EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 20

January 2000

WE HAVE STOOD BY OUR SON

Brent's dad shares his views.

It's been over a long, long period of time and things change. It's not an addiction that has just popped it's head up. When we became involved with the addiction it was horrendous. It was horrific to the whole family but you learn to cope with it and the sharp edges seem to dull off a little bit. When it is brought to the fore, like recently, the whole family suffers again. What it tends to do is go slightly underground and it's not discussed as it should be. This is probably because people like myself lose patience. I've lost patience, Martin has lost patience but at the end of the day family is family and you have got to face it eventually. I lost patience because he has tried before and done very well before. He has character and he has will power but circumstances have pushed him back to addiction. He has basically gone off on a tangent again and left the family. He has done his own thing, lived away so you do not know what is going on. Horrific things are happening and he's back on heroin.

We have a family of four lads and a girl. They've been brought up fairly strictly and when you lose the ability to say, "No, you can't do that", then the frustration sets in.

The other week I took, Steven's, he is thirty-six years old, car keys off him after he had had a drink, so I am still being the father. When you lose the ability to do that I think frustration makes you lose patience.

We've always been a close family, we've never drifted apart. We do have our disagreements, obviously, which families do. There has never been a problem with Brent coming home, it's always been in Brent's hands. There is very little we can do when Brent moves away and gets into this bad company and uses drugs. We've had no control over what he does because he's thirty-seven but he has always been allowed to come home.


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