Obstacles

I was talking with a group of people via Zoom recently when I shared a story about obstacles. As I finished speaking I looked down at my phone and saw a text from a friend that was attending the meeting. His message said, “You need to write about this”. The man that sent the message has become a great friend over this last year of my life and since he has always nudged me in the right direction I decided I would try and get these thoughts out on paper.

But this one was going to be a bit tough.

SPOILER ALERT, the ending to this story is a good one. I’ve experienced a transformation of sorts over the last two years and I don’t know that I could be in a better place mentally, spiritually or physically. The problem is getting through to that end means I must walk through the struggle it took to get me here…and this is going to suck.

Why is it going to suck? Because it means I must face myself. It means I must take a spotlight into my head where the darkest part of me exists and I must shine that light onto the thing that I had become. As a bonus I am writing it down on paper. So now it’s real. It’s not a thought, or an idea, or a distant memory. Nope, not now. Now it’s tangible, now it can be seen, now it is out in the open.

So, why all the fuss? What is it that I am so concerned about? A Google search defines obstacle as: - a thing that blocks one’s way or hinders progress. What’s worrisome about that? It seems harmless, because in most cases obstacles are just that, a speed bump, a puddle, a minor obstruction that can be hurdled easily.

Unless those obstacles are your own children. Man, it hurts to write that down. It hurts because it’s true. That’s what my kids had become to me. The reason? The short answer is alcohol and crack cocaine.

I am a recovering alcoholic and drug addict.

My drug of choice was no joke. Crack cocaine was my personal Dr. Frankenstein. It turned me into a monster. It stitched together all the worst parts of my personality. Self-loathing stitched to lies, stitched to meanness, stitched to selfishness and self-centeredness, stitched to a callousness that had no real grasp on reality.  I was manically stumbling around life, mumbling incoherently, destroying everything I encountered.

Most nights I would drink. That typically resulted in a trip to my crack dealers house. Fun fact: I didn’t have his phone number. I never got it from him. I just showed up at his house, at whatever time I had drank enough courage to make the trip. 

My route was fixed. A quick pit-stop at the ATM to get whatever amount of cash I thought I could sneak out without my wife knowing, typically $100, and then off to his house.  I’d show up, pay him and he would place in my hand my nightly fix. No baggies, nothing wrapped in paper, he just handed it to me. I would open my hand, he would give it to me, and off I went. Every time, without fail. I never wanted. It was always available.

There were a million reasons why that arrangement was a bad one, but it’s consistency was the absolute worst part of the relationship. My guy was the Old Faithful of crack dealers. He was always on time.  He never took a night off.

So here I am. Forty-six, two kids, house on a pond, a great job and I’m horribly addicted to crack. That’s when I lost sight of everything that was important to me. That’s when my two boys that I loved more than life itself became my obstacles. That’s when they began to block my way.

This is what the typical experience turned into towards the end. Boys go to bed at 8PM, wife goes to bed at 9PM, I drink until 10 or 11PM then make the drive to get my drugs. Depending on how much I bought or how much I felt my heart could take I would smoke crack until I either ran out or I physically could not continue.

Crack sucks. What I was buying and using got me about 15-30 seconds of the actual high when I smoked it. That time diminished over the night as I my dopamine levels got obliterated with continued use. Crazy, right? 15-30 seconds and then it was gone. I would spend the rest of the night trying to get back to that first high. It was, to put it bluntly, ridiculous.

Crack also does horrible things to your heartbeat and breathing. Most nights I would smoke so much I thought I was having a heart attack and I did one of two things; 1) I stopped because I couldn’t physically go on. 2) I waited patiently until my heart rate dropped enough to where I felt comfortable to continue smoking, only to repeat that same process throughout the night until I just couldn’t do it anymore.

Eventually my physical condition deteriorated such that I was having to stop before I finished what I bought. I just couldn’t finish it, my chest was killing me. The “upside” meant that I would have a stash in the morning to get through and since I “worked from home” I had the house to myself to do as I pleased.

But kids are problematic to that process.

My wife would leave the house at 6:30AM to get to work which meant I was responsible for getting the boys off to school. It’s a real pain-in-the-ass to try and look sober to a 11 and 9-year-old and act like you care about them when you’re high.

To get them up, dressed, lunches made, teeth brushed and, on the bus, took about an hour. It may as well have been a week, at least that is what it felt like. I hated them. I wanted them gone. I NEEDED them gone. My high had worn off, I was ready for more and I counted the space between seconds until they left for the bus.

Then that time became too long for me to wait. At the very end I didn’t even wait for them to leave. A sure-fire way to avoid an obstacle is to simply pretend it doesn’t exist. That’s when I had really lost my way. Not 40 feet away from my locked bathroom door sat two young boys naively eating their breakfast cereal as their father smoked crack in the bathroom.

I would emerge high as kite, making sure to give them a hug and through gritted teeth tell them I loved them as I stared out at nothing. I didn’t feel anything. I couldn’t feel anything. As the door closed behind them on their way to the bus I would slink back to my bathroom to finish what I had started the night before.

It’s maddening to me today to know that guy existed. He was real, he was a monster, but he is gone now.

I said at the beginning that this story has a happy ending and it does. The whole reason I am writing this is because of the conversation I had with my friends on the Zoom call. I was talking about how my kids were obstacles to me but the whole reason that conversation started was because of an interaction that took place before we began our actual meeting.

A few of us had gotten on our call early and as what is typical of my mornings, my youngest son, now 11, came to tell me “Bye!”. It’s pretty innocent and something that has just become part of what was normal to our family now.

My son came up to me, gave me a hug, waved to the folks that were on the Zoom call waiting for it to begin, then kissed me, told me he loved me and was off. It’s a far cry from how our mornings used to begin but now every morning is like that. The people on the call vocalized some “Awwww’s” and “How cute” and it struck me as to how special that moment was juxtaposed to what our mornings used to be like.

I’m happy to report I replaced my booze with water, and my crack pipe with God. My boys aren’t obstacles anymore. Through God’s help I get to see them for what they truly are.

Gifts.

Gifts I did not deserve and gifts I tried to throw away. But that time is over. Now our mornings are filled with love and filled with hope. They are filled with a knowledge that these times would not exist without God’s love, and a real daily effort to remember that my only real obstacle was me. I just had to get out of my own way.

Writing down these experiences is a tough process. It’s hard to step back and take an honest look at what I had become capable of, but it’s important for me to do so. It’s why I appreciate my friend so much for nudging me to put our conversation from this morning on paper.

There is a real catharsis to writing these thoughts down and owning up to who I had become. It’s not to dwell on it though. I’m not advocating lamenting on my past at all. I believe that would be counterproductive and downright dangerous to relive in perpetuity those events in my life; but I do believe those experiences need to be accessible.

For my new life to work I need to remember with great clarity the events that shook me enough to make the change. Having the ability to look backwards, not in regret but in gratitude is a gift that God has given to me.

That’s a weird thing to think about. Gratitude? Really?? How can it be that I am grateful for what I used to be? I was as close as one could get to losing everything that I held dear in my life and then God happened. I’m not going to try to explain it because I can’t, and that is fine by me. I don’t want to explain it, but I do need to recognize it.

I got a horrifying glimpse of what my life could be like without God in it and that was enough. So, I can confidently say that I am now grateful for those experiences. It took the absence of life for me to understand why the rest of mine is so important.

There is one last thing though. I don’t believe I get to keep this life unless I share my experiences with other’s. I believe it’s the only way to keep this grace thing going. As painful as they may be, my experiences have been forged into real examples of what God can do. I don’t believe this gift is just for me, it’s here for the taking. You just have to believe.