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Deborah J. Brasket

~ Living on the Edge of the Wild

Deborah J. Brasket

Tag Archives: Hope

From the Tailwinds of 2019, Hope Lost & Its Glimmer

05 Sunday Jan 2020

Posted by deborahbrasket in Family, Love

≈ 26 Comments

Tags

2020, Hope, life, new year, personal

hughesnighttrainstars

Edward Robert Hughes (1851-1914), Night with her Train of Stars (1912)

I ended a blog post at the tail end of 2018 with this wish list for 2019:

A Look Ahead – What I Want Most

A happy ending for my son.

A happy ending for my novel.

More novel-writing, more painting, more blogging.

More artful living.

More Love. Lots and lots of love, for all of us.

My wish list for 2020 is much the same. For one year, it appears, was not long enough to fulfill these wishes.

The happy ending I’d hoped for my son seems less likely now than ever. His addiction has once again robbed him of everything he built during four years of sobriety.

The happy ending for my novel is still on hold. We took it off the market while I sent it to a professional editor. And the editing I had begun was postponed when my granddaughter came to live with me.

Instead of more writing, painting, and blogging in 2019, there was less and less. I did not blog or paint or write at all last month.

More artful living? More love for all of us?

Not so much last year.

The one gift 2019 gave me (which is huge and fills my heart!) is hope for my granddaughter when she came to live with me. Hope that she will remain in my care–happy and safe, healthy and strong, responsibly cared for and dearly cherished as she grows into a young woman.

May this blog post be the beginning of a bright new year for all of us.

 

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Steeling Myself for Tomorrow: The Day After the Election

06 Tuesday Nov 2018

Posted by deborahbrasket in Culture

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Current Events, Despair, election, Election Day 2018, Hope, Politics, Survival, Trump, USA

Exhibitions - Carmen Herrera - Art in America

Carmen Herrara, Art in America

Recently, in a morbid mood, I told my husband that if the Democrats do not win back the House I would slit my throat.

I know, YIKES!

Even I was shocked by that imagery. But I remember grasping for something dire enough to describe how I felt. How such an outcome would signal the end of something I dearly love. How another two years of Trump unchecked would usher in “the end times,” the end of the United States as I know and love it.

And yet, I felt much the same way when President Bush won a second term, and I know Republicans felt that way when Obama won again. We each survived our defeats to fight over our differences once again, as we have down through the ages and will continue well into the future.

Our nation survived a Civil War, a Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, Hitler’s Holocaust, Vietnam, Watergate, 9-11, and the financial crash of 08. We will survive Trump, whether we win back the House or not.

And things will get better, as they always have in our strife to create a more perfect union.

Slowly over time we abolished slavery, gave women and Blacks the right to vote, ended child labor and won a 40-hour work week, desegregated schools and drinking fountains, ended the constant flow of litter beside our roadways, turned the yellow-smog skies of LA blue again.

Martin Luther King once said: ” The arc of history is long but it bends toward justice.”

Even emphasizing the LONG, and the achingly SLOW BEND, another two, or even six, years under Trump unchecked will not break us.

Or so I reassure myself. And steel myself for tomorrow: The Day After the Election.

Will there be a great Sigh of Blue Relief? Or a great Cry of Blue Despair?

Either way, the slow, sure bend toward the promise our Nation stands for will continue.

 

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A Walk on the Wild Side – For People Who Love Addicts

19 Monday Feb 2018

Posted by deborahbrasket in Addiction, Blogging, Family, Love, My Writing

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

Blogging, Deborah J. Brasket, drug addiction, From the Far Ends of the Earth, Hope, mother love, opioid crisis, writing

A few years ago I started an anonymous blog with the above title to talk about addiction. About trying to help a grown son addicted to heroin. when I did not believe he, nor I, would survive his addiction. Here’s part of my first blog post:

Addiction, as horrible as it is for addicts, can be terrifying to those who love them as well.  Like it or not, if we choose to be in their lives and support them while they fight this cruel affliction, we’re taking a walk on the wild side, going places emotionally and spiritually, and sometimes even physically, that are dark and scary.

And often we’re alone.

Too often when all hell breaks loose, and the dust settles, one lone family member is left standing to walk this scary path alone with their loved one.  Most others get blown away, or turn away, or run away eventually.  But a mom, a dad, a sister, a lover–hopefully for the addict’s sake, one of us remains behind.  One of us stays by their side all the long, and wild, and weary, and heart-breaking way.

I’ve been there, and maybe you have too.

