Jami

Jami is a drug addict. Everyone knows that. Maybe I can explain some of Why this happened to her but first I want to say, Her addiction does Not define her. She is still my amazing daughter, my rock in hard times,  a Beautiful Creature.

Yes, we have had some terrible times. But those were almost never with Jami herself. They were with her addiction. I can see the difference now. 
Jami IS  the one that no matter what is going on if I say, Help me! She is here.  Jeremy is that, too. But of my daughters, Jami is faithful. Jess does more and more to take care of me, too, but this is Jamison's spotlight. 
Jami's addiction effects every aspect of her life and everyone connected to her. But it is Not everything she is about  I believe Jami hates her addiction even more than the rest of us do and I would give anything to free her of it.

This is something that has bothered me for about 20 years, sometimes I feel I am close to understanding it and other times I am just totally lost.
For the last 10 years or so I have had this idea that if I just kept loving Jami, just kept showing her that the things she says and believes about me can't possibly be true, that one day she would wake up and see me, her mother. Back to that in a minute.  

I have found out that most of the stories she tells that blame me for her life are extremely common, some verbatim,  with other addicts. It's not even to explain/excuse to the world their addiction. It is usually mostly to explain it to themselves. With a world just waking up to know that addiction is a Disease, they needed a way to understand what had happened to them. They Know they aren't "bad" people but they have to find a way in their minds to explain their addiction. Until recently when addiction was declared a Disease,  many desperately needed an explanation. It is easier to tell people they were abused in some way, hurt, damaged, that nadectgrm turn to drugs to relieve the pain.

I would give a Lot to have understood that from the beginning!!

Something happened last year that made me believe that the long awaited day that Jami knows what's really happened will never come. A couple of years ago when Jami got out of jail I arranged for her to work with me for a man named Dan delivering papers for the World-Herald. One night shortly after we started thr job we left for work and we were on the road about 10 minutes when I noticed that she was nodding off, it looked like she had just done a big shot of heroin. I had several chances to stop this before it turned into something terrible but I passed all of those opportunities that night. I was just so desperate to show that Jami and I could do this!! My first thought was to take her home and take Jessica with me that night but I decided to keep going. Then we ran into Jen, Dan's wife, at tobacco hut. I hoped Jen would not notice Jami's condition and i asked Jami to please stay in the car but when Jami notice that Jen was in the car behind us she got out of the car, almost fell down and greeted Jenny slurring and thinking she was talking coherently to Jenny. Jenn looked at me with raised eyebrows, we were so close then we could have e t IU re conversations without words, and I returned her look saying I had this under control. (I so did NOT) I got Jami back in the car and continued to Dan's house to pick up the van that we deliver the papers in. Driving on to Dan's to pick up the delivery can I tried to talk to Jami. I told her I knew she had taken something that was making her act like she was as on heroin. She got very defensive, insisted she just took a xanax, then it went to the usual turnaround of her saying I never gave her a break, always accused her of using, etc. I told her how Jen had known right away she was high and Jami blew up, told me I was lying, told me I was crazy etc etc.  When we got to Dan's he noticed that Jami was crying in the van and asked me if everything was okay and again I passed an opportunity to fix this and told him that we would be fine. Jami got increasingly worse on the drive, and it was a long drive to where we delivered, out by Norfolk. When we got to Norfolk I tried to leave her in the car, the passenger door didn't have a handle on the inside so I figured it wouldn't be too hard to keep her in the van so she wouldn't interact with the customers there. It kind of worked but she was screaming in the truck for me to let her out. I just got out of there as fast as I could. By the next drop site she passed out in the van and I finished the route the best I could but I was worried because Jami was the one who had been trained how to deliver the comics for the newspaper and I did mess that up. One reason I kept going was that I had taken the job so Dan would feel free to go to a pool tournament in Las Vegas, something he looks forward to all year long, and I really wanted this to work so he could go on his trip. I fought so hard to make this night work!! We got a late start because the presses were running late. Then Jami wasn't able to divide and label the bundles so I was doing it while driving and made a huge math mistake. This is the Sunday paper. The huge, heavy one. I hff ave no idea how I could have unloaded then alone except I was That Desperate to do this for Dan.  But the newspaper deliveries that night were a disaster. Every time I thought I was done and headed back to Omaha I got an angry call that something else was messed up and I had to backtrack to try tut o fix it. My count was off from the math error, people got the wrong things, comics  were left in the wrong places,  and Dan was called out for hiring inept people to run the route. Dan offered to fight for us when he was called in to explain and I told him not to risk his job, told him to throw me under the bus and let me take all the blame for what happened that night.
The next day Jami was horrified and dreading telling her father and her friends what had happened. I felt sorry for her and told her that when she told the story she should blame me, that she would should say that I messed up the job, not her, and say nothing about the fact that she was on drugs that night.
But what horrified me and made me realize I may never reach a point of Truth with Jami was what happened about a year after this happened. We were talking about her starting to use again right after getting out of prison, all that it had cost her already, and I mentioned how she had lost that job from doing drugs that night. She flared at me totally indignant and told me that everybody knew that the reason we lost that job was because I was unable to do the job, that I had messed up the job. The story that I made up for her to tell her father had become the absolute truth for her. That was a big moment of realization for me. The stories she tells can become Absolute Truth to her in only a matter of months, perhaps even instantly! I did do a little bit of research and found that this was somewhat common, that drug addicts telling the story over and over while high somehow makes it a fact and their mind.
So here I am with years of distorted stories Jami has told and believes and I feel there is nothing that I can do about them. 

