I know a great many women who choose to recover from substance use issues for their children, and I honor them. I am also one of them.
At age twenty, and with unending gratitude to a man I once thought was my entire reason for being (turned out he wasn't even close), I found myself pregnant. Ashley, the beautiful baby girl who came into the world on July 1, 1981, did more than change the course of my life—she saved it.
That pregnancy—and the responsibilities of single motherhood—marked the beginning of my trying to stop using substances and become the mother I wanted to be. Working on stopping was the theme of my life for the first few years of that little girl's life.
Successfully stopping didn't happen until she was six and my second beautiful daughter was two. People say we can't recover for anyone else, that we must be driven by our own desire for recovery.
I never wanted it for myself until I wanted it for my children, so I beg to differ. Our children can inspire us to recover, but the work of recovery is ours.