I started the blog not long after I wrote a post on this site about finding him OD’d on the bathroom floor, gray and apparently lifeless.

This post was followed shortly by another when we could not find a rehab that would take him in. It begins:

The last few posts I’ve tried to write, again and again, disintegrated into dark rants and rages.

Rants against a society that fully recognizes how an epidemic of addiction is destroying our children, our families, whole neighborhoods and cities, filling our jails and prisons, and littering our streets and alleys with the living dead. And yet, and yet, how this same society provides painfully few resources toward treatment and recovery. A son or daughter seeking a bed at a detox center is forced to wait months for something affordable or dole out thousands of dollars for a few short days, only to be turned out onto the street again when the stay is ended.

Rages against the fact that the few available programs designed to help recovering addicts will bankrupt most families, since the road to recovery, as all admit, includes multiple relapses. But instead of sticking with those who relapse, helping them when they most need support, these programs kick them out on the streets again. With no place to go, to start over again and again and again, with no end in sight.

Not long after that post he disappeared. He’d finally gotten into another rehab, but they kicked him out when he relapsed. He was lost on the street again, and I was giving up hope. That’s when I started the new anonymous blog, to vent, to rage. It was right after receiving this phone call, which I write about in my second post:

The last time I heard from him he told me he didn’t think he had long to live. He’d had two overdoses the week before. One where he woke up in the hospital. The other where he woke up in a motel room. His companions had left him for dead after stealing the little he had (a bike and a backpack stuffed with dirty clothes) and even the shoes off his feet. He was barefoot when he called, using someone else’s phone. He’d lost his own weeks ago (again).

I begged him to get help, to go an NA meeting, go to a church, go to a detox facility, go to a shelter. But he was too embarrassed. He was covered in staff infections, he said, and he looked like a zombie.

I’d seen him that way before. I knew what he meant.

I begged him to go to an ER and get medication for the staff infection. Then I gave him the address and phone number of a detox, and told him to get there. He said he would. But it didn’t sound like he meant it.

“Say it,” I told him. “Say it like you mean it.”

“Promise me,” I demanded. “If you don’t want to die, promise me.”

“I feel like I’m dead already,” he said. “Like I’m in Limbo, you know? Or purgatory. Everything seems so surreal, like I’m walking around in a nightmare.”

The good news is that the police picked him up shortly after that phone call and that saved his life, I’m sure. His road to recovery was difficult, which I detail on my blog. But he did arrive. And he’s three years clean and doing great. My son was saved, but so many have lost their lives to addiction, or are struggling still.

One of my posts was Freshly Pressed because it spoke to so many people about the manic ride the lovers of addicts take in trying to help their loved ones. It was called “Am I crazy? Or Is He? How Addiction Warps Us.”

In it I write about three stages of living with an addict which I named: Hyper-Happy, Dangerously Depressed, and Mad Maniac.

 It’s the old pattern re-emerging, the way it’s played out too many times before. The crazy times, I think of them. That’s why this Hyper-Happy son makes me want to cry, because it reminds me of those times. Episodes of my life that are so bizarre and unbelievable, remembering them is like re-living a nightmare, or being in some alternate universe where crazed people do crazy things to survive and to save the ones they love.

I’ve never told anyone about those crazy times in my life. The things I’ve seen and done and endured, trying to help him.

During those days it was as if I lived in a secretive, shadowy world where I became someone no one would recognize. On the surface I was the same old person everyone knew–quiet, responsible, reasonable. But when I walked on the wild side of addiction with my son, I was anything but that.

I think that’s why I started this blog. Why I named it what I did. Not, as I had thought, had hoped, so I could sort things out and figure out a way to save my son. I want that too. I want that badly. But I think the real reason I created this blog was so I finally could let it all out. All the craziness I experienced. Bring it to the surface, look at it in the light of day.

To bring that craziness out into the light of day . . . . Some of the craziness I wrote about on that blog, like the one called Pimping My Son. But the worst of the craziness has never seen the light of day.

The novel From the Far Ends of the Earth that I hope to publish soon throws light on a lot that would like to remain in darkness. Especially on that twisted and dark, love-strangle that exists between an addict and the one who is determined to save him despite himself.

The novel is fiction but it draws upon a deep experiential understanding of the complexity of addiction. It exposes what I call in the novel “the ugly underbelly of mother love,” as seen mostly through the eyes of the son, as shown here:

She’d become the object of his self-loathing, the mirror against which he throws all his plates, watching them splinter against her face and slide to the floor, all his messes splattered over her. And still she’d stand there, watching him, sometimes dissolving into tears, or raging in fury, or stony with disgust, but never backing away from the ferociousness of his attacks. Standing her ground and taking it, bearing it, never retreating from his touch—unwavering, resolute.

