“Mom, do we really need to talk about this again?” My almost-13 year old looked at me impatiently, his voice still cracking when he tried to raise it now that puberty had taken hold of my formerly sweet baby boy with blonde, curly locks. The person standing in front of me looked familiar, but was also a stranger in some ways. Now taller than me – stronger, too – his shape looked more like a man than a boy, and sarcasm was his second language.
“Yes. We are.” I screwed up as much courage as I could and looked him straight in the eye. “I’ll keep talking about it until you’re married with your own kids, and even then I’ll keep talking.”
He sighed, resigned. “OK, fine.” It wasn’t “fine,” but I plowed ahead, anyway.
Moments earlier, his phone buzzed with a news alert. He had been required at school to have the New York Times on his phone for current events, and he got into the habit of reading pieces from the online paper each morning. This morning, while scrolling, he saw another young adult had died due to a drug overdose. (Read more here.) While reading, he gasped – low but loud enough for me to hear in the same room. I couldn’t see the article from where I stood, and asked what was so shocking.
He looked at me, blood drained from his face. “Another overdose. He was thirteen, Mom. Thirteen. My age.” He put his phone on the table and faced me.
It was moments like these that I remembered how woefully unprepared we are to be parents, especially parents of teenagers. I simultaneously wanted to reach out and hug him and never let go . . . and also give him yet another (likely unhelpful) lecture on drug addiction. I settled for making a cup of coffee. I purposefully turned my back to him so my face wouldn’t show confusion, or weakness, or how I was wishing for a time machine to go back to the potty training years.
“How does that make you feel?” was all I could muster. Depending on the day, that could result in an eye roll with a side of sarcasm, or an actual conversation. I waited.
I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until he started to speak. “Scared,” he whispered after a long moment of silence.
Wishing I had read more drug prevention literature or attended a workshop or something useful other than reading the hundreds of overdose stories are literally everywhere, I sat down and looked up at him. “Me, too,” I said, looking him straight in eye. “Me, too, kid.”
I started to speak more, and he protested, not wanting to hear it, again. We seemed to talk about this every time another overdose story hit the news, which these days seemed like it was a daily occurrence. We talked about pain killers, supply and demand, prescriptions, unethical doctors, access to pills in the home, not being judgmental, not trusting anyone, being teased, safe words over text, taking Ubers, and anything else I could think of that might prevent a tragedy.
Some of it was helpful. Most of it was me feeling unprepared and panicking internally.
With this topic, I just feel so lost, so . . . overwhelmed.
Yet, thanks to the brave parents who have shared the details about their children’s addictions we know that drugs do not discriminate based on race, color, gender, creed, religion, or economic status, and we are learning so much more from the ground about red flag behaviors and how “trying it just once” can lead to a life-long addiction . . . or even death if the drugs are laced with some sort of synthetic poison.
And the numbers are scary. Once rare, adolescent drug overdoses doubled between 1997 and 2012, a Yale School of Medicine Report found. A 2015 survey by the Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality found 21,000 adolescents (ages 12 to 17 years old) had used heroin in the past year. (Read more here.) There are hundreds more studies and statistics like these. Knowing this, I still feel dismally unprepared.
Teenagers can be tough to parent. Not just because of the emotional mood swings, but because there is a whole new level of responsibility attached to parenting a young adult. I often feel like this is it, this is where you can make or break them. I know (I know!) it’s not just about how well you parent them at this age, but I still feel like a small child standing in the rough surf without a life preserver. It’s game time. Learn how to swim or you’ll drown in the rough waters.
So, yes, we talked about it – again. I answered questions about my uneventful teen years, how I was teased at times for not being “cool” enough to drink or party hard, what type of friends I had, and how (and why) when I was in college I never left my drink on the bar when I went to the bathroom. I talked about what I knew, why I never trusted anyone, and why I never took a pill - - and truthfully, how pills did not seem to be as accessible as they are today.
My teen looked at me with an expression of awe laced with uncertainty. I think he appreciated my honesty, but it was left unspoken between us that I’m really no help at all, because I just don’t understand.
And he’s right. I don’t.
So I’ll keep reading, and learning, and gathering information from drug prevention groups and fellow parents, and talking, and checking texts, and monitoring where he is, and deciding whether he can go to a friend’s birthday party or not (there are parties with pills offered in a candy bowl….did you know that? A fellow mom told me that happened in her kid’s middle school district this past summer), and basically just keep worrying. I don’t consider myself a helicopter parent; maybe with drug prevention I have no choice.
It’s hard parenting teens. Hell, it’s hard just being a parent in today’s world. And drugs don’t discriminate. Just ask the mom of that 13 year old boy.
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Drug prevention resources:
Know of others? Please share them in the comments, below.