do so-the stigma, the judgment. . .

I wish I could be less isolated and share more but I don't think the frum community is ready for that and sadly, I am not prepared to be the one to help them out with that (awareness etc).
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ValleyMom




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Dec 16 2014, 7:28 am
The beauty and GIFT of being in a 12 step program like alanon is you have an instant community who make themselves available 24/7 to support people in program. I have a dear friend whose husband was a blackout drunk and she came home late from work to find him sprawled out near the threshold of the front door. She called a friend in alanon who told her to pack an overnight bag and she spent the night at her home.

12 step programs are an incredible source of support, compassion and understanding that normies can't quite wrap their heads around.
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33055




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Dec 16 2014, 7:38 am
southernbubby wrote:
I think that it depends on the size and make-up of the community. I don't love to cook and I do get involved when there is a short term need such as a person who is sitting shiva or someone who just had a baby but if someone needed meals for months or years on end, I would not or could not be the one to organize that.

But then, I live OOT and am part of the Chabad community which is small here and most Chabadniks are not wealthy and they don't have money for hired help or constant extra food. Most people are fine with making a Shabbos dish or two or an occasional meal but would not want to do that on a daily or even weekly basis.

That being said, people with short term needs will be helped but if it is a chronic or long term situation, they probably won't get that much help. There were volunteers that helped take a child who needed daily IV antibiotics for 6 weeks for an infected toe so that the mom would not have to miss so much work. There are people who visit the young woman who has been in a semi-coma for 7 years after being hit by a car.

With cancer treatments, those on chemo are out of commission one week out of every three or four weeks, depending on the treatment cycle. They usually don't need help every single night of the 12 weeks or so needed to complete chemo. If the list of friends is being stretched thin, it is best to concentrate on those days of the treatment cycle that help is most needed. I know people who went to work during chemo on the "good" days.


I think you are right about the size of the community. For the most part these families were helped out on a rotating basis. One family is given funds to hire a young mother with her own family to watch the kids while the dad works in a job supplied by the community so he isn't a total chessed case. The kids tuitions are paid for. A cleaning lady is supplied for the apartment. This has been going on for years for this family. This family has no relatives in this community.

The outpouring of support and the closing of ranks for those unfortunates are amazing here. It doesn't negate the stigma of mental illness and/or addiction but the support makes it easier.
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southernbubby




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Dec 16 2014, 8:21 am
Squishy wrote:
I think you are right about the size of the community. For the most part these families were helped out on a rotating basis. One family is given funds to hire a young mother with her own family to watch the kids while the dad works in a job supplied by the community so he isn't a total chessed case. The kids tuitions are paid for. A cleaning lady is supplied for the apartment. This has been going on for years for this family. This family has no relatives in this community.

The outpouring of support and the closing of ranks for those unfortunates are amazing here. It doesn't negate the stigma of mental illness and/or addiction but the support makes it easier.


If a community has a large established bikur cholim that raises money and has volunteers who give specific chunks of time or involvement, it is easier to help in long term situations. If I were to volunteer, for example for one afternoon a week for whatever situation the bikur cholim was sending me to, I would know that my time from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. belonged to the person in that situation but outside of that, I was not giving up my own life for someone else's highly involved and complicated situation. People get very overwhelmed if too much is expected.
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debsey




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Dec 16 2014, 8:24 am
wonderful article. What a reframe! It's powerful articles like this that CREATE social change. Just look at how mental health treatment is much more acceptable in the frum world now, in a large part due to the frum media championing it. (not to say there isn't more work to to do!)
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amother


 

Post Tue, Dec 16 2014, 8:37 am
My dd has depression with anxiety It is hard to be part of the frum community. Questions like what is she doing, where is she up to , what is with shidduchim? When she can't come to simcha's because she has anxiety people ask question. If she does come and stays by herself away from people, they talk about her.
Part of her depression is that she does not take care of her personal body and people talk about it.
Then there are the questions for me. Are you getting her help, does she go to therapy and take medications
Then other wonderful advice. You are enabling her. Can't you just tell her she needs to get a job, can't you just put her into an apartment and tell her you'll. pay the first few months rent but she must take responsibility

When reading this forum I see many women admit to having psychiatric issues. How did you overcome your barriers in order to meet someone get married and be successful , or as much as you could?

The community has to change the way its look at people with psychiatric disabilities
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southernbubby




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Dec 16 2014, 8:41 am
debsey wrote:
wonderful article. What a reframe! It's powerful articles like this that CREATE social change. Just look at how mental health treatment is much more acceptable in the frum world now, in a large part due to the frum media championing it. (not to say there isn't more work to to do!)



Awareness of childhood s*xual abuse in the frum community came about as a result of a landmark series of articles in the N'shei Chabad Newsletter.

Often pioneers in social change in the frum community, such as Eliezer Goldstock, who created a place in frum society for children with Down's syndrome, get their causes into the media so that it raises consciousness.
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debsey




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Dec 16 2014, 9:04 am
southernbubby wrote:
Awareness of childhood s*xual abuse in the frum community came about as a result of a landmark series of articles in the N'shei Chabad Newsletter.

Often pioneers in social change in the frum community, such as Eliezer Goldstock, who created a place in frum society for children with Down's syndrome, get their causes into the media so that it raises consciousness.


Maybe for Chabad. Awareness of child s-xual abuse in Lakewood came due to a successful prosecution of a teacher who molested a little boy.
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musicmom




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Dec 16 2014, 9:05 am
To the amother with the daughter dealing with anxiety. Nobody should be giving you advice or talking about your daughter. These issues are so private. You should find a lot of positive things to say about your daughter, and practice ALWAYS saying something wonderful about her in public.

As to you your question with marriage... Anxiety is a problem that may need a long- term solution. Medication and exercise may help her to get back on track and deal with some of the issues. Anxiety is only a part of who your daughter is. Highlight the positive, but when dating look for someone also who appreciates her positive character traits but who can deal with some of the anxiety.

I have had anxiety issues myself. There have been times when I was functional and off medication and everything was fine. Then there is now... I am back at work with 4 kids under 4 and there is a lot of pressure... My husband is really good about taking my limitations in stride and focusing on my positive traits. I knew this about him before we married.

It really only takes one person. I met him in a town where there are barely any single Jews. Have faith that things will work out and stay positive!
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