recovery

In Need of a Love Revolution.

~ heroin heroine ~ 1 Comment

Life is a love poem. Most days I am sure of it, some days I am not. The days I am not are usually because I am astonished by extraordinary acts of greed. Examples abound. Never in recent history has the wage gap been this large. Agribusinesses poison our topsoil with dizzying amounts of pesticides to increase corn yields – which are then used to sweeten our foods to a sickening degree. All in the name of profits. I can think of a dozen more examples. I am sure you can too. Currently I am dumbstruck by the amount of greed the Sackler family showed manufacturing oxycontin. As the death count mounted they hid money in off-shore accounts, bought doctors, manufactured fake safety studies, and fed illegal pill mills.  Personal fortune in the billions was apparently not enough.  They invested in a pharmaceutical company operating in China and India so that they could addict a whole new continent of unsuspecting consumers (they are using the same marketing tactics).  How has this corporation not been dismantled, their money confiscated, and the orchestrators jailed? I am convinced that someone is profiting somewhere from the injustice.

I am not a rube. I realize profits are the life blood of a healthy corporation. And I am not a socialist. But it seems to me that we have given our golden goose away to the business elite. We have forgotten that our constitution guarantees the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. We can not be healthy or happy if corporate greed continues to control our destiny. And as the Sackler’s have proven time and time again: we may not even be allowed to live.

I think greed is the only human emotion that is untouched by love.  It’s been sixty years since this country had a love revolution.  And I venture to say we are desperately in need of a new one. “Turn on, tune in and drop out” needs to be redefined. Hedonism, navel gazing and blissful ignorance should have ended a long time ago. It’s time for wide eyed collective activism. We need to “turn off (our distracting social/entertainment feeds), tune up and drop in.” Hard.

Maybe you can find yourself in a march against our current gun laws. Or petition to restore our clean waters act. Or question the profit sharing at your workplace.  Maybe just write a check to feed our hungry veterans. Or vote out of office those who are controlled by super pacs. Maybe you will be like Maura Healey, Boston’s Attorney General, and enforce the rule of law. She turned down Purdue’s offer of 600 million lame ass dollars since they will be based on future sales of oxycontin. (Yeah, I know I said lame ass –  it could have been worse).  Maura is holding fast.  She wants the money to come from profits already made. She wants justice for her fellow man now.

The rule of law and capitalism work: but only if we keep our eyes wide open and we play our part.

So choose to do something. And choose something everyday.
My mother once shared that her Buddhist friend claimed it was her “duty to perform three good deeds each day.” Let’s be like that friend.

It’s time to let our love light shine.

Paper Airplanes of Love.

~ heroin heroine ~ 3 Comments

Everything is a love poem.

Someone said this recently.
I think they were joking because their tone was a bit flippant.
But after he said it he let a long pause hang in the air.
And the pause felt like a challenge.

I guess I would like to believe that everything is a love poem.
I admit I embarrass myself. Am I just a silly girl?

Yet there is a whole lot of love tucked into nearly every day: A smile from a stranger, the cat that follows you down the driveway, the extra cheese someone put on your sandwich, the feel of the wind on your cheek, an evening swim, a pink sky, music on the radio, cold ice in a drink, the feel of a warm embrace. Right now my big old red dog is laying down under a tree and sniffing the air. If he catches me looking at him he will feel the need to come stand by me, and in doing so he will have to move his arthritic hips. I look quickly away so he will not struggle. Love, love, and more love.

Of course we can’t dismiss the broken hearts, the divorces, the deaths.
Yet these hurt because they showcase another side of love: the loss of it, the memory of it, the importance of it.

Then there is self love. Contrary to what our media feed may tell us self love is not a day at the spa or a healthy meal delivery from an internet box service. True self love depends upon unconditional love.

The first time I considered the meaning of “unconditional love” was after a text from our family therapist. She implied that I might have been lacking it. She sent it upon the aftermath of my umpteenth midnight run to pick up my screaming daughter from a police lock up. The therapist was wrong. Nothing my child did or said could have made me love her less. I was just not willing to equate loving her with letting her go. I was not willing to “live and let live.”

