The confrontation

[garote]

She shifted gears, trying to give a positive spin. "Well, I have better chances now, at least. My husband has all my meds and has been giving them out a few at a time, and I don't have credit cards, and it's much harder for me to get ahold of prescription stuff now."

"Bull shit," I said, flatly. "It's trivial for you to get medication and we both know it."

"What are you talking about?" she said defiantly.

"You can just mail order pills from some out-of-country supplier and have it show up right at your door. I know you can, and I know you have. You get the pills delivered to some other address, though, so he doesn't notice, and then you pick them up. You did it to your mom already, and you just did it to me."

"No," she said. "No way. The stuff I had delivered to your house was just to help me sleep. It's a nutritional supplement called 'gabba'. It was recommended to me by a physical therapist I know at crossfit."

"You're lying to me. You're lying right to my face, and you need to stop."

"I swear I'm not!" she said, hotly. "Look at the bottle, it's a normal supplement; people take it all the time."

"No, it's not," I snarled. "What you're describing is GABA, and GABA is a nutritional supplement that's sold as a sleep aid. It's not FDA approved because its claims are not verified and chemically speaking it doesn't even cross the blood-brain barrier, so all that really happens is you eat it and you experience a placebo effect and then you piss it out. But you didn't buy GABA."

I pulled out my phone and brought up a photo I'd taken of the side of the bottle. "You bought a medication called Phenibut, which is manufactured in Ukraine. It's a lab-produced chemical that does cross the blood-brain barrier, and stimulates a receptor in the brain called the GABA receptor. It is absolutely not the same thing as the supplement. Phenibut is not legal to sell in the United States and most of Europe and it's a controlled substance everywhere else, because it's addictive and very strongly contraindicated with alcohol.

"No, it's legal to buy here," she protested. "I bought it off Amazon. I just included it with the order of stuff for my sister so I could get it sooner." She took out her own phone and opened the Amazon home page, then began searching for Phenibut. She scrolled down the results for a while. I waited, staring at her.

"Okay, it's not here, but, I swear, it was there when I bought it."

"No, it wasn't. Here's a photo of the box it came in. You did not order it from Amazon. Amazon does not sell anything like this. They would be in huge trouble if they did. Maybe you can confuse your mom, but do you think you can confuse me? I've been working in a god damn laboratory for five years; I know how to read the side of a pill bottle."

She set down her phone, and said nothing.

"You know what really makes me angry about that?" I said. "Even more angry than the fact that you used me as a drug mule?"

I leaned over the table and got right in her face. "You tried to convince my girlfriend to take it. You would have happily addicted her to this god damn shit, just to provide a little cover for your story."

She started crying.

"We talked it over already. She is not touching the stuff. We're going to take it to the hazardous medications recycler. And you spent all that morning trying to tell her how great it was. We already knew you were drinking, and probably stoned on something else as well. You snuck out into the back yard of her house, on a cold night, and set up a chair facing directly away from the house, right into some bushes. Not suspicious at all, yeah? I could see the chair from the bedroom window. When I came out to check on you I saw you shove the can under your book. You think you're fooling everyone, but you're not. No one is fooled. All that's happening is your brain is constructing this convenient narrative where you can believe you're fooling everyone, so you can get the next hit without your conscience messing up the high. But really, everyone knows, and they're just too sad, or they feel like it's too pointless, to even tell you any more. That's what the situation is. Everyone knows. Your older kids know. Your youngest knows something's horribly wrong but doesn't have the experience to interpret it. We're all just waiting for the other shoe to drop. We're waiting for you to go to jail."

Through her tears she said, "Sometimes I actually wish that would happen. Like, maybe if I was in jail I would find some kind of peace. I would be really cut off."

"Well that might sound appealing but I can guarantee that if you go to jail, all this" - I gestured at the room, at the walls - "this whole house and the family and kids in it, will be gone from you forever. Your kids will never live with you again, never visit you for longer than an afternoon. Your youngest will go live with your sister or someone else, and won't be raised by you."

