Our daughter's amazing recovery from drug addiction
I'm really glad she gave you permission to run this, Tom. What a beautiful story. I wish her and your whole family nothing but health, happiness, and peace going forward.
Good stuff. I truly appreciate this. It is a gift for many of us.
as I said elsewhere...a strong woman from a strong family. Thank you TK.
Wow. Thanks for sharing that, and for providing something to ponder and, more importantly, to discuss at home. Strength, peace and all good wishes to Maura, you and your family for the road ahead.
Tom and Maura: Thank you SO MUCH for sharing this! Talk about a community service! I am proud to call you folks neighbors.
That you have supported each other though this excruciating territory is so poignant .
To Maura .i know you will continue to enrich your soul and go forward helping others to see your courage and use it as their own
Your whole family deserves such credit for your perseverance and continuous love . Love to all.
"The Strongest Steel is that which is Forged in the Hottest Fire" ............what a true inspiration to all of us.
We (Maura, Jeanmarie and I) thank you all for your kind comments. You never know what the reaction will be when you put yourself out there. I'm not going to lie I was a bit nervous posting something so personal, but Maura insisted it would be a good thing. Again, Thank You!!
Wow, Tom, thank you for posting this. Surely one of those, "you never know what people are going through." I have spoken with you and JMH quite a few times over the past three years and didn't know anything about these struggles. Wishing you all peace as you continue on this path of strength and healing.
Wow, this is incredible and inspiring. Thank you very much for sharing this!
Thank you to you and Maura for sharing your family's journey. My best wishes for the future.
I shared it with my high school's Student Assistance Counselor who wrote "Thank you!!! I so appreciate you sharing this wonderful (and honest) story. So many families are battling with various forms of addiction and sharing the stories can bring such support. Thank you again! "
That was very moving to read, and thank God your Maura has made it through! I'm sure having such a loving and supportive family made all the difference for her!
Hoping it's ok to post this link - only 544 "likes" so far - maybe we can all help this cause spread word of their good work!
https://www.facebook.com/heroinkillsnj/info?tab=page_info
Tom and Maura, thank you so much for sharing this. Very moving and inspiring.
Thank you, @pdg. Here is the HeroinKillsNJ web site http://www.heroinkillsnj.com/ (it's a bit ironic that it's "HK").
And again, thanks to everyone for your incredible support.
The updated Facebook page for Heroin Kills NJ is:
https://www.facebook.com/heroinkillsnewjersey/info?tab=page_info
What an amazing story of strength, love, and support. I wish your family the best of luck.
Thank you so much for sharing this, Tom. I think you know how much it means to me every time I hear that someone came back...but, especially the young ones. Then I am so grateful that they will have lives to remember, and not lives to forget. They will have memories worth remembering. I feel like crying now. Thank you so much again, Tom. And please tell your daughter as one to another, I said, "Yay!"
Congratulations go out from me to your Daughter.
She seems to be doing an outstanding job of making a good life for herself now
I know it must have hard for her not to give in to temptation, at times, once she got clean, to often those who kick the habit only return to it because the temptation was to strong for them and they unwisely thought they could handle it only to fall back into the same trap.
The best advise I can give to thoes who have gotten off drugs is: never never think that the cure worked, it is something that you must fight a lifetime and never let your guard down. But you will be able to remain clean as long as you want to be
and don't allow the weakness grab ahold of you again.
Once you have learned to live without drugs it's not as bad as my statement makes it look to stay clean.
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On March 6th my daughter celebrated 3 years of being clean from drugs and I posted a tribute to her on Facebook. I received many comments and some parents actually reached out to me to let me know that my Facebook post gave them hope as they were dealing with the nightmare of an addict child (or children). Now Maura has been featured in a law enforcement magazine that seeks to educate our police officers about this deadly disease. With her permission I am posting my original post and the article in hopes that maybe it will help a parent who is in the middle of this struggle. Peace!
"A little over three years ago our family was facing a challenge that I would never wish on any other family. The day after the Giants won Super Bowl XLVI, January 13, 2012, we found out that our 17 year old daughter was a drug addict. It was the moment that changed our family forever. The story is not unusual, unfortunately. Lying, wild mood swings, stealing, physical changes, always sick. It’s easy to look back and ask how we could have missed it, but that’s all irrelevant now. It’s amazing how you go into action when one of your kids is in danger. Before Maura even got home from school that day, her mom had already contacted Princeton House in South Jersey to get Maura a bed to begin her detox and long road back. The rest was up to Maura. We watched her struggle with this deadly disease, facing challenge after challenge. Sometimes she would struggle and falter, but most times she struggled and persevered. Ultimately she ended up at Hazelden in Minnesota and then a half-way house in Illinois. On October 12, 2012 Maura came home. This is not to say that we did not have our own recovery to work through. This disease affects the whole family, not just the addict.
She was no longer the little girl we watched grow up. She endured a battle that gave her some battle scars and she came home to us a different person. Not different-bad and not different-good (at least not yet), just different. The whole family had to adjust, not just mom and dad, but her two sisters as well. We were all learning how to deal with this “new normal”. What came next was totally unexpected.
Over the last three years our Maura Sunshine came back to us, just not as the little girl that my mind’s eye still pictures. In the addiction recovery world there is a phrase; “the gift of sobriety”. This gift occurs when addicts work through their recovery and have reached a level of clarity in their lives that we who are not addicts will never know. I have seen our precious Maura receive that gift.
Maura, you continue to inspire all of us. With all of the challenges you have faced, the friends you have lost, the deep hurt of losing someone close to you, going to college, working and, well, I could go on and on, you continue to show resilience, strength, perseverance and best of all a wonderful heart. To see the amazing woman that you have become surpasses anything I could have imagined on that day back in January of 2012. Congratulations on your three years. Peace, I love you."