Life Still Rolls On

I know I’ve been kind of quiet lately. Things are changing here. Some are the same, some feel all too familiar & others are completely different, even now. Our daughter came home on the 1st of November. She was released to intensive outpatient care, rather than just to continuing or after care. Her counselor felt that her desire to be home was impeding her progress at recovery. While I could see her point, I feel like being at home before she was ready to be here is impeding it even more.

We’ve been through one relapse already, 4 days after she got home – she drank a bottle of body spray at home & part of a bottle of hairspray later at our god-daughter’s house. She started to try to hide it, until I told her that she smelled funny & I was going to breathalyze her when we got home. She came clean about the hairspray at that point & lied to me, flat-out about the body spray until I asked her again when we were alone.

I told her she had to tell everyone else who’s involved in her recovery and that she had to be 100% honest about it, and, as far as I know, she was. She has been.. strange ever since. Obsessed with this man she lived with before she went to jail this time. Insisting that she’s okay to be with him, that she isn’t in a relationship with him and so on. She asked if she could go to his house today if I breathalyzed her before & after & got pissed when I told her she couldn’t. That started a bunch of bad feelings on my part, and on our son’s, too.

I told her exactly how I felt, and all she could keep saying was “Do you want me to leave?” and variations of that. I felt angry & frustrated, and said some things that I shouldn’t have and I guess I’ll deal with the implications of that as time goes on. I restated the terms that she agreed to in order to live here. I told her that she was welcome to leave if she didn’t agree with them now. I also told her that if she wanted to live here, she wasn’t associating with people she has used with in the past. The the justifications began, “I didn’t use with him, I drank with him.”

I’m standing my ground on this. She can fall in line or leave, either way, it’s no skin off of my nose. This is her life & her addiction, and her recovery or relapse has no bearing on my own recovery from all of this. She can either decide to live, or she can decide to keep drinking & drugging. I  didn’t cause it. I can’t control it. I can’t cure it.

So. Yeah. That’s what’s going on there.