New Audio Interview

Personal audio Interview on InsideScoopLive now ready to listen to -- just click HERE to listen.

I also would like to share (with permission) a letter I received from one of the addiction story contributors in Tales of Addiction. Lacy wrote her moving story about struggling with her mother's alcoholism. After reading the book, she offers more insight for us. Thank you so much for your wondferful feedback Lacy.

Barbara,

Just wanted to write again and tell you just how much your story about your son so affected me. So many of the feelings that you described, I have felt so often in my own life. Wanting so badly to help someone, it can be so draining and so difficult to accept that you can’t. I just found your descriptions so moving, I couldn’t stop thinking about them long after.


One of the things you shared in the book that I identified with most was “Autobiography in Five Chapters.” You shared it as a better understanding for those with the addiction and how they need help sometimes to find that other path but I walked away from reading that passage with a better understanding for myself, as the family member of the addict.


So much of the past six or seven years have been spent going down that same road day after day, month after month. When you first wrote me to share my story, I was in an interesting place in my life. I had just made the move to remove myself from the situation. But it was only a mere two months later that I found myself in exactly the same place I’d always been when I let my mom move back in with me. As naïve as it sounds to me now, after about fifty times of trying, a part of me still believed that I could change her. I wanted and needed to believe that.


Your book coming out when it did couldn’t have been better timing. In April, I told my mother I couldn’t do it anymore and I chose to once again remove myself from the situation of “saving her.” But it was only by early May that I was once again wondering about the possibility of letting her back. And then I read your book, and the passage I had written, which feels like ages ago now.


Initially, I was taken aback by just how vague I had been. So much of my mother’s alcoholism had me living in shame, as though I was the one doing something wrong; but I think for the most part, I simply felt that by keeping quiet and to myself, it wasn’t all that real. I am in a completely different place now.


Also, while reading what I’d written, I was struck by the amazing similarities to my life now. I’d chosen then to save myself and now I was finding myself in that exact same situation with that exact same possibility before me, and I knew then that I had to take it. I wrote to my older brother to explain: “I am afraid. Afraid of what will happen if I let her back. Afraid of what will happen if I don’t let her back. There are no certainties except for one. If I do let her back, there is no guarantee that she will change, that she will get better. But, if I let her back, I know one thing--I will die.”


So, thank you for this book and for sharing your story :) It couldn’t have been better timing. I wrote my mother a poem just after I’d made my decision and I’d like to share it with you:


Caught


I hate you, I love you
This back and forth emotion
This up and down feeling
This stop and start life
Breathing in and breathing out
Getting up and falling down
Hiding while crying
Living while dying
Believing in nothing
Questions in the night
My soul in shadow
No one in sight
Bitterness screaming
Hopeful dreaming
Lost and alone
No place called home
Hating you, Loving you
Saving, then losing you
Finally free
Saving me
Learning to breathe


~ Lacy Lynnette