Sometimes I criticize myself for all the time spent “loving” her – often at the expense of the other members of my family, and my own. (If you think you are hard on yourself ask a mother of an addict how she feels deep down inside.)

I had a fabulous therapist for a year who asked the most ridiculous questions: what kind of wild animal did you see today? what is your love language? But she was also spot on. She brought me back to the love that was all around me (that old dog under the tree, that cheese on my sandwich, that pink sky).

Unconditional self love, however, is a strange concept. We misinterpret it. We think a self improvement regimen is as an act of self love. Or we recite our strengths to feel worthy of it. But self love requires something completely different. It requires accepting that mountain of other, quieter, stuff; our operating quirks, our bias, our mistakes. That mountain grows as we get older. Maybe that is why so many of us address it later in life.

My New Year’s resolution is to take time to sit quietly.   To sit quietly atop my mountain of stuff.  And I am going to write some love poems.  And I am going to let them fly.

Time is Not Golden.

~ heroin heroine ~ 10 Comments

 

Broken things can be mended. Like my coffee mug with the reattached handle. And my old cashmere sweater with the stitched moth holes. Broken things can also just be broken. Like my refrigerator which is currently leaking all over the kitchen floor.

You probably know where this is going. This is a blog about recovery after all.

I like to remind myself that broken things can be fixed. I am sitting at a round oak table that I found in the bowels of an antique store. The owner practically gave it to me when I said I liked the shape of it. I brought it home and stripped it, sanded it, stained and polyurethaned it. It is heavy and beautiful and has the most glorious curled feet. For so many years it sat in the basement of that shop covered in green paint. You couldn’t even see those strong, lovely feet.

But recognizing an objects worth and fixing it are sometimes not enough. The motherboard on my refrigerator has been replaced yet the temperature continues to rise. I defrosted a frozen drain hole and the ice block returned.  I superglued the fraying rubber gasket – it ripped some more.

People can be broken too. But unlike objects, people are not irreparably damaged.  Yes, some may have been born with “operating quirks.” Some continuously fall prey to their own bad choices. And some peoples broken-ness can be blamed on others.

The Japanese term for embracing imperfection is called “wabi sabi.”  I like this philosophy; I find delight in crooked teeth, aging faces, scarred body parts.  Who really wants airbrushed perfection?  But admittedly some things are not just worn, but broken.  The Japanese have a solution for that as well:  kintsugi.  Kintsugi is the practice of using gold joinery to reattach broken pottery. Gold joinery to illuminate imperfection!  The resulting pieces are a work of redemptive art.  Like my round table.  Like the people I have met in recovery.

But how come some people never make it to that redemptive place? I believe it is simply a matter of running out of time. The time needed to be pulled out of that “dark basement,” the time needed to have their broken-ness acknowledged, and the time needed to reassemble themselves.

Today I am thinking of all the lovely people who ran out of time.  When I was little my father would ask me “what kind of wings would you like when you become an angel?… gold, silver or copper?”  (Disclaimer:  my dad never believed in Christianity. He was most likely drawn to the Pre-Raphaelite imagery.)   I always answered copper. I preferred the warm shimmer.  

I know this is a silly wish – but if there is a heaven, I hope that when I arrive the golden wings are reserved for the broken people – the ones who either fixed themselves while on earth or were mercifully repaired when they ascended.  Kintsugi Angels.  

An Augusten Burroughs Kind of Dream.

~ heroin heroine ~ 2 Comments

 

I had a strange dream last night.  In this dream I tried to help someone (a confident yoga teacher) find something in a dark basement. I ran after him to help because I knew it would be very dark and very dangerous down there. But he shut the door on me. And I was left behind in a room full of beautiful, happy, healthy people. It was then that I felt the arch of my foot throbbing. Refusing to acknowledge the pain only led to it increasing and traveling to the top of my foot, my ankle and my calf. When it became nearly unbearable I looked down to find swollen blackness had encased my lower leg like burnt elephant skin. I recall thinking, “This is okay. You can handle this by ignoring it some more.” Just then a partygoer with a handy pair of scissors grabbed my leg and started cutting the damaged encasing away. I was semi-terrified but decided to trust them and was surprised to feel no pain as the damaged skin fell away in sheets. I watched as my leg emerged – pale, healthy and pain free.

