I was twenty-five when I realized that growing up in a meth lab wasn’t okay. But it was my home.
It happened while driving with my future partner down Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard. Not the part we call The Strip, with its shimmering marquees and mood-lit restaurants, with hotels that feel both like home and somewhere better than home, with its riot of color blooming from bougainvillea trees—magenta and the perfect shade of orange aptly named California Gold. But the part that’s lined with liquor stores, graffiti, and laundromats.
We’d just started dating and swapped childhood stories during the drive. Both of us were from nowhere desert towns in the California no one thinks about when they think of California. Children of divorced parents, dressed in thrift-store clothes (before thrifting was cool), plagued by longing and loneliness and dreams bigger than the life we’d been given, we had lived parallel lives that, by a stroke of luck, finally crossed.
Sitting behind a row of blaring taillights, watching the traffic signal cycle through red, green, and yellow, we talked about our fathers. I told him about my dad, how growing up, I noticed his hands were permanently stained a rusty orange color from the iodine he used to make meth. How sometimes he’d be so exhausted from chasing the ever-elusive high that he’d fall asleep standing up and spend whole days in the dark. I told Perry how Dad was the best at telling stories—it was like listening to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn but for drug addicts and criminals. He’d talk fast and loud and had the sort of laugh that stuck with you long after the joy was gone.
Turning onto Normandie Avenue, Perry started telling me a story about a time when he asked his father to play catch with him. His dad tacked a yellow Post-it note to a fence post and had Perry throw the ball at it. Then his dad went back to guzzling Coors Light. It made me think back on all the times my own dad had made time for me when I was a kid—when he set up a tetherball in the backyard and showed me how to hit with the heel of my hand, when he bought me a bike and roller blades and Nerf guns, and taught me how to use all of them. They were all bought with drug money, but at the time, I didn’t understand that. All I knew was that my dad was there, present.
I thought about the time we stargazed from our backyard in the desert dark. Dad piled blankets onto the trampoline, and we stretched out under the ocean of galaxies. He reached his arms up, and it felt as if the sparks of light were just out of reach of his fingers. Tracing the constellations he learned as a child into the night sky, he pointed out the three peaks of Cassiopeia and the brightness of Canis Major. I fell asleep listening to the sound of his breath rustling through the coarse hair of his mustache. He smelled of faint traces of acetone and the lemon hand soap he always used. He smelled like home.
Thinking back on my childhood, I felt lucky that my dad was my dad. The love I had for him sustained me. I drank from it, lived off its bounty. I had nothing bad to say.
But then Perry said, “I can’t believe you grew up in a meth lab.”
Wait. What?
Perry’s words landed with a weight that made everything feel off-kilter as if I’d slipped out of sync with the world I once knew. I’d known that my dad made and sold drugs out of our home, but that didn’t mean I grew up in a meth lab. Did it?
Wait. Did it?
“But my dad loved me,” I said. I wanted to defend him. I wanted to protect our home, our relationship, our life.
Dad tried to shield me from it but couldn’t mask the scent of paint, bleach, and the weird garlic smell that would rise from the phosphine gas. He couldn’t hide the security camera he installed to watch the house or the steady stream of people coming to our door at all hours to buy the Mojave’s most highly sought-after methamphetamines. He couldn’t hide the cupboards full of sugar and nothing else, the locker full of guns, and the blankets nailed over every window. He couldn’t hide the cut across his arm that needed stitches from a beaker exploding from too much pressure, too much heat. But most of all, he couldn’t hide his absence—all those hours spent behind locked doors in our home in the Mojave.
The thing is, even in this absence, I always knew where he was. I could call for him, and he would come. I could knock, and the door would open. And that’s all I thought I needed—to know he was there. That was enough, wasn’t it?
I guess you could say my bar was set low. Mom spent most of my childhood in prison, so I didn’t expect much when it came to her love or presence. Without realizing it, I’d trained myself not to need much—my only requirement: show up. And Dad did that. Even if he were as high as the hills or close to catatonic on the comedown, in the idealized way I’d grown to remember my childhood and think of my dad, I would tell you that I was safe and loved and had everything I needed. And I would believe it, but it doesn’t mean it would be true.
