When I finished reading this book, I was not sure how I felt, apart from very sad. So often we read about the addict’s journey from his or her perspective. These accounts are frequently peppered with bravado that seems to almost glorify drug abuse as a lifestyle. We hear about the rebel, the lost, the search for self, the struggle and in some cases, mercifully, the redemption. But rarely do we read about the impact of the drug user’s behaviour on those close to them…especially parents and mothers in particular. Mothers carry these children next to their hearts for nine months. Medical research now shows that each child leaves a part of their DNA in the mother and vice versa, so neither child nor mother are ever completely separated. It is probably for this reason that mothers experience such terrible inner struggle when their children suffer. Perhaps it explains the terrible pain they experience, the guilt, the absolute self-recrimination as they examine in minute detail what they did that led their child to seek refuge in drugs. How many times can a person relive their child’s life, and have it play out differently in their imaginations so that they mitigate the effects of trauma before it turns into drug abuse. And, of course, none of those reincarnations in the mind are possible. The moment has been and gone and how was anyone to know that that was the trauma that turned a child into a drug dependent adult. How can a parent be that vigilant and hyper aware? A child is who he or she is and the parents who they are, all living their lives to the best of their ability…often struggling to forge their own lives with inadequate emotional and physical resources, often alone. An Addict in the Family captures all the terrible horror of a parent’s experience of a drug dependent child who becomes enmeshed in the drug underworld. She makes no excuses for his behaviour. Nor does she slip into the all to easily found black tunnel of feeling sorry for herself. There is no self-recrimination and no evidence of all the if only’s that she could so easily slip into. We do see a pro-active mother trying to do all she can to give her child a new start in life. We see her doing all she can to work with authorities and the frustrating dead-ends she encounters. We have a feeling of how surreal the whole experience is. However, when all she has done fails, we again see the amazing courage with which she accepts this, and realises it is time to let go. That is an amazingly courageous act. Those with a spiritual belief can place the child into the care of a force greater than any individual and believe that he or she is living their journey the way he or she is meant to. Meantime, we have our journey to make, and this is the journey Stephanie has chosen to follow. As a reader, I am relieved for her, but I know that no parent who goes through what she went through is ever the same again. And maybe that’s what it is all about, relinquishing power and admitting that some things are bigger than us – that there comes a time when we offer up what we can and do all that we can to make our corner of the world just a little better for us having been here. Stephanie has done that by sharing her story. And I pray her son knocks on her door one day and says, with a smile, “I’m home.”