I think I know what this dream is about.
It’s about opening my eyes to the constant need to close them.
It’s about learning to let others fend for themselves.
It’s about cutting away the things that bring me pain (not to be confused with ignoring things that give me pain!)
It’s about trusting others to help me.
It’s about re-claiming space with the happy, healthy people.

This is the perfect sort of dream for a mom of a child in recovery to have.

It’s funny how our subconscious sends us freaky night time missives and our waking mind attempts to make sense of them. Of course I can read this dream many ways. Possibly I should be more humble – who do I think I am that I can help an athletic male yogi avoid danger? Or maybe I am simply being reminded to run a little less so my foot doesn’t throb in my sleep.

Or possibly my brain is sending me the naughty subliminal message to get in with the type of people who run with scissors.

🙂

Poetry. Addiction. Life.

~ heroin heroine ~ 1 Comment

Poetry. With just a few words it can make the most difficult feelings easily understood. Or it can transform the most mundane activity into a deeply humanistic ritual. I used to think poetry stripped things down to their basic essence but now I think it has the ability to alchemize life.

There is a belief that the creating artist suffers more than the rest of humanity. I do not believe this to be true. I had a Harvard professor (shout out to Vernon Howard!) who once said “one man’s opera is another man’s ball game.” He wasn’t merely being democratic – he was speaking the truth. Every day I am humbled by the breadth of artistic expression.

One artist I deeply admire is the Iranian born poet, Kaveh Akbar. I hesitate to explain what he means to me beyond revealing that he is in recovery and that his words seem to both inform, and include me. Miraculously he incorporates multitudes* in that his everyday language builds an opera of understanding around what it means to suffer, to dream, to survive.

 

RIMROCK – by Kaveh Akbar

Without the benefit of fantasy
I can’t promise I’ll be of any use.

Left to the real world I tend
to swell up like roots in the rain,

tend to get all lost in hymns
and astrology charts. Lately

I’ve been steaming away, thin
as cigarette paper, cleaning up

the squirrels that keep dying in my yard.
Each cascade of fur feels like a little tuft

of my own death. Am I being dramatic?
Mostly I want to be letters—not

their sounds, but their shapes
on a page. It must be exhilarating

to be a symbol for everything at once:
the bone caught in a child’s windpipe,

the venom hiding in a snake’s jaw.
I used to be so afraid of nature.

Peering up at a rush of rimrock
I imagined how unashamed it would be

to crush even me, a tiny stuttering boy
with glasses. I pictured myself

reduced to a warm globe of blood
and yearned to become sturdy in my end-

lessness, to grow heavy and terrible
as molten iron poured down a throat. Still,

I don’t know the rules. If I go looking
for grace and find it, what will grace

yield? Broken ribs, probably, flakes
of rust, an X marked in an atlas which itself

has been lost for ages. Oh, but I do
know what I am: moonstruck, stiff

as wet bamboo. I remember someone
once sang here, once strung together

a garland of near-holy moments.
It’s serious business, this living.

As long as the earth continues
its stony breathing, I will breathe.

When it stops I will shatter back
into gravity. Into quartz.

(*with another shout out to Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself.)

“ACE” made me do it.

~ heroin heroine ~ 2 Comments

There is a relatively new addiction model called Trauma Therapy. One of it’s chief proponents, Dr. Gabor Mate, explains that people are born perfect and adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) create trauma which leads to addiction. In an interview in The Fix Mate claims, “if children receive conditions of love and respect in their childhood, they’ll never be addicted, they’ll never get depressed and they’ll never be anxious.”

What qualifies as an ACE? Physical, sexual or verbal abuse, physical or emotional neglect, living with a parent who is abused or addicted, having an incarcerated or mentally ill caregiver, or suffering the loss of a parent through divorce, death or abandonment. The Centers for Disease Control developed these markers to identify people at high risk for obesity, depression and addiction.

