Last year I hardly ever blogged. I was too busy. So I missed the opportunity to process what I was learning, what I was seeing played out in front of me. I think it's time.
Our basement is a one bedroom apartment with an separate entrance. Last year a teen mom lived there. She was 19 and had 2 kids. She had also aged-out of foster care. Before she came to us she was homeless. The majority of kids who age-out of foster care end up on the streets or in correctional facilities. That's how it rolls.
Our friend was pretty, and smart, a fiercely protective momma. She was up against incredible odds. A chance to live in our basement, to partner with a mentor from the Hope House, and get accepted into college (with grants) should have been what she needed to make a "go" of life. And she did, for awhile. But my guess is that she is either on the streets again, or very nearly so.
People rallied around this teen mom to pull her out of her circumstances, but ultimately the weight of her past pulled her back into the life she knew. Because, while our friend didn't want to be hungry and homeless and helpless, she was much more comfortable in a life operated around those things than in a life of relative security. She was used to chaos, and the cortisol buzz from crisis was her drug of choice. She literally did not know what to do in a world where someone didn't need to be bailed out of jail, or didn't have to scrounge up change for a bus ride to the food pantry. She didn't know how to feel safe.
There is a culture of addiction, and a culture of generational poverty that is drastically different than middle-class America. Asking a girl who grew up in generational poverty to leave it for middle class America is like asking me to up and move to China. I wouldn't know the language. I wouldn't be familiar with the food. I would operate under a different value system. I would feel like a "foreigner", and I would have to leave my family behind. Even the clothes would be different. Culture shock and assimilation would be huge issues. Assimilation might very well feel like I was betraying my home country.
Our friend's choices made no sense until I understood this.
The first few months our friend was here were a honeymoon for her. She had food, a job, a safe place for her kids. Her relief was palpable. But then there came a point where her continued progress, her healing, depended upon her making the hard choice to leave her old life behind. She could not stay friends with people in her old life and embrace her new life. She could not have a relationship with her birth mom (a felon, addict, liar), or her boyfriend (same goes) and break the patterns of co-dependence.
The Bible says, "A double minded man is unstable in all his (or her ) ways". This was exactly the case for our friend. She wanted all of the benefits from life in our basement apartment, but in the end she was not willing to pay the cost of HOPE." It was her undoing.
I learned a weird thing about addiction while our friend was a part of our life. Addiction is not only about the addict. It's about the people in the addict's life who make the addiction possible. It's the wife who buys doughnuts for her morbidly obese husband. Or the spouse who calls in sick for their partner when the hangover from last night's binge is too much. Codependents become addicted to "feeling needed" by addicts. We would not have allowed a chemically addicted person to take up residence in our basement. Our friend wasn't; but she was terribly codependent. We learned that codependents are addicted too. They are addicted feeling needed, to solving a crisis, to smoothing over. Ultimately our friend couldn't give up her habit.
She returned to her abusive and addicted boyfriend. She returned to her birthmom. She returned to squalor. And she took her young children with her.
I knew from our adoption training that a bed, clothes, food and education can't heal brokeness. A heart healed is a product of unconditional love, the hand of God, and ultimately the broken persons choice to heal. We show up willing to give. We love. We tell the truth. And we understand that our value is independent of another person's choice to heal or not heal.
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