What inspired me to write “Secret No More”

When addiction first crept into our household 11 years ago, I started keeping a journal. Retreating to clean white paper became my refuge. The blank pages stared back, non-judgmental and welcoming. On their unvarnished surface I poured out my anguish, fear, confusion and shame. It was the only place – until many years later – that felt safe to reveal the terrible secret that was destroying our family.

When Jacob was in active addiction, so was I. Not to drugs or alcohol. In fact, there is no history of addiction in our family. I was addicted to him.

Obsessed with where he was day or night, assaulted by hideous images of what he might be doing and with whom, ashamed that someone – anyone – might find out my son was using drugs, I was suffering the same feelings of isolation, anxiety and shame as was he. But I was Jacob’s mother. If he was sick or in trouble, wasn’t it up to me to help him? I had to fix him, to cure the disease, to bring back the healthy, handsome son with the brilliant future he was meant to fulfill.

During Jacob’s high school years, I held a senior position with one of Maryland’s fastest-growing health systems. As president of the Anne Arundel Medical Center Foundation, I was the chief fundraiser overseeing a staff of ten and a board of 25. We were engaged in a $44 million capital campaign to expand the hospital campus. I loved the work. Like my journals, it offered refuge from the ugly scenario of my son’s worsening addiction unfolding at home.

Ours was a fairly “normal” family, but with a very public face. My husband had been mayor of the City of Annapolis, where he was born and where we had lived for more than 40 years. Active in the town’s civic and social life, we loved giving back to causes we enjoyed. Jacob was born on our daughter’s fifteenth birthday. Eventually, addiction would erode the bond of their shared birth date. But until he began his senior year of high school – and that fateful phone call from a respected teacher who first warned me about Jacob’s “smoking” and a “different” crowd – life was good.

For a time I wondered if the school had the wrong kid. Addiction? Not my son. Not in my family. Denial moved in right alongside my child’s worsening disease.

At work, meeting with donors, sometimes a couple would make me wonder: was addiction worming its way into their family, too? A son was living in their basement. A daughter was away at school but a “How’s she doing?” brought only a shoulder-shrug. That subtle glance between husband and wife, the wife looks away, then a quick change of subject. My antennae honed in. But, of course, I was shielding my own dark secret, so nothing more was said.

Often, it was the faces of these mothers I recalled as I began writing Secret No More. At first, it was simply cathartic, the sheer act of setting on paper years of pent-up pain, like lancing a boil to rid my body of a cancer I’d borne far too long. Scanning pages of my journals, I searched for understanding. How had Jacob’s addiction begun? Was I at fault? Did I cause it? What was his disease doing to our family? And if I couldn’t cure him, could I survive?

Midway through writing I wondered if sharing my story might make up for those missed opportunities to share with other parents. Would a kind word have soothed that mama’s soul? Or a soft suggestion have steered that dad to find help for himself? Caught up in my own fear and isolation, I was incapable of helping anyone else during those frightening years.

Eventually, the book faced a huge hurdle before it ever reached a publisher. Would my son give his permission?

“Mom,” he once told me, two years into recovery, “if this book is meant to be published, it will be.”

It’s my hope – and Jacob’s too – that Secret No More will comfort families facing addiction in a loved one or a friend. It’s the book I wish someone had given me when I was living with the active disease in my family.

Because if one mom and one addict can make it, others can, too.