Beautiful Boy was the overly ambitious second book I took on vacation last year (the book itself wasn’t overly ambitious, the notion that I might read two books during one vacation with four kids was). During the post-school, pre-nap bottle with the toddler, I restarted David Sheff’s poignant memoir a few weeks ago. I was instantly drawn back in (huge force, undertow-grade). It was impossible not to roil along with Sheff as he nearly lost his son what seemed countless times to drug addiction. The beast of drug addiction is such a behemoth, and to be let on its stranglehold over a young man and his entire family made for devastating, kick-to-solar-plexus, intimate reading.
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Soon after we moved to our house with three big barns behind it (no animals, just empty wooden structures that require gigantic budgets to renovate into any number of cool other things). A friend had grown up across the street, and he told me about how, uh, utilized our third barn had been when he was a teenager. I tucked away a far-off fear of my children’s (and my neighbors’ children’s) adolescence and what might happen again in that barn. We had a toddler at the time, though, and then a new, moon-faced baby, and the neighbors’ boys were sturdy small people too, years removed from lanky limbs and low voices and ideas for those barns that would rile their parents. For some time, my eldest pleaded with us to turn that biggest barn into a theater.
Even still, my attitude about far-off adolescence strove for tolerance and hipness, as in when I was an adolescent myself I did… stuff… and turned out pretty fine. I wouldn’t wish misadventure on my kids, yet at the same time, misadventure would seem pretty inevitable. Better some missteps sooner than later, I reasoned, when I’d still be actively parenting kids living at home and could, presumably, prevent true disaster. What might my teen years have been like if my parents had actually noticed what I was doing and maybe intervened? As I said, I was ambivalent, because really, I looked back and didn’t feel terribly harmed by anything I’d gone through, even with their having taken minimal action.
My second child, the one whom as a baby loved to throw his head back when being pushed in the baby swing and laugh like crazy, the one who twirled round until he fell down, that one, he gave me some pause. Sometimes, I used to glance at my bottommost barn with a wee bit of anxiety and a vague wish to just board up its entrances. But he was little and all of that adolescent experimentation seemed extremely far off into the distant future.
He turned twelve this month and his brother’s fourteen. The future is now.
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Beautiful Boy changed my mind about tolerance. Beautiful Boy offered a powerful wake-up call: whether a person will become addicted to drugs is a complete crapshoot, an unknown. As a friend said somberly trying drugs is Russian roulette.
Of my friends, some had experimented or used some and stopped; others didn’t get out so seamlessly. By our twenties, we were sure one friend would die due to his addictions. He’s sober (and we lost another friend to a brain tumor, so, yeah, crapshoot, life). When the friend died of the brain tumor, the relatively recently sober friend said that he’d thought it would have been him…
Starting then, shouldn’t I have already been making forward motion toward the zero tolerance line?
I think it took reading about the havoc drug addiction wreaked upon a family at the same moment adolescences is stirring on the premises to see the inherent danger of tolerance for drug experimentation much more starkly. May the tenets I’m employing with my kids should—fingers crossed—help. The gist; we talk openly, and I don’t shy away from topics that might feel uncomfortable to discuss. Please do not think you are hearing me say that I believe openness is a panacea or a guarantee of any sort (I don’t) or that I am not scared (I am).
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In the midst of reading Beautiful Boy writer and keeper of a popular parenting blog Katie Granju revealed—as she’d hinted at for a while—that her eldest son had been struggling with addiction for years, a struggle she’d kept private. Henry’s overdose compounded by a horrific beating put him into a coma and the ensuing medical crisis prompted Granju to reveal what her family had endured and her doing so has generated lots of responses in the blogosphere, some kind and some critical. I’m obliged to weigh in, here’s what I’ve got: wonderful, thoughtful, loving parent, terrible, tragic luck. As Granju wrote about balancing hope and acceptance, because her son is facing a life radically altered by his brain injury, she wonders why she never thought of this outcome and warning him and his peers against these kinds of possibilities, the drug-related beating, the drug-related auto accident. It’s unfathomable to summon such terrible ifs. And there’s no guarantee that warnings necessarily work.
Thanks in large part to Katie Granju’s openness about her family’s predicament when my just-turned twelve year-old—formerly the spinning monster of a toddler—picked up Beautiful Boy you can bet I let him read it.
Here’s what he told me upon devouring it (almost literally; he read it in a weekend): “It was such a compelling book. I loved the descriptions and the way the writer pulled us in. I liked the characters. I learned not all drug addicts are disgusting people. Nic was really nice and interesting and likable. I wouldn’t do drugs—I already thought that and this book made me even more certain—and I learned that it’s safer not to try drugs rather than take the risk of being addicted to them.”
Can I have that in writing, young man?
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I don’t have words for the bruised, rightbesidethem feeling I have even from a distance for David Sheff and Katie Granju. What a gift they’ve offered by sharing such poignant stories, to let readers in on what’s not simply fixable with a band-air or a time-out or tough love. I think I get the take-home lessons: love ‘em hard, be firm and decisive, share your feelings and your beliefs openly and most importantly never ever close your heart to your children.
