Eventually, my drug use stopped being something I believed I could control.
It became part of the story that other people used to define me.
And that is where my relationship with Jon became even more complicated.
For years, I had tried to hold our family together.
I had tried to make our marriage work.
I had tried to take care of the children.
I had worked.
I had supported Jon.
I had tried to help him maintain relationships with his children.
I had tried to keep our household functioning.
But eventually, I reached a point where I was thinking about leaving.
And from my perspective, that was when everything changed.
Jon, or Jonny as I called him, became what I think of as my caller.
By that I mean that I came to believe he was the person calling DHS and law enforcement when he knew I was considering leaving him and taking the children with me.
I cannot prove every call or every report simply because I believe it happened.
That distinction matters.
There are records that exist.
There are reports.
There are investigations.
There are things people said.
There are things I remember.
And there are things I believe based on the timing and circumstances.
But I don't want to turn my belief into a fact simply because I am telling my story.
What I can say is what it felt like from where I stood.
I was the mother who had primarily cared for our children.
I was the one trying to keep everything together.
And I was using drugs.
Both of those things could be true at the same time.
I had become dependent on something that I originally turned to because I felt like I couldn't function without it.
And once that dependency existed, it became something that could be used against me.
I know I made the wrong choice when I started using meth.
I know that.
I don't need a court document to tell me that.
I lived it.
But I also know that my drug use did not erase every other thing that happened in my marriage.
It didn't erase the years before I used drugs.
It didn't erase the work I had done.
It didn't erase the children I raised.
It didn't erase the medical problems we went through.
It didn't erase the emotional abuse I believe I experienced.
And it didn't erase the things I remember happening between Jon and me.
It became one more piece of the story.
And eventually, it became the piece that seemed to swallow everything else.
That is one of the reasons I am writing this book.
I want my children to someday understand that I was not simply a woman who used drugs.
I was their mother.
I was a wife.
I was a daughter.
I was a worker.
I was someone trying to hold together a family.
I was someone who made a terrible decision.
I was someone who became dependent on that decision.
And I was someone who eventually realized that the thing I thought was helping me survive was becoming the thing that could destroy everything I loved.
I don't want to hide that.
I want to tell the truth about it.
Because if I leave that part out, then I'm doing exactly what I don't want this book to do.
I'm creating another incomplete version of the story.
And my children deserve the whole story.
Not a perfect story.
Not a story where I am always right.
Not a story where Jon is always wrong.
A story where I was a real person who made real mistakes while trying to survive a life that had become much bigger than I knew how to handle.
And somewhere along the way, I lost my way.
Now I am trying to find it again.