The real truth is that Mom had been in and out of prison more times than I could count or remember, and Dad was always the one left behind. We both were. One moment, she’d be there, cuddled up next to me in bed with her matchstick-thin arm around me, smelling of nicotine and cinnamon, her long, dark hair draped over me like a security blanket. Then, the next moment, she’d be gone. I’d look for her in every room. Switch on the light. Look in the bedroom. Switch on the light. Throw back the covers. Switch on the light. Maybe she’s in the garage. Switch on the light until there are no more lights.
I yearned for Mom’s presence and to be almost anyone but me. The other girls at school had full lunchboxes with perfectly cut sandwiches, shoes that always looked new, and unwrinkled homework in organized color-coded folders. Their hair was combed and put into little braids or pigtails, their nails were painted innocent shades of pink, and they had a brightness to their eyes that only comes from having your mother at home.
I had none of these things. Instead, my paid-for-by-the-government lunch came on a plastic tray, the food in varying shades of beige. I crammed my toes into shoes I’d worn too often and for too long; my hair was brittle and tangled like a tumbleweed, and my nails were chewed to shreds from my desperate need to distract myself from my anxious heart. When I looked in the mirror, my eyes were pools of darkness filled with loss, longing, and a dim but flickering hope—the kind of hope you hang onto because you’d have nothing left without it.
I couldn’t bear to think that, for some reason, I didn’t deserve the things that make up a stable childhood. But that didn’t stop my subconscious from spinning stories about how I wasn’t enough for Mom to stick around, how I was a burden to love. These stories affected how I’ve always carried myself, making me the pleaser and the fixer. Maybe if I were just smart enough, pretty enough, good enough, Mom would come back to me. Maybe if I brought enough to the table and made myself useful, she would see my value. Maybe then I could keep her.
Nothing I did made a difference, but I kept trying. I became the perfectionist who persisted, who kept going, who buried her needs under the needs of others. I learned that revealing your needs was a weakness. And I needed Dad to see that I was strong and could grin and bear it without saying a word or being a whiner. Endure. Endure. Endure. The word means to suffer without breaking and remain alive—to last. It reverberates through my mind like a mantra: I will not break.
And maybe it’s a good thing—the not breaking—the ceaseless need to fix everything. But then, maybe it isn’t. I have yet to see my inherent value. My self-worth exists in what I can offer to others, what I can withstand, and how I can help. If something goes wrong, well indeed, I must have caused it. Here. It’s okay. Let me fix it. I can do this and this and this, too. Is it enough? Please tell me that it’s enough to make you love me.
During Mom’s last stint in prison, Dad collapsed into himself, fixing nothing. He stopped trying to make things work with her. He was old enough and broken enough to see that he didn’t matter to her. He didn’t have the naive hope that came with being young. He didn’t clothe himself in denial like I did to stomach getting on with life. He did what he had to do to survive and nothing more.
That’s when he started cooking and selling meth. Before that, he’d been a manager at a tire shop, making pretty good money and taking care of our family in all the ways he knew how. He’d even bought himself a new truck. It was bright red and still smelled new when, one cloudless blue day, he drove it over the side of Cajon Pass in the San Bernardino Mountains. He’d been so strung out that he couldn’t sleep or eat or function, and then his body finally stalled. He fell asleep going eighty miles an hour on the highway and bounced between a semi-truck and the guard rail before going over the edge—a five-hundred-foot drop.
He broke his neck. He had glass in his ears, his eyes, his mouth. His truck was totaled. They somehow pulled it up from where it laid among the sagebrush and creosote—how, and at whose expense, I have no idea—and it sat in our driveway gathering dust from the Mojave like a reminder of all that we could’ve lost, and all that we had already lost. With no job, no truck, and no wife, Dad put his focus on meth, the only thing that was giving him relief from reality, an escape from what his life had become.
A few years after that drive with my partner down Sunset Boulevard, I visited my dad at his home in Michigan, in a small town that was more lake than land, and tried to make sense of the memories that blurred and burned bright against the hard black edges of our shared past.
The air was warm and gold, and there were pops of pulsing green in every corner from the plants that hung from the ceiling. His home looked nothing like ours when I was a kid. Dad walked from his tiny kitchen to where I sat in the living room. He had to duck an inch or two as he went through the doorway to avoid smacking his head against the lintel. His old recliner made a creaking sound when he sat down. I watched the dull shine of half-light move across his face as the sun made its way behind the cottonwoods, and I asked him how he came to start making meth. He closed his eyes for a long time, leaving the question hanging in the air.
Then finally, he said, “I don’t know.” His voice was quiet. I was sitting not even two feet away from him, but he still sounded far away.