According to Mate all IV drug users score positively on the ACE scale. Furthermore he insists if you do not recall childhood trauma then you are repressing it and in need of extensive “trauma therapy.” (If this is not a siren call for false memories then I don’t know what is.)

I shared my doubts with a follower of Dr. Mate. I explained that my child did not meet a single marker on the ACE scale. Stymied, they asked if her childbirth had been traumatic (which felt a bit like “mother blaming”). When I explained that she was the easiest of my childbirths I was told my daughter must be a victim of epigenetics. This was explained as “inheriting on a cellular level the trauma of previous generations.” I was then asked if something ugly could have happened to me as a child, something that I may not even recall. A subconscious molestation could be the reason I birthed an addicted child.

This does not sound like responsible science to me.

Epigenetics is the science of gene expression. It explains how the environment may turn on/off the expression of certain DNA coding. For example there is scientific evidence that extensive stress can cause permanent damage to the body’s production of cortisol. This makes sense since we are biological beings and our bodies interact with, and are affected by, our environment.

The proponents of an epigenetic basis for addiction cite work done by Rachel Yehuda Ph.D., at the Icahn School of Medicine. Dr. Yehuda hypothesized that genetic damage suffered by an individual could be passed down to future generations. She deduced this after finding an increased rate of anxiety, depression and obesity in the children of Holocaust survivors. She attributed their health problems to inherited faulty cortisol production and enzyme regulation; rather than asking if growing up with PTSD-affected parents could have produced an environment that fostered stress in the children.

It is important to note that Dr. Yehuda’s work has been debunked. The Chicago Tribune (citing various sources) reported “Yehuda’s study began with too small of a study size. Only 32 survivors and 22 of their offspring were studied. That’s a very small group on which to base this theory and a major study flaw.” The article further revealed a major flaw within Yehuda’s research: “While the team studied the children of women who lived through the Holocaust, they would have to study the great-grandchildren of survivors to prove actual epigenetic inheritance from mother to offspring. Why must four generations be studied? The eggs that made you were present inside your mother when she was a fetus inside your grandmother. Because a pregnant woman already possesses the DNA of her grandchildren and these genes can be affected by things during her pregnancy, the DNA of the great-grandchildren has to be studied to show that epigenetic changes were passed on across generations.”*

I also can’t help but think that if generational trauma was a prescription for drug abuse the species would be extinct by now. The circle of damage would have increasingly widened as generations multiplied exponentially through time.

Strict reliance on ACE is problematic on another level: it rigidly shuts the door on other causes of addiction. Purdue Pharma flooded the market with highly addictive pills that have been proven to change neuro-pathways in the brain. Are we really going to insist that those who got addicted did so because of early trauma (divorced parents possibly?) and not because they were the victims of corporate greed?

Interestingly Mate acknowledges that “not all of those who have ACEs become addicts, but all addicts have ACEs.” Why isn’t Mate questioning this discrepancy? Could the difference be attributed to the fact that some people are genetically predisposed? Or that they have less emotional resiliency because of a psychological disorder that is eased by substance use such as anxiety, bipolar, or depression?

Dr. Mate insistence that psychological disorders are created by early trauma is nonsensical. Babies are not born perfect! Every day children are born deaf, blind and lame. They have congenital heart defects, they have sickle cell anemia. To think that the newborn brain is inure to imperfection is ridiculous.

Imperfection is part of nature. I often ask my art students to go outside and find the perfect tear shaped petal, the perfect circular rock. They always come back empty handed and we marvel at the impossibility of it. It is only the foolish or megalomaniacal who dream of perfection.

My daughter is flawed – but not any more than me. She is stubborn, I am prideful. She is anxious, I have self doubt. She did not have a traumatic childhood; she had a fairytale one lived out in a house near the sea with a sister, a brother and a big fluffy dog. She tells me nothing untoward occurred during her formative years and I believe her. Can she benefit from trauma therapy? Of course. But it would be for trauma experienced while using.

