There wasn't one single moment when everything fell apart.
Looking back, I can see that I had been carrying too much for a long time.
I was raising my children.
I was working.
Jon was working with my family.
Our marriage had become complicated.
We had financial problems.
We had family problems.
We had the ordinary responsibilities that come with raising children, along with all the extraordinary ones that seemed to keep finding us.
And then there was Marley.
Her kidney disease had changed our lives.
I had spent months learning how to care for a sick child, worrying about her health, dealing with medications and appointments, and trying to keep everything else going at the same time.
But even after Marley went into remission, the weight didn't simply disappear.
Life kept moving.
I kept moving with it.
Then my grandpa died.
That loss broke something inside me.
I had reached a point where I felt like I couldn't bear all the weight of the world anymore.
I felt alone.
I felt like I was carrying everything with my children and trying to keep everyone else functioning while I was barely functioning myself.
Looking back now, I realize something I couldn't see then.
If it had simply been me and my kids, I probably could have handled a lot more than I thought I could.
I was their mother.
Taking care of them was hard, but it was also the part of my life that made sense.
What made everything exponentially harder was everything surrounding my relationship with Jon.
The marriage.
The fighting.
The emotional weight.
The responsibilities.
The history.
The constant problems.
The feeling that I had to keep holding together something that seemed determined to come apart.
I didn't know how to put any of it down.
And after my grandpa died, I couldn't bear the weight anymore.
That was when I started using drugs.
I want to be completely honest about that.
I made that choice.
Nobody forced me to use meth.
I am responsible for that decision.
But there was a reason I was vulnerable to making it.
I wasn't looking for a way to destroy my life.
I was looking for a way to keep living it.
That distinction doesn't make the decision right.
It just explains how I got there.
Before meth, I had been prescribed Adderall by a doctor who believed I may have been misdiagnosed with ADHD my entire life.
I don't necessarily agree with that diagnosis.
But the medication worked for me.
It gave me energy.
It helped me focus.
It helped me function.
It made me feel like I could keep up with the life I was trying desperately to manage.
Then I lost access to it.
After Jon and I returned from an anniversary trip to Colorado, where marijuana was legal, I tested positive for marijuana.
At that time, marijuana was not legal in Missouri.
My doctor stopped prescribing my Adderall.
From my perspective, I went from having something that helped me function to suddenly having nothing.
I still had the same responsibilities.
The same children.
The same marriage.
The same work.
The same problems.
But now I felt like I couldn't even muster the energy to deal with them.
Then someone asked me if I wanted to try meth.
I said yes.
That was the wrong turn.
I know that now.
At first, though, it felt like an answer.
It gave me the energy I couldn't find anywhere else.
It allowed me to keep moving.
To keep working.
To keep taking care of things.
To keep pretending I was okay.
And that is how something that started as an attempt to survive eventually became something that helped destroy the life I was trying so hard to protect.
I wish I could go back and make a different decision.
I can't.
I can only tell the truth about the decision I made.
Eventually, my drug use became part of the story other people told about me.
And eventually, it became part of the reason I lost my children.
That is one of the hardest sentences I have ever had to write.
Because I never stopped being their mother.
I never stopped loving them.
I never stopped wanting them.
And I never stopped wanting my family back.
But by then, my relationship with Jon had become something I could no longer understand without looking at the power struggle that had developed between us.
I had reached a point where I was thinking about leaving.
I was thinking about taking my children and building a different life.
And from my perspective, that was when Jon became what I call my caller.
I came to believe that when he realized I was going to leave him and take the children with me, he began contacting DHS and law enforcement about me.
I believe some of the accusations made against me were false.
I believe some of what was reported about me did not reflect the reality I was living.
But I also know that there are official records, investigations, and legal proceedings that have to be dealt with on their own terms.
That is why I am writing this book.
I don't want to simply say, Jon did this to me, and expect everyone to accept it because I said so.
I want to show what happened.
I want to show what I remember.
I want to show what the documents say.
I want to show what was alleged.
I want to show what was dismissed.
And I want to show what was actually proven.
Because somewhere along the way, my drug use became bigger than the woman who had existed before it.
The mother.
The daughter.
The wife.
The worker.
The woman who cared for her sick little girl.
The woman who buried her grandfather.
The woman who was trying to keep her family together.
The woman who made a terrible choice when she felt like she couldn't carry the weight anymore.
All of those people were me.
The drug use was part of my story.
It was not the entirety of my story.
And it shouldn't erase everything that came before it.