“Dad, c’mon. It’s not a big deal. Just tell me something about that time,” I said, trying not to sound too pushy.
He ran his big, calloused hands down his faded work jeans and cleared his throat. His face went long and soft in the dusty blue glow from the windows from the fast-approaching Michigan nightfall.
“You wanna know how to make dope or what?”
“Ugh, no, Dad. I don’t want a recipe but . . . just, like, tell me something, anything.”
He sighed a big gale-force sigh. Then he said that he learned how to make meth from a guy he knew, but since he was a perfectionist, he made it cleaner and better than anyone else. Word traveled, and people started asking for it and looking for him, money in hand. He became known as the Guru—that’s why he had security cameras, guns, and countless knocks at the door in the middle of the night.
But I could only see my dad as my dad, not some big meth cook, some real-life Heisenberg. I remember the smell of the chemicals. Ephedrine. Muriatic acid. Iodine. Red phosphorus. Charcoal lighter fluid. Acetone. I remember the headaches I’d get and the way my eyes would burn. But most of all, I remember the fear I had of losing him.
I was always scared. I was afraid that if I went to sleep, Dad might not be there when I woke up. I was afraid that the cops were going to bust down the door like they did when they raided our house and took Mom away, prying her from my tiny hands. I was afraid we were going to get evicted. I was scared of the dark, the knocks on the door, and the shadows cast by the green glow of the security camera. I was afraid of being alone.
To cope with it all, I’d trained myself only to see the good in things—the good in people, the good in my dad. I blocked out anything that might make me think things were not okay. I played tricks on my mind so I’d believe that I could have everything other children had—things like dreams, opportunities, a chance to make something of myself. I created an alternate reality for myself, one where an idealized version of my life existed. I needed to believe I was loved, so I built a world that put love at the center. I made Dad play the part of my great protector, and I told myself that the life I’d lived mattered.
It never occurred to me that none of this was okay—that I wasn’t okay. That maybe my dad wasn’t the great superhero I’d made him out to be. Maybe he didn’t love me as much as I thought he did, or at least, he didn’t love me in the way that I needed, in a way that I could count on.
It was the birth of my son at thirty-five that opened my eyes to the truth—the reality of the grief I had spent my whole life suppressing. I poured my entire being into my baby, studying every sound he made, every movement, every crinkle of his forehead so that I could anticipate and tend to his every need. But the more I fulfilled these needs, the more I realized how unmet my own needs had been when I was a child. I was trapped in a deficit. I needed to give, give, give, and constantly found myself scraping the bottom of my soul for my worth. I realized how much I had taken care of my parents, how much of myself I had given them, and how little of themselves they had given me. It was something I’d always been good at: giving pieces of myself away. Holding my life out in my hands. Here, take what you need. A piece for you, and for you, and here, take two.
With each uncovered truth came the grief. I felt it all like an individual loss, like tiny deaths, one by one, strung together like beads. But I couldn’t stop it. I didn’t know how. As Mary Oliver said, “I had to swim through the fire to stay in the world.”I had to let myself grieve the childhood I’d tricked myself into believing I had, the dangers I’d dressed up as adventures, the neglect I’d disguised as love. My whole life, I had shoved truth into the dark—afraid that if I listened to it, looked at it, felt it in my chest, I’d lose. Lose what? I don’t know. Myself? The world I’d created? Everything all at once? Did I ever have enough of anything to lose in the first place?
So many fragmentary truths told me I was okay, that we were okay. But for all the good parts worth remembering, there are still things that send a dull ache through my spine when I think about them—a disappointment, a mourning, a sadness that takes the shape of my father, the shape of home, the shape of memory.
***
Artwork by Getty Images
Voices on Addiction is a column devoted to true personal narratives of addiction, curated by Kelly Thompson, and authored by the spectrum of individuals affected by this illness. Through these essays, interviews, and book reviews we hope—in the words of Rebecca Solnit—to break the story by breaking the status quo of addiction: the shame, stigma, and hopelessness, and the lies and myths that surround it. Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, adult children, extended family members, spouses, friends, employers or employees, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors, victims of crimes, and those who’ve committed crimes as addicts, and the personnel who often serve them, nurses, doctors, social workers, therapists, prison guards, police officers, policy makers and, of course, addicts themselves: Voices on Addiction will feature your stories. Because the story of addiction impacts us all. It’s time we break it. Submit here.
