It was the day I felt crucified and relieved at the same time. I had stepped through the looking glass into a world I had not known existed. It was scary and it was incredible.

It was the day I realized I was just as sick, if not sicker, than my daughter. It came one day as she continues to work her program in a treatment facility and learns how to live a different way. As she is recovering I realized I am not.

I have enabled, enmeshed and co-depended my way through the last seven years. It’s most likely longer but I’m not ready to go back that far. It’s all been in the name of love, parenting, maternal instinct, responsibility. Whatever term I could come up with that made it okay or justified my behaviour.

Justified to clean up the mistakes, fix the situations, pay the debts owed to the bad guys.

Justified to blame others, make excuses, turn a blind eye or simply look past the ugly to an imaginary reality that didn’t exist.

Once the ugly was so big that I couldn’t ignore it anymore, I let it swallow me. Like a blood pressure cuff wrapped around my entire body that just kept inflating. I couldn’t move and I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe. My entire existence connected to her situation. I just felt frozen.

Many times I still do.

When I think further ahead than today panic leaps from the back benches to take its place lodged in my throat. When I subconsciously create a running doomsday narrative in my head, anxiety clouds my thinking and I feel fuzzy and angry and scared.

I like the thought of loving detachment but how that works in practice is a foreign language to me.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change……

That’s not talking about the time, or the weather, or the latest election results. It’s not even talking about getting laid off or your favourite sports team losing the big game. It’s talking about accepting that I am powerless over alcohol and drugs and I am powerless over my loved one who has the progressive disease of alcoholism and/or drug addiction. Only my loved one can work to arrest the disease. Whatever I do or don’t do cannot control that.

Accepting this is hard. It’s kind of easy academically, but that’s about all the easy. The rest is pretty tricky.

Really accepting means no more stalking the phone, hiding the booze, making bargains or contracts. No more losing sleep, reaching out to the friends or asking to meet new ones to judge their integrity for yourself. It means no controlling the situation, no getting involved in the plan, and not orchestrating the outcome. It also means not lying to your own friends about how things are going, and deciding not to feel cast aside when those friends slowly don’t reach out to you as much because the situation you’re in is too overwhelming for them.

Accepting means that my emotional well-being is not dictated by my daughters current situation. If she stays in recovery and works her program for the rest of my life that’s great, but if it doesn’t happen it doesn’t mean my world falls apart too.

Accepting means understanding the role I played in her addiction, drinking, and using. It means me getting better so those relationship roles don’t play out like they once did.

Accepting means to not be fearful or anxious once she does come out and starts to live a new life. A life that doesn’t include me at her side 24/7.

It’s been 13 weeks since my last late-night hospital visit, that lasted three weeks. It’s been six weeks since we brought her to the centre, with four weeks to go. It seems a long while for me to still be on step one – acceptance.

I can’t rush this. I rushed it before and it made things worse. This time last year, for instance. I thought we were golden – she had resurfaced and was making the right noises so I jumped on the train. I was convinced that was it. It was over. Finally finished.

Yeah. No.

Not this time. Pressing into the feelings; fighting through the fear and the pain with the goal of coming out accepting. It’s the only way I’m going to get better, and in turn be the healthiest me I can be while she makes her sobriety her number 1 priority.

I will find Serenity, but this time I’m not going to rush it.