 The rage was okay.  It was the tears that unmanned him. That killed him time and time again until he had to make it stop. Had to make her face the truth, that her tears were wasted on him, that he was a miserable fuckin’ asshole who didn’t deserve her love. And he’d prove it by ripping out her heart and holding it up for her to see, until her tears finally did dry up in a rage that blew him away with its ferocity. A rage he fed with little bits of her heart and his heart until she fuckin’ wanted to kill him and would too, if he didn’t dance out of her way, laughing at her rage, her inept, futile rage, which didn’t do either of them a bit of good. Except in stopping the tears.  Neither she nor he could survive the tears.

It’s something he ponders but cannot fathom, the depth and folly of her mother-love. The obstinacy that thwarts his every attempt to shake it loose, even while he tests it mercilessly, uses it shamelessly, depends upon it endlessly—and wears it like ball and chain, like an indictment stamped on his forehead: his total unworthiness of her unwavering love.

There is light as well as darkness in the novel, more light than dark, I believe. People struggling with addiction or struggling to help loved ones will find something here that may be helpful, or at least hopeful, or if nothing else, a mirror that reflects back what too many of us have hidden away in our hearts for too long.

But the novel isn’t only about addiction. Art and art-making play starring roles too. And finding love, romantic and otherwise.

And coming home to ourselves. More than anything, it’s about that.

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Waking Up in an Alternate Reality

09 Wednesday Nov 2016

Posted by deborahbrasket in Culture

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

2016 Election, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Hope, inspiration, personal, Politics

485px-Paradise_Lost_12

From Paradise Lost

I woke this morning feeling as if I had  been tossed from the real world into an alternate universe–where Trump had become president. I kept grasping for something that would allow me to return to that safer and saner world where Hillary had won.

How could a man who had said such vile things about women and immigrants, who had mocked the disabled, insulted POW war heroes, bashed Gold Star families, and belittled worthy adversaries become the leader of our nation and the free world?

How could the most qualified person ever to seek the presidential office, who had worked her whole life to help children, oppressed women, and working families, who would in turn break a long-standing ceiling to become the first woman to hold the highest office in our land–how could she lose to him?

I felt sure there must be another reality in which she had prevailed. So why had I and so many unwilling been tossed into this one? Was there something here I needed to learn?

So I grasped at straws, hoping this new reality under a Trump presidency wouldn’t be as bad as I feared.

Perhaps Trump the con artist, playing to the crowd all along, didn’t believe the worst of what he had said and would not pursue the worst of his claims. Perhaps now that he had won and didn’t have to fool anyone any more, his once liberal leanings would emerge–a way to pay back all the Republicans who hadn’t supported him or believed he could win.

Sadly, the belief that this all had been a scam to win the biggest ego prize ever was the only source of hope I could muster for a while. I just prayed that despite this he would keep his promise to help those who have felt left out of the American dream. I hoped he had enough integrity to do at least that much.

A faint hope, but it was all I had.

Until I heard Hillary’s concession speech. And then I cried tears of gratitude. I had never been so proud of her–and of us, as Americans–as I was then.

She said:

“We must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump is going to be our president. We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.”

“Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power,” she added. “We don’t just respect that. We cherish it. It also enshrines the rule of law; the principle we are all equal in rights and dignity; freedom of worship and expression. We respect and cherish these values, too, and we must defend them.”

“This is painful, and it will be for a long time, but I want you to remember this: Our campaign was never about one person, or even one election. It was about the country we love.”

“To all the little girls watching this, never doubt that you are powerful and valuable and deserving of every chance in the world.”

“Never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it.”

I knew then that hate hadn’t trumped love, as I had feared when I woke. Even in this seemingly alternate reality where Trump was president.

If this brave, strong, and loving woman could keep an open mind and look with hope and optimism to the future–despite her tremendous loss, then so could I.

Maybe that’s what I needed to learn.

Thank you, Hillary. I can feel my heart starting to heal already.

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After sailing around the world in a small boat for six years, I came to appreciate how tiny and insignificant we humans appear in our natural and untamed surroundings, living always on the edge of the wild, into which we are embedded even while being that thing which sets us apart. Now living again on the edge of the wild in a home that borders a nature preserve, I am re-exploring what it means to be human in a more than human world.

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