Mate’s proposition is maddening because it is reductionist. And because it asks people who are already suffering to seek another layer of pain where none may exist. It also demands that science take a back seat to a condition that people are finally beginning to accept as a disease.

I feel traumatized by the possibility of it.

Stats… STAT!

~ heroin heroine ~ 7 Comments

Our children relapse. We are warned “relapse is part of recovery.” But I don’t think most of us believe it. By the time your child has a few years under their belt you get comfortable. You see a person emerge that you haven’t seen in years. Someone who is genuinely happy. Focused. Funny. Confident. Surely this person is here to stay.

But the fact remains. A mom I know confessed to returning to the days of sending canteen money to her son after his recent relapse landed him back in jail. She ended her dark missive with “why, why, why?”

It’s a rhetorical question I suppose. We know why. Giving up anything for a lifetime is a pretty monumental task. Giving up something you once loved more than life itself must be harder. Then throw in the added bonus of having an addictive personality or a mood disorder. Those are some pretty good whys. Sometimes I am amazed at the fortitude required to obtain 2-3-4 years of complete sobriety. It feels like a miracle. But I don’t want to think this way. I don’t want my daughter’s future to be dependent on a miracle.

Last week my daughter called me from detox. It was her third attempt in ten days. Her voice was hopeless as she numbly reported “only 1% of addicts ever make it mom.” I also have heard this number quoted. And I don’t like it.

We know statistics are manipulated to present a particular point of view. Is this one in existence because historically we haven’t cared enough to get the math right? Or has it been cultivated to justify poor spending on treatment?

This number was ringing in my head when I sat on an opioid forum last week. Beside me sat the head of a Massachusetts hospital emergency room department. He confidently stated that “involuntarily committing addicts to treatment is not recommended because we are setting them up for a higher rate of overdose death.” I am presuming his reasoning was based on the premise that this population is not interested in quitting drugs and therefore would return to using. I don’t question that deaths are higher among the involuntarily incarcerated vs. the voluntarily committed when treatment ends. It makes logical sense. But the data is flawed. The data is flawed because of “patient selection bias.” The doctor failed to include those who were NOT included in the data: those not forcibly committed to treatment. I venture to say that most of them are dead – or will be dead. Look at it this way: it’s like playing Russian Roulette with people who don’t want to quit the game. If you take away the gun some may eventually go back to playing with the gun. But if you DON’T take away the gun… well everyone is going to die. It’s that simple.

Are there better stats regarding relapse? Unfortunately there is a dearth of long term data. One of the few long term NIH funded studies followed 1,162 addicts for eight straight years. Published in the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Abuse it revealed that as the length of time in sobriety increases, so do the odds of continued sobriety. Those with less than a year have a 33% success rate. Those with over a year increase their odds to 50%. And those who achieve five years can expect an 85% future sobriety success rate. Data just doesn’t exist for those with 20 or 30 years of recovery time; but those who work in residential centers find their reappearance rare.

So we know clean time breeds more clean time. I remember joking a few years back with a local officer.  I asked him to handcuff my daughter to her bedroom radiator to prevent her from scoring. He smiled, but then seriously replied “yeah, I can’t do that…and neither can you.”

Since that day I have been searching for a legal means to success.  That searching even led to attendance at a spiritually based reading group (disclaimer: it is an act of desperation for me to turn toward faith for any sort of answer.)  What I found was that many of those in attendance were living a life of successful sobriety.  History, science, and society have not been kind to those suffering from the disease of addiction so we can not blame them for remaining in the shadows.  AA and NA use “anonymous” for a reason.  But by sharing their status this group become a living example of hope and, even better, a room full of positive odds!

It is still going to take a lot of unbiased research to get us solid numbers to stand upon.  Faulty statistical analysis, unfunded federal research, a lack of evidence-based treatment, and social stigma have led us to this unsettling place. To live within the world of addiction is to stand on shaky ground.

For now I will tell you what I can do. I can share a whole new set of facts with my daughter when I visit her at the hospital. I can tell her with confidence that the 1% success rate is inaccurate. And I will tell her with even more confidence that she matters 100% to me.