But with the understanding I have of addiction now,  and the ability to See The Real Jami, I can live with the distortions, but I will describe some of their history here. Maybe someday after I'm dead she will see this and some of it will ring true.

When she was 16 she started running away to her father's house and twice I called the police and they went and got her and brought her home but the last time they said that they would not do it again because she was 16 and they felt that she had the right to decide where she wanted to live no matter what I said about the household, the drugs and alcohol in that household etc, the police were no longer going to help me. The last time I brought her home she kicked me in the stomach on the front porch when I tried to talk to her and then she ran to the basement where her room was. Steve followed her down there and she greeted him with a long butcher knife pointed at him. We called 911 and asked that she be taken to the psych ward at Immanuel for evaluation. Once there she began telling them stories of abuse by Steve and me towards her and even her little sisters. After the first round of questioning her we were threatened with the loss of all the children to social services but as they questioned her again and again they noticed that her story changed every time and started listening to us More than to her.
Our insurance would only cover a 10-day evaluation and at the end of that 10 days they decided that she was safe to be released. Steven I went to her to talk to her about coming home but she refused to even look at us and all she would say over and over was  "I  just want to go live with my father."
Jami's telling of this event ever since, even face-to-face to me, was that we told her she could not come home and something about how we didn't even want to see her again so we asked her friend Carrie to load up her stuff and take her to her father's house. The only truth there is that we did ask Carrie to take her there but it was because she didn't want anything to do with us and I couldn't stand the thought of actually taking her to her father's house.
Over the years I would always notice that Jami had a completely different story than anyone else around about anything that happened in her life. I don't think I really realized how much she blamed and hated me until I went to the emergency room once when she had her nose broken. I was sitting in a chair outside the room where she was being treated and a young man was sitting next to me, I can't remember his name now. But he said to me "Jami's mother is actually the one who should be sitting in there with a broken face! Her  bitch mother should die for all the things she has done to this poor girl in her life." His shocked face was priceless when a nurse stepped out asking if Jami's mother was there and I stood up.
Another horrific incident with Jami happened when she was living with Mikey on the air Force Base. She was doing a lot of meth and both of them were abusing oxycontin and I was brought into their kitchen to stand trial for my crimes before Jami and Mikey. For several hours Jami would state a crime I had committed against her and then punch me in the arm while Mikey stood guard to make sure I did nothing to fight back. The list of accusations was long and absolutely unbelievably outrageous. She hit me in the same place in the upper arm every time she felt she made a point. It took a month for the bruises on that arm to heal. When she became tired or maybe out of things to scream at me about it ended and all I did was glanced at the phone on the counter and Mikey said "You be sure that what happens here stays here" and it was definitely a threat. I waited until I was sure they were asleep and I called a man named Rex who I considered a friend and who drove a taxi cab. When Rex showed up to pick me up he stepped out of his car pulled his jacket back so Mikey, who was standing on the porch, would see the 44 Magnum he had in his pants and Mikey didn't say a word as Rex loaded me into his cab. That is how I escaped that day.

Still for the next 5 years I continued with my insane plan that I could just love her so much and take such good care of her that she would have to see that's the stories she told just couldn't be true. Every now and then I would start to think that maybe my plan was working but then whenever something didn't go her way or she got angry or did meth or was coming down off of meth I was right back where I started, I was the evil b****, horrible human being, an abusive mother always plotting ways to hurt and destroy her.
Jami started getting close to Jess when she was about 14 although Steve and I tried to prevent it. Jami would take Jess to meth houses and fill her head with the stories of her abuse at my hands. I don't know how much they influence Jess's own hatred and contempt for me but I think it was a start.
Jess was a very, very difficult child from a very early age. At First I believe  it was because Jess was deaf for years before we knew and had the surgery to restore her hearing.
Jess was, like I said, always a little different. So shy that her teachers believed she couldn't talk until the third grade. She was also extremely socially awkward (that's putting it lightly but I don't have a better word right now). If we took the kids for ice cream and asked what flavor she wanted she would always just freeze. Jeanette often spoke for her at these times. I remember once she said she would talk to her Uncle Mike so he flew to Iowa from Texas to try to help her. He left after a few days totally frustrated that she wouldn't say anything to him.
We found out that our church elder had been molesting all of our girls when Jeanette was in kindergarten. I remember when the pediatrician examined them and when Jess fought her and had to be pinned down the doctor said, "This one will likely be intact, she has fought like this before."
And Jess was indeed the only one "intact".
Note here, I do believe the things this man did to my girls deeply damaged all of them.
I still feel guilty that I didn't know, didn't protect them. I was raped as a little girl. I had dealt with it when I found myself the mother of three little girls. I though This is Why. That happened to me so I would know how to protect my girls. That belief was deeply rooted in my belief in God, all things work for the good of those who have faith in God. When I found out about my poor girls I screamed at the Heavens, cursed God, told Him that all of his Plans were evil crap.
That was the first time I lost God. I remember the song "Losing My Religion":was popular and it became My Song that year.
We moved our family to Omaha. Steve was a hopeless, useless wreck. First he became terrified to even hug the girls afraid they would think he was molesting them. Second, he kept waiting for the Church to stand and defend us. Instead they vigorously defended their Elder.