By Isabella LaRue
The first time I learned my father wasn’t ever going to get better was in November 2016, when he kidnapped me and my siblings, stuck in his hotel room until late into the evening.
It was Thanksgiving, and it was my dad’s turn to have the three of us. As divorced parents with joint custody and visitation rights, they would trade off every holiday and every weekend. It would adjust occasionally because of my parents’ schedules. Still, more often than not, it would be my father who skipped visitation or denied us on holidays because he was “busy.”
Sometimes, he would forget us, me, my younger sister, Emma, and my younger brother, Russ, or come so late to pick us up at our after-school daycare in elementary school that it would go into the night. As a result, my mother would have to pay extra fees to the school for watching us longer. Even as a kid, I knew what it meant. He had other, more important plans.
That Thanksgiving nine years ago, my father refused to take us home, saying his brother was coming to visit, but our uncle never showed. We weren’t fed all day, and instead, he sat us down at the table, ranting for around two hours before taking all three of our phones so we couldn’t call our mother. It was a television stand because we were living out of a hotel room for a few weeks at that time. He often had trouble paying for rent in the various houses and apartments we lived in.
I remember feeling like I was never going to see our mother again. From a young age, I called upon her for a lot of support, and she would often calm my anxiety, especially when it related to my father. But that Thanksgiving night, my dad ripped that avenue away from me. Growing up, my father’s motto was always: “What happens in this house, stays in this house.”
My dad would often get like this, red-faced, manic, and wildly flailing around while he would rant, letting whoever he would direct his anger toward know why they were wrong and he was right. Later in the night, he finally took us back to our mother after she threatened to call the police if he didn’t return us.
The unspoken agreement between my siblings and me that we would keep our dad’s secrets finally lifted that night when we arrived safely back to our mother, and the three of us told her everything that happened. This was one of the last times we saw him outside of a court-mandated therapy session, and one month later, my mother filed an emergency motion to suspend visitation in December 2016.
I am using pseudonyms for many people in the story, including my father. I have not spoken to him in seven years because he lost custody of my siblings and me on account of emotional abuse, a charge almost impossible to prove, coupled with a restraining order. Thanksgiving 2016 was used as evidence for this: a night of manipulation, fear, isolation, and unadulterated rage.
Parental substance misuse has an overwhelming impact on the well-being of their children. Between 2015 and 2019, more than 2 million children lived with a parent with a substance abuse disorder. These parents suffering from addiction are less likely to effectively take on a parental role for their child. What follows is an onslaught of loss, conflict, violence, or abuse, and children taking on the role of guardian for their own parents.
According to a KFF poll, U.S drug overdose deaths are at an all-time high, as many are feeling the impacts across the country, with two-thirds saying a family member or themselves have been addicted to drugs or alcohol, experienced a drug overdose, or experienced homelessness due to addiction. Three in ten of U.S adults have been addicted to opioids, prescription painkillers, or illegal substances such as heroin.
As someone with a father who suffered from addiction during my childhood, I have learned from a young age to be quiet about his unseemly habits or erratic behavior and the effects he had on my siblings, my mother, and me. I decided to not be quiet anymore and go to an Al-Anon meeting, a group for the families of people who suffer from addiction, for the first time. When I arrived at the “Alano Club,” a few people stood outside smoking a cigarette and chatting before their respective meetings. It was set in an old church with posters of bible quotes on the white walls.
While pouring myself coffee, a man told me where I could find the room specifically for Al-Anon, taking it upon himself to welcome me to the space. I was overwhelmed. I didn’t know there was even something like this for families and not just communities to help the users get sober. I sat in the meeting for a little over an hour, where the entire session was dedicated to making any newcomers feel comfortable, like me. Everyone went around the room to share their stories and what this group has meant to them for 20+ years, with most of the room being at least past their 50s.
I was pleasantly surprised at how warm and inviting Al-Anon was. Despite the feeling of raw vulnerability with people I had never met, I felt understood in a way people don’t often understand me and my relationship with my dad. I didn’t feel alone with that anxiety. The people in the room met me with murmurs of agreement and words of encouragement when I spoke. I said things I had never said aloud before, shaking in my seat as I accounted only vague details of my father’s addiction and abuse. I talked about how it felt like I was grieving my dad, despite him still being alive, it feels like I’m mourning the father and childhood I could have had if he was sober. Would he still be in my life? How differently would I have turned out if I grew up with a father who didn’t suffer from addiction?
Growing up, I found myself wishing my parents never met. For my siblings’ sake, my sake, and most of all, my mother’s sake. I watched the way he hurt my mother constantly, screaming at her in locked rooms, slamming her against cabinets, spending her money on his vices, and hurling insults at her over phone calls. I saw the pain he caused both when he was around and long after he was gone. Before meeting, the two of them had drastically different upbringings, ones that clashed when it came to their values. My mom grew up in a traditional, conservative, Christian home in Green Forest, Arkansas, in a very sheltered environment.
My dad, on the other hand, grew up in Tampa, Florida, with an older brother and a twin brother. The three of them were frequently in and out of trouble, raised by a single mom because their dad left when they were born. My dad and his brothers were usually babysat by their family dog and left to their own devices. My father would tell me growing up that his dad abandoning them left deep, emotional scars and it encouraged him to be a better father to my siblings and me. He promised he would never leave us, too.
