PARENTS LEARN TO 'LET GO' OF KIDS WHO ABUSE

The following is the third in a series on drug abuse in the Jewish community.

Deborah is a pretty, dark-haired mother who doesn't know if she'll ever see
her son alive again, but she believes she could probably find him somewhere
on the city streets - in the area around Jarvis and Church.

Once a week, Deborah joins a group of eight or nine women who are either
addicts or family members of addicts. They meet at JACS Place - a
storefront at 858 Sheppard Ave. for Jewish alcoholics, chemically dependent
persons and significant others. The women's group comes together for
understanding and support.

Within the four lavender walls, anonymity is sacred so that the group can
discuss their weekly experiences with honesty and candor.

Deborah knows there are probably no easy answers to why this has happened
to her son and her family, or to what might happen next.

But right now, Deborah says she has to close the door to him if he tries to
come home. Even if it means that the next phone call could be from the
police telling her her son has been found dead.

He has to hit bottom, she says. Otherwise, he comes home only when he needs
money to bail him out of a crisis and then he goes on to his next binge.
Because he is over 18, Deborah's son can sign himself out of every recovery
program his parents find for him. They can't force him to stay and he
doesn't seem interested in being cured.

"His addiction is destroying our family," Deborah says. "For too many
years, I have had no time for my husband or my other children. My
self-esteem was crushed, my dreams destroyed."

Deborah and the other women who meet regularly say JACS has offered them an
anchor and a foundation to help them cope.

By talking among themselves, they have learned to look for patterns in the
addicts' behaviours and in their own responses. They discuss issues that
consume them, knowing their concerns will remain undisclosed to outsiders.
The women agree that it seems much harder for their men to speak openly
about family problems.

Deborah says, for example, that her husband is still too angry to discuss
the issues.

Lilly, an addict who has been clean for several years, says the regular
support group meetings "help pierce through the shame that comes from
community and personal denial and the guilt that somehow we are to blame
for our addictions or for the addicts in our lives."

The myth that "Jewish women are supposed to be better than everyone else
means that when we suffer from problems, the fall is so much greater,"
she says.

Miriam is a petite woman who hardly looks her age. She currently has
custody of her grandchildren.

"My daughter and her husband have lost everything - their business, their
house, even their children," she says.

Miriam stopped bailing them out of their ongoing financial troubles
recently because she believes that if she constantly helps them, they will
never recover.

Her daughter ran away from home when she was 12 years old. The police found
her and brought her back, but she then dropped out of high school and every
other program her mother put her in.

While their daughter was growing up, Miriam and her husband didn't
understand that drugs were consuming their child's life.

"We thought you either had good kids or bad kids, and since we believed we
had a good kid we thought the problems would just go away with time," she says.

Last year, Miriam found drugs in her daughter's home and realized she had a
big problem on her hands.

"My daughter now blames me for not helping her," Miriam says. But as hard
as it is, Miriam is convinced that she can't answer her phone calls.

"My daughter needs to understand that she is powerless over the alcohol and
drugs that are controlling her life. Otherwise she will never recover,"
Miriam says.

Joanne is a young adult who grew up with parents who were stoned most of
the time.

"Everyone thought my mother was the ideal PTA mom," Joanne says. "She would
pick me up from school and stop to chat with the other mothers."

But Joanne remembers that her parents would come home and close the door to
their bedroom.

"We were left to bring ourselves up. There was no homework time or
bedtime," she says.

Eventually Joanne and her siblings were taken in by a relative until their
mom went into recovery.

Today Joanne thinks she is a better person because of what she went
through. But when she was little, she remembers going into the closet and
just crying.

Anita is an addict who initially joined an Alcoholics Anonymous group that
met in a church for support.

"But I felt so uncomfortable in a church. I couldn't go back," she says.
Leah, the wife of an addict, agrees. She says she could barely bring
herself to JACS because she was afraid she might know someone.

On the other hand, Leah says she would never have gone into a non-Jewish place.

The hard part was coming in. Now, she relies on her weekly meetings.

"Counsellors have taught me that addiction, like cancer, is a disease; that
there are steps that can be applied to help me deal with the sickness; and
that overcoming denial is part of the solution," Leah says.

"This may not be the life I would have chosen for myself," she adds. "But
no one ever said life would be easy."

The JACS helpline is 416-410-5227.