These are the only true numbers at my disposal and, for today, we are relying upon them.

Rainy Beach Day.

~ heroin heroine ~ 2 Comments

Exactly two years ago I wrote these words in my journal:

Sarah is still clean.
It is a miracle.
Others are dying though. Dying everywhere at an unprecedented rate.
But we all die. I think about this at the beach and I cry with relief.

I think about these words. I don’t remember writing them.
Was I crying because my daughter was safe?
Or was I crying because death is our shared destiny
– and how can you fear something so natural?

I don’t know.

Today my daughter is safe after her relapse.
But today I do not feel relief.
Maybe it is the rain. Or the wind signaling the end of summer.
Or maybe it is something internal that I just can’t access.

It could be fear for the future,
or stress over the uncertainty.
It could be sadness for her struggle,
or anger at my being unable to fix it.

It is probably all of these things.  And more.  I know there is more.

One thing is certain though – today I will visit the beach.

The Art of Telling Stories.

~ heroin heroine ~ 5 Comments

I recently joined a storytelling troupe. This is a weird one for me since I don’t like being on stage. No one would ever describe me as theatrical. But this particular group shares recovery stories. Wishing to ‘end the stigma” I felt a moral obligation to sign up.  Plus, let’s face it, I have a lot of ugly stories in need of a facelift. Quite possibly this group could help with that. And there was a selfish reason; I was searching for people whom I could talk to. I’m not a recluse; I have some pretty awesome, long-term friends. But the whole friendship thing gets complicated when your child suffers from addiction. Most of the time, your friends just don’t ask. I had been forewarned ‘when your child suffers from a disease like cancer you get cards and casseroles, but when your child suffers from addiction you get silence.’ I found this to be true. Five years brought me one card, and no casseroles. Occasionally I did get to share my experience… but the exchange became too lurid even by my standards:

Mom #1: “X can’t seem to pass his driving test and he is so depressed. I worry about his self esteem.”

Me: “Y is sleeping in a filthy motel forty miles away using type A narcotics. I can’t sleep at night worried that she may be dying as I lay here in my beautiful bed.”

You can see the problem.

So you end up alone with your thoughts, either by choice or because people don’t want to engage in this kind of exchange (how are they supposed to respond?) But if not careful your sense of isolation can fester into a wound of resentment. You can’t help but wonder what friendship is really for. You start to feel buried alive: your once perfect family is now dysfunctional and your friends are psychologically absent. It can be a dark place to find yourself in.

This time when my daughter relapsed I decided things were going to be different. I considered asking for what I needed. But I just couldn’t do it. It felt like asking someone to love you… pathetic and powerless.

Instead I opened myself up to new avenues of expression. The arts take Courage and Power (uppercase letters intended). I am going out on a limb here… but I would venture to say that the definition of good art is that it is emotionally complex, it inspires conversation, and that it accesses the buried but universal elements of human nature.

As suspected it wasn’t easy to stand up in a room full of strangers and entertain, inspire and heal with a broken hearted story. One teller spoke of a day when she had sat at a table littered with jittery tinfoil scraps and the small rocks of crack she had been hoarding. She describes her apprehension when a strange man decides to sit opposite her. When he offers her a little blue pill to help her come down from her teeth clenching high, it is not the free pill that takes her by surprise. It is the impossible blue of his eyes. Suddenly the drugs became secondary to basic human connection. I could feel my head nodding. Connections can be made in the most difficult of environments. And the truth is that those who say you can “do it alone” are either misguided or lucky enough to not have been in too dark of a place.

One of the last storytellers spoke sadly of the loss of her marriage and self control to drug use. And of her dad’s steady effort to take her on long daily walks. On stage she mimic’d how her father, on these walks, would steal long wordless glances her way. It was all she needed; to be fully seen and quietly loved. To be fully seen and quietly loved – it is the only thing any of us truly need.  Life had taught me this.  And the arts gave me the means to express it.

 

 

God Moments?

