Regretting the Past

From the time I was 15 or so, I have been into one "substance" or another. Out of 4 kids, I was the only one who ended up with a substance abuse problem. Those were great odds for my family, since my mother was a raging alcoholic. She did her best, but when I think back on my chidhood and young adulthood I only see darkness and chaos, much like a creepy nightmare. Looking back, I wish I knew back then what I know now. I wish I could have helped her. I wish somebody had. Things would have been so much different. Maybe I wouldn't have wasted my whole life.

When I was 14, mom would let us "party" with our friends in the livingroom. I guess she figured, if we were gonna drink, better we drank right there at home rather than who knows where. By 16 I was a smoking pot, dropping acid, popping those little cross-top "whites" (I don't even know what they were, only that they got me really wired), snorting coke and drinking, always drinking. I was raped once at a "mountain jam" in Malibu at 17 when some guy popped 3 10 milligram Valiums in my mouth and I swallowed them. I remember being awake off and on, but I couldn't move. I know what he did. I've lived with the shame of that ever since. The utter stupidity. I didn't deserve to be raped, but if had known better, I could have prevented it.

I think the years that I was having babies were probably the best years of my life. I was sober during those years and happily married and proud of my family. I wasn't a Christian yet though, and when my husband moved our family, unknowingly to a party neighborhood up in the Antelope Valley, everything changed. I started drinking again and started snorting coke. "The Devil dwelleth in a desert," I heard somebody say once. That might be true. But more the truth is the fact that the devil dwells in the hearts of men, if we let him. He hates marriage because it is "of God." He'll do anything to destroy it. And so it was with us. That was the beginning of my downward spiral. For the next 14 years I have paid and paid and paid for my sins. But there was no forgivness because I didn't know who to ask for it. I just kept on making the same mistakes over and over and over again. Not until I had sunk to the very bottom in 2005, homeless, addicted, alone and afraid, did I begin to feel that I wasn't really alone at all. Yes, "feel." When I finally cried out to God for forgivness, when I asked Him to take me and do whatever he wanted with me, when I admitted to Him what a mess I had made of my life, I began to feel his presense there - in the cold, darkness of that broken down van, in the filth of that heartless city, something came over me: a strengh? A will to fight? I don't know what it was, but change began that night.

At the end of the movie "Shawshank Redemption," Morgan Freeman's character, "Red" is up before the parole board (again). They ask him if he feels he is rehabilitated. He wonders what they mean by that. Did they mean is he sorry? He conveys that there is not a day goes by that he doesn't feel regret. Not because he has been in prison for 40 years or because the Board feels he should. He looks back on the way he was then: a young, stupid kid. He wishes he could talk to him. Try to talk some sense into him. Tell him the way things are. But he can't. That kid is long gone and all that's left is this old man. He has to live with that.

That is how I feel every day of my life. There is a scripture in the bible that goes, "Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus." (Phillipians 3:13-14). This passage helps me when I focus too much on the regrets of my past. I can't change it. Oh God how I wish I could, but I can't. The consolation for my children is that they have their mother back, whole and complete. They can rest in the knowlege that I'm here for them, sober, at any time of the day or night. My faith is my consolation. I have to have faith that, no matter what God's will is for my life, it's better than anything I could dream of on my own. Look where my will got me.