Nobody Knows

The Love My Wife Poured Into Her

She was born in 1988. We brought her home when she was two-and-a-half months old.

The video below was our first day home with her. We were deliriously happy and stayed that way for years. The series of posts I wrote, a couple of years ago, about our life with her, and how we came to understand it, begins here. I wrote that series in the hope that it will somehow help other parents. Parents who need to find their way out of the confusion and desperation that overwhelms, when someone you love chooses to just dismantle her life, and when you suddenly find yourself standing over her grave.

I want to forewarn anyone who decides to read those posts that they don’t wallow in the usual therapeutic empathy that characterizes the conventional wisdom regarding addiction. We came out of that experience with views on addiction, moral culpability, and human agency that reflect nothing like the faith in psycho-therapeutic rehabilitation that tends to dominate the conversation in that world.

I’m posting this now because we just recovered the video embedded above, after it had spent 35 years lost in a sack in the attic. We stumbled across the pages of the letter, which I have inserted below, just today. They had been tucked away among some papers that my wife, somewhere along the way, had stored for safe-keeping.

That same baby girl, twenty-nine years after that video was recorded, wrote the following note to her mother.

Hi Momma,

My gift is late like I usually am. 😀 But I am working on that. I love you so much and I want you to know I would be so lost with no hope if it wasn’t for you putting all the wisdom and love into me. You don’t know (you probably do) how you have put in so much that has really saved my life. I will always give my successes, as little or big, to being a result of you/Dad + God. (I hope that made sense.) I’m forever grateful for the unconditional love, the conversations, the discipline, and especially the love you have for my son. You are such a[n] admirable woman. I am lucky to be able to say I am yours - part of y’all’s family. Thank you mom for loving me. I mean that in 1000 ways.

Love you so much mama. - Mary Grace

Mary was, by the time she wrote that letter, already addicted to opioids. She had been addicted for several years.

A little over two years after writing those words, she was dead.

The series of posts I later wrote, about our life with Mary, were excruciating to produce. The deep dive into remembering, which you simply cannot avoid if you are writing about the past, was intensely painful and overwhelming at times. To this day I have not written about everything we went through. It is just too much and too hard. But in the end, I went through with it - I wrote those posts - for other parents.

When you have a child who is dismantling herself, other people - people who know nothing at all about you or your life - will have strong opinions about you and your child. During one especially dark time, the first of many seasons when we feared for Mary’s life, a woman, from our church at the time, blithely remarked to my wife that Mary’s slow-motion self-destruction was “obviously because she has never known unconditional love.”

Can you imagine? In the third installment of the series I wrote about our life with Mary, I recalled that exchange with the woman who had taken it upon herself to volunteer a diagnosis. I wrote this:

People very often say dumb things; indeed I have my own robust track record in this regard. But for sheer relational obtuseness, I think it would be hard to top the act of telling a grieving mother, one who has very literally come close to being consumed out of love for her daughter, that it was actually her lack of love that was the cause of her daughter’s failures. It never seems to occur to those who are superstitious about the therapeutic benefits of unconditional love that, was love’s ability to affect its recipient absolute, the entire world would have already thrown itself down in gratitude at the foot of the cross. If these superstitionists had any imagination whatsoever, or had they even just reflected momentarily on the constancy of their own human nature, they might have recognized that every one of us is very often the recipient of loving kindness that we neither perceive, appreciate, nor understand.

It is simply impossible to overstate, even to put into words, really, how much of my wife’s very self and being she poured into that child.

“…let her works bring her praise at the city gate.” - Proverbs 31:31

A loving mom is, in the most literal sense, a force of nature.