Getting angry

I rarely get angry.

Is that abnormal?

It must be. Because when friends find out they look at me strangely.

Living with someone who is actively using drugs or abusing alcohol, it is easy to get angry. Probably even normal.

Like the time that Jacob’s high school counselor called me, “Are you aware your son is in danger of failing English? and history?”

Or the time another mother accused me of not reining in my son because he was out with her son doing who knows what.

Or the countless mornings we’d find the side mirror of the car smashed, often dangling by a thin wire.

And the endless conversations that felt only one-way, eliciting monosyllabic responses to pointless questions that resolved nothing.

But I didn’t get angry.  Not then.  Or even later when the counselor we were seeing asked me straight up, “Don’t you ever get angry?”

I’m sure it is unusual. Or something lacking in my make-up – worthy of analysis.

Instead, I just got sad.  Sadder.  And sadder.

Because I knew, even when Jacob’s addiction was at its worst, that this wasn’t my son doing these things to himself or to me.  This wasn’t the sunny, funny kid my husband and I had raised.

It was the addiction.

That cruel, mysterious monster had slipped silently into our warm, safe home one ugly summer night and taken hold of my child, slowly suffocating the boy I knew and loved, but somehow couldn’t protect.

Its sickening grasp held him for years.

Instead of blaming the victim, I turned my rage against addiction.

But not at my son.

Because how would anger help?