"No way," she said. "There's no way; they need me too much. He needs me too much. They wouldn't let that happen."

"You think you're irreplaceable? You think we won't all take this apart piece by piece while you sit behind bars, and find some other thing that works, even if it sucks? That is exactly what we'll do. In fact that is what I think we should start planning to do right now, because I'm not convinced that you're gonna pull out of this. I think we should all start planning to minimize the damage when this goes to hell."

We fell silent for a while, except for the sound of her crying softly.

"I love you," I said. "I always will. I also love your kids, and that's what's making me think about damage control. But I'm not going to write you off. I know that there are things in your life that are screwed up, that aren't working for you, and they probably haven't been working for a long time. And for your life to get better you need to figure out what those things are and start working on them. I'm absolutely certain that one of the things that needs to change is the amount of stress and angst you are feeling about the fate of your kids, specifically their social and academic fate, and specifically with your eldest."

She raised her eyes from the table and stared out the window, thinking.

"I can tell you a thousand times that I think he's going to be fine," I said, "but I know you're his mom so to an extent that's going to fall on deaf ears. Your instincts tell you it's your job to worry. But you need to balance that with the knowledge that he is now pretty much an adult, and can chart his own course. And he can handle more responsibility too. I think that if you concentrate on letting go of the reins and giving him more choices and more room to succeed or fail, your stress level will go down, and you'll be able to concentrate on your own happiness just a little bit more. I think that's going to be a key thing. Because you need to rebuild your happiness, in a way that's also non-destructive to the family that you obviously love. You need to reclaim your identity."

She wiped her nose. "I"m really, really, not happy right now," she said. "I don't even know what would make me happy. You know what my identity is? I feel this horrible, intense guilt, like I'm failing. That's it. And when I drink I stop feeling it. But then it comes back. What's the point if I can't even feel happy? What's the point of living at all?"

"You think this is living?" I said, poking the table. "You get drunk, you get stoned - that's like pulling a handle on a huge toilet. Everything flushes down, good and bad. In a few weeks your brain fills back up for another flush, but there's still nothing there, or maybe just bad things like more stress and pain. No wonder it seems like the only thing you can possibly do is just pull the handle again. You need to carve out some time away from that cycle. It's not going to be easy at all because you're going to have to fight your own brain to do it. Eventually, slowly, if you work at it, real life will come back in at the edges. And when that's happening, you need to be really clear about what it's made of. You need to let good things in - relaxation time, real conversations, real sleep. If it's just a big avalanche of shit you're going to really want to pull the handle again. Your addiction will reach up through your guts like a hand in a puppet and pull it for you."

"How do I fight that?" she said, despairingly.

"Outsmart yourself. Use this time right now. While you're in shock, while you're upset, find ways to make it hard to reach that handle. Only you know where all your pills are stashed -- so dig them up and throw them away. Only you know where the bookmarks and emails are for the drug suppliers. Delete them. Only you know the psychology you can use to make your kids blow in the breathalyzer for you and start the car when they shouldn't. Grab them now and tell them to never, ever do it again no matter what you say later on. There's things you can do. Maybe you've done them before. Stack them all up. But really, I think the most important things you can be doing are about reducing the stress in your life, and preparing in case the worst happens, so it stays clear in your mind what the consequences are."

She scooted back her chair, then got up and went to the desk nearby. She rummaged for a few seconds and sat back down with a notepad and a pen.

"Okay," she said. "I always feel better when I have a list. Let me write some of this down. Maybe if I think about it this way it will help."

"Alright. I think you need two columns," I said. "Call one 'stress relief' and call the other 'damage control'. I think it's important to acknowledge the danger of this situation up front."

She slashed a line down the center of the notepad and obediently wrote the names at the top.

"'Damage control'," I said, "is for things you can do to minimize the chaos if you do end up in jail. 'Stress relief' is for things that will reduce your stress, or add to your happiness, and keep you away from that handle for another day. Ideally, we can find things that fit under both of these columns at the same time."

We workshopped the list for a while, adding half a dozen things, until the others got home.