When a loved one is suffering I find it hard to feel 100% joyful.  You know if they’re under the weather, suffering a loss, had a breakup, lost a job.  I have been having a severely hard time feeling happy knowing where my daughter has been.  And by where she has been I mean, for the last couple of years she has been in a bad place.  A place of self-destruction, pain, falseness and fear.  Tell me how in the world a mother can feel joy knowing her daughter is in that place?  I feel guilty feeling fantastic when my precious daughter is passed out at 2 in the afternoon from the effects of too much booze.

After I read the book about setting boundaries I begin to take a look at myself and question whether or not it’s ok to laugh, to take pleasure in an event, to take a trip and have fun.  I decided then that I had no choice but to do those things and do them freely.  After all I am not the addict and I do not make her choices for her.  I get to choose myself what I want to do and how I feel, how I react to what ever life hands me.

That is when I started taking long walks daily and enjoying those moments.  Stopping to smell the roses, literally, laughing at kids playing on a playground, petting someones’s friendly dog – if only for an hour a day I was finding some joy!  It felt good – kind of…

Since then I’ve said to my husband on more than one occasion that I refuse to let her choices affect every waking moment of my day.  My husband and I have an active and adventurous lifestyle.  Meeting friends for a cold beer, hosting a dinner party or hitting the local bike trails, we take pleasure in life.  Now does this mean I don’t think about her or wonder how her day is going…do I fret over when the next frantic or plastered phone call will come…Well yes, I do but I’ve made a conscious decision not to allow myself to be addicted to her anymore.

I do not feel guilty…I do feel sad when her day is miserable…it’s her choice.  I mourn it and move on.  I may mourn it more than once throughout the day but it’s not consuming my entire life.  That is one reason I decided to record this journey.  In hopes that it will lighten my load, take if off my chest and allow me to carry on with joy.  So for now I am throwing my guilt out the freakin’ window!

It’ll continue to be a learning process to stay in this mind set.  I know I am not the only one who is living this  – this life of loving a daughter who is an addict.  You know, that’s still really hard to say and I’m not too keen on saying that to just anybody but I did just say it to the entire universe!

I’ll be sharing more about Kae’s failed marriage and how all that came to be, soon.  What happened to trigger her need or desire to drink, then to drink too much and so on.  From the outside in it’s not that hard to visualize how it all came to be  –  in hindsight.

Always My Daughter