~ heroin heroine ~ 2 Comments

 

Someone in recovery described a story of mine as a “God moment.” They didn’t mean God, per se. They meant those moments when the universe just seems to be there for you. One of those rare times when the “dots get connected” when you least expect them to.

The moment I had been sharing was hardly ‘heavenly.’ It was about the time when my seventeen-year old daughter had prematurely left drug treatment and gone missing. A tip on her location had landed me in court to have her arrested and involuntarily committed for treatment. The judge issued a warrant that was due to expire at the end of that very day. As I sat on the court bench and waited for her arrival I had a distressing front row seat to a slow parade of sadness, ugliness, and desperation. What I did not witness was the arrival of my daughter. (A year prior police escorted her in both hand and leg cuffs. There is nothing more shocking than seeing your child shackled this way; other than realizing a year later that you are now looking forward to those same custodial restraints.)

With one eye on the ticking clock I asked the court officer for the address to the local police station. Upon arrival I informed the officers that I was about to “do their job for them.” They warned that my efforts would be wasted since ‘no one would open the door in a drug den.’ I countered that it was much more likely my daughter would answer if she heard my voice and, regardless, I was going whether they came with me or not. Possibly shamed, but more likely legally bound, they agreed to accompany me. That was when I learned that the neighborhood was so dangerous that a second cruiser was needed. To top it off I was given a lecture about “staying behind the officers” when we entered the building. (No God moments thus far… instead It felt a bit like we were prepping to enter the fifth level of Hell.)

The address led us to a street that was a lifeless shade of grey. There were dozens of people milling about but they morphed, understandably, into silent watching shadows. The triple decker we approached was adrift in discarded clothing, empty cans and bits of unidentifiable metal debris. The front door was located on the second floor and had no discernible way to reach it. No staircase, no doorbell, no mailbox, no buzzer. Together we rounded the building and discovered a dirty basement door boarded over with plywood and nails. I envisioned prying it open and crawling through the darkness. I made a note to return to this door if need be. Rounding the last side of the building we were greeted with an entry level, dead bolted, door. And a woman. The same woman who had been silently watching us from across the street. Earlier I had thought she was a man. But now I was close enough to make out the large breasts that hung to the left and right of her plain cotton tee shirt. She was powerfully built in denim jeans and construction boots. She had a plain round face, and a long thin black pony tail that hung down her back: pencil straight. Her countenance was unreadable. She pointed to me and, wordlessly, pointed to the third floor. I replied “yes.” She nodded and turned her attention to the large brass key ring on her hip. Methodically she flipped through dozens of standard cut keys and selected just one. And she opened the door. The next few minutes were a bit of a blur. I know we climbed to the third floor and we knocked and my daughter answered. The officers put her in handcuffs and she was wild with spitting fury. Even so, the officers carefully tucked my daughter’s dirty blonde head into the back of their cruiser. Before following them back to the courthouse I sat in my car for a moment. I didn’t notice that the woman had approached my driver’s side window until I heard the knock. Rolling down the window she spoke her first word to me. “Drugs,” she said. I nodded. Staring hard at me she then said “Bad drugs.” I replied, “yes.” Then she said, “good mamacita,” and slowly crossed the street.

It was only then that I remember feeling truly overwhelmed. Unhinged may be a better word. I had been playing this game for a few years but this feeling was different. I rolled up my window, but not without the self correcting thought “this is what you do in neighborhoods like these.” Yes, this is where my daughter was lost. But this is also where she had been found. Someone – someone I never expected to help me – had done so. The police hadn’t. What if she hadn’t been there? What if she didn’t have those keys? Why did she help me when she knew there was drug activity going on in a building she obviously had some sort of responsibility for? Why had she helped me in front of the cops? Was it a gift from one mom to another?

It was, in the end, a coming together of disparate parts of the universe.

Of course I felt unhinged. I don’t know if I experienced a God Moment. I don’t even know if there is a God. But I am beginning to believe I may have met some sort of fallen angel. A fallen angel who was working hard on our behalf. A fallen angel in construction boots.

.