When he turned 12, his dad returned, but he was in and out of his life, causing constant instability in his home. He was the life of the party, like he always was, courting attention wherever he went. She had never heard someone sing like that before, and she was instantly drawn in. They were engaged within six months. Her memories from their time together, as well as mine, are murky, so some details are missing.
Dr. David Russ, my great-uncle and a licensed psychologist, who is a founding partner of Carolinas Counseling Group in Charlotte, North Carolina and focuses on severe anxiety disorders in adolescents. He is a co-creator of a treatment program for anxious children called “Turnaround: Turning Fear into Freedom.” He turned it into a book, chock full of metaphors like comparing my emotions to a rollercoaster stopping on an incline and never knowing when it would fall.
For many children of addicts, there are countless unknowns, and they don’t have the language to articulate their experiences. So, as a child, it became one of my favorite books that helped me understand my anxiety and other upsetting emotions exacerbated by my father.
Russ told me that after traumatic experiences, namely from childhood through the lens of someone now in adulthood, people will not remember the categories and reference points that existed at the time of the event.
A traumatized person is left asking themselves why they did something or why they did not know how to do something. Developmentally, one couldn’t understand what was happening to them until much later as a means of self-protection. People’s brains favor remembering danger as a means of survival.
People will not think about traumatic events for years before they suddenly come back, frequently with no warning. Anything recurring and problematic leaves its mark, such as a loved one’s addiction, on the lives of the family members.
“Like when you’re anxious, it’s just you and the bear,” Dr. Russ told me. “You don’t care what kind of trees you’re running through; you don’t care about world hunger or the stock market, it is you and the bear.”
Things that impair the front of the brain, “the caveman part,” also impair one’s survival instincts and impulse control. It is the alarm portion, which makes it more automatic, so if it is flooded or impaired by substances, your available IQ drops. People begin to rant, bombarded by anger, and say things without thinking. Without the substance, one’s brain would likely prevent the person from committing a volatile or thoughtless act.
This explanation brought to mind the nights when my father would spend hours ranting. The rants ranged from blaming my siblings and me about the bad day he was having to paranoid ramblings that I couldn’t keep track of. The drug-induced neurosis.
My sister, Emma, remembers that the most: how much he talked. She would sit there and count down the seconds to distract herself, watching the clock, and doing the math. My sister said the numbers made sense when other parts of our lives did not. When she counted, she found that some of the rants would be up to five or seven hours. If either of us spoke, they would go on for longer.
“Addiction creates a lot more uncertainty and insecurity,” Dr. Russ explained. “Cause it’s almost like you can be dealing with the same person, but the sober person is one thing and the person under the influence is a whole different thing.”
Before my dad’s opioid addiction, my mom and dad got married in 1999, before my mom graduated from Drury University in Missouri in 2000. My dad was working for the Holland Railroad Company at the time, where he would weld the track and lay it. They were long-distance because of the travel he had to do for his job, but they made it work. My mom told me about his accident at her work when he was sitting in a high rail truck, a vehicle that can drive both on and off the railroad track, when a runaway rail car started sliding down the track, where he couldn’t jump out or back up. The rail cars were supposed to have air brakes that could engage at any time to stop them, but they were faulty, a condition the company was aware of but neglected to address.
The car hit him enough to injure his spine with three herniated and ruptured discs, in need of a spinal neck fusion, which limits one’s ability to move their neck from side to side. He left the company on disability, where he later developed arachnoiditis, a rare spinal inflammation and pain disorder. He didn’t work for another ten years.
His addiction started while being treated for his disorder. My dad called one of the nurses who treated him and complained that his prescribed pain medication wasn’t working anymore. They explained it was because he was addicted to them, and he asked for another medication that would work again.
“And it was like this total acknowledgement of ‘yeah we know you’re addicted to this opioid…’” my mom said. “They gave him something stronger.”
During this time of doctor’s visits and pain prescriptions, he went from taking Tylenol 3, an opioid and a combination of codeine and acetaminophen, now discontinued due to the risk of liver damage, to OxyContin, a highly addictive pain medication.
After his treatment was over and he began recovery in physical therapy, his addiction was starting to take its toll on both him and my mother. The two of them decided to move to an apartment together in Little Rock, Arkansas, before he proceeded to take the down payment for the apartment and gamble it away at a casino.
She was forced to borrow money from her parents, which always felt like the worst-case scenario for her, as someone who could consistently take care of herself. Now, she was taking care of her husband. Six months into their marriage, after the accident, her panic attacks began.
Over 10 months, he spent over $50,000 on drugs. Opioids quickly escalated to various, stronger pills to fentanyl popsicles and regular use of cocaine that he also began to sell. My dad’s doctor had fired him as a patient because he was intimidating him into continuously giving him Adderall, not covered by insurance, as well as escorted him out of numerous Emergency Rooms for faking injury to score more painkillers.
“I remember the first time he started taking it, he was like… slack-jawed and just completely stoned out of his mind on it,” my mom said. “But he had no pain.”
