Smoke Means Fire
I smell a skunk.
I'm sprawled out on my fluffy peach bedspread fumbling over my algebra homework after school when I inhale something funny. I scrunch my face and sniff.
“What’s that smell?” I yell to my brother Brad. He’s in his room next to mine, supposedly working on a model airplane. But that’s not what the air smells like.
“Nothing,” he says. His voice is choked and small. I go back to x and y. I’m used to him dismissing me, his little sister by three years.
In a few minutes my confusion flips to clarity like a light switch and I stammer to Brad, “Is that, is that pooot?” My voice rises as I inhale the pungent scent I’ve rarely encountered—and never at home. “Oh my gosh, Brad! Are you crazy?” I leap from my bed and rush into his room.
Brad was wrong, it wasn’t nothing. That fall afternoon marked the first time Brad sucked in a “couple of hits” of marijuana in his bedroom. No one could know it was the next step toward Brad’s twenty-year addiction to downers, beginning with valium and ending with heroin.
Talk about a defining moment.
No one could know that Brad discovered a way to self-medicate what his teachers called his “high energy.” He likely had ADHD. A good-looking, outgoing, athletic kid, Brad seemed like the whole package, possessing personality and popularity. But it was a package he couldn’t manage. Maybe his own expectations (and Dad’s) applied too much pressure for him to handle. Mom and Dad—who grew up in the '50s—lacked the tools and knowledge to help him cope with his racing brain and body.
So, they enabled him instead.
Mom adored Brad and chose to keep the peace at home. When she first realized he smoked pot in his room, she didn’t tell Dad, but instead she yelled at Brad and let his behavior go. After years at home with us kids, she’d begun working full-time and was busy raising two teenagers. It’s understandable how she possessed less bandwidth to implement the discipline he needed. Besides, in our old-school household, Dad laid down the law. But he didn’t know smoke meant fire.
Dad eventually learned about Brad’s pot use, but he and Mom never grounded Brad. They never realized Brad was an addict in the making. Their denial served them and kept up appearances but didn’t help Brad. When parents smell a skunk, they should act on it rather sitting idly by and watching their loved one self-destruct.
It’s possible that despite their later awareness that Brad was an addict, they coped by pretending otherwise. According to Merriam-Webster.com, denial is a defense mechanism in which confrontation with a personal problem or with reality is avoided by denying the existence of the problem or reality.
They hid our household dysfunction to close friends and family, hid their shame. That’s what people did in their generation. Keeping up appearances let them keep friends close—who might otherwise reject them in an effort to distance themselves—in an unfortunate codependent response. I can see how that seems easier at the time, easier than turning your life upside down to focus on re-railing an addict who you won’t admit has a drug (or alcohol) problem.
That short-term denial response becomes impossible over time. The addiction oozes outside the walls of your home. The long-term repercussions of a teenager addicted to drugs can be horrendous. That’s why it’s called a family disease.
Had my parents intervened full-time for a year or two and created a brick path Brad couldn’t veer off—while he was still a minor—we might not have lived through the hell of addiction for two decades which led to his overdose, followed by Mom’s death, then Dad’s.
What if we’d acted sooner?
Our story is over. Today I can only hope and pray my experience helps someone else overcome their denial and make the uncommon choices that will lead to a happy ending for their family.