David is a former drug user and the product of generational addiction, the child of an addict with a brother and a sister, both meth users, who are still deep in drug use themselves.
In 2008, David, 19 at the time, worked at a restaurant in his hometown with friends from college and high school who were taking opiates. This was his first introduction. This was at the height of the opioid epidemic. That year, drug overdoses in the United States caused 36,450 deaths.
He started taking OxyContin and feeling very sick afterward, as he was starting to wake up in the morning feeling very ill. He began to figure out that, after taking the drug again, he would feel better, and that’s where the dependence began. He was surrounded by friends who were all in active addiction, and it led to a tailspin for him.
OxyContin was the kind of drug that would wear off after 24 hours, which is when he would start to feel withdrawal. With heroin, on the other hand, he started to feel unwell every 6 to 8 hours. No one had any idea he was knee deep in addiction while juggling two jobs, an active social life, and to everyone else, nothing was wrong. That was the scary part. In 2023, around 54.2 million people 12 and older needed treatment for a substance use disorder, but only 23% received it.
The financial burden of his addiction began to take a toll on both him and his loved ones when he started to run out of money. He began stealing from his family to pawn off items like a camera from his niece, and money from his mother’s purse.
“Every dollar I had went toward my habit,” David recalled.
An addict will do it out of fear in the moment, then the reality will settle in when the drugs wear off, and they’re only left with deep regret. It was then that he started to realize he needed a change.
When it came to my dad, everything moved so quickly, and my mom was always in survival mode. His accident, as well as the subsequent failure of his medical professionals who initially fed his addiction, was the first instance in a long battle of my father’s drug habits, financial strain, and abuse toward my mother, being dragged along at his whim in her fruitless efforts to save him.
Erin is someone who has also seen the effects firsthand from her alcoholic father, who also abused narcotics, among various others, still unknown to her. It was harder to hide the excessive drinking, but he was discreet with his pills of choice to her and her twin sister. She recalled the first time she realized her father’s addiction went further than alcohol when she was 17.
When she got her wisdom teeth removed, she was prescribed oxycodone, a strong opioid, and her mother immediately told her to make sure she hid it and that her father did not come into her room without giving her an explanation, which was odd to her as a young adult who only viewed the pill as something to treat pain. It resonated with her in that moment that her father had a problem.
In April 2024, at the time of the one-in-a-lifetime solar eclipse, Erin’s father worked on a passion project over the span of months to throw an eclipse festival. It was a whole affair with a huge stage, friends, and family from all over, music, food trucks, and cabins for everyone to stay in for the night.
That night, Erin sat out on the porch with her mom, sipping wine and talking under the stars after a long day. He came out on the porch, the physical embodiment of a dark cloud over their conversation before he pulled out his balloon and inhaled next to them.
Their talking wavered, and when he spoke, the gas would warp his voice. It was low and warbling, blissed out and leaning back in his chair while Erin and her mom tried to carry on as if everything was fine.
Before she fell asleep, Erin cried in bed with a dark, looming feeling that something horrible was about to happen to her or her family.
“I just had this feeling that was the last conversation I would have with my dad…” Erin said. “And in three weeks, he was dead.”
Her father passed away late April after overdosing on the combined toxic effects of oxycodone, clonazepam (an anti-anxiety medication), and trazodone (an antidepressant), with a glass of wine, after years of on-and-off use.
The anniversary of her father’s death is coming up this year at the end of April. She’ll spend the day with loved ones, a necessary focus on community in a time of ongoing grief.
When she had been around him, she remembers an immense wash of shame, that gnawing ache in her stomach. It wasn’t quite pity, but a sense of deep sadness, the equivalent of watching a car barreling toward a wall at full speed, where the watcher can do nothing but stand and scream for them to slam the brakes. Erin’s family is now left with thousands of dollars of debt from both his habits and the destruction they have caused, including over five cars totaled within the span of a few years.
To me, one of the scariest parts of addiction is the generational cycle, from one user to their descendants, it becomes embedded into their DNA. Genetics are responsible for almost 50% of the risk for drug and alcohol dependence. The other factors are environmental, such as exposure to a parent’s drug use have a higher probability of behavioral problems for the children of addicts, frequently leading to experimenting with substances.
For me, I’ll never know if my dad got sober. After my parents divorced in 2010, my mother started seeing a therapist and was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, generalized mood disorder, panic disorder, ADHD, PTSD, and battered-wife syndrome, with my father at the root of them all. I started seeing a therapist at 12 years old, where my siblings and I were diagnosed with PTSD, depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and ADHD, all of which stem from our time with my father, too.
When it comes to addiction, specifically the opioid epidemic, much of the framing surrounds the medical field or the person who suffers from substance abuse, with a limited scope, and not the consequences and effects of the drug use on loved ones.
The statistics are there, but each of those numbers is a real person. They are children with parents in active addiction, often without the resources to advocate for themselves as they try to make sense of their experiences. The string that ties each together is the series of failures that contribute to one’s addiction and the addicts that fail those around them, a tar pit. The trauma of each incident leaves a scar.
Because every Thanksgiving, still, I think of him.