Personal Narrative: Substance Abuse In My Family

As I stare at this old photograph of this seemingly happy family, I think about how different so many lives would be if drug abuse didn’t exist. In the picture, I was only a toddler sitting on my mother’s lap and my newborn baby brother was laying in my father’s arms. It was Christmas and all of our new toys were scattered all around us. This picture should be something I find and feel happiness; however, in my case, a picture like this only puts a knot in my stomach the size of a volleyball and fills me with hatred.
At that young age, I had no idea what the start of my life would contain. My mom, my brother, and I were happy and care-free at this time. She was a stay at home mom and our dad worked at the prison. My mom would wake up every morning, turn on cartoons, and begin making us breakfast while we were occupied, and spent the entire day with us. My dad seemed amazing as well. He would be at all athletic and school events even though he worked the nights before. He played …show more content…
For, somehow he passed the drug test and the court forced my brother and me to go with him every other weekend. At this time, my brother was three years old and I had just turned six. Even so, each weekend that my mother was forced to send us with him, I remember taking care of my brother, feeding him, helping him bathe, and mothering him while my mom wasn’t present because our dad would pass out on the couch or just leave us there alone. Still, the court made us go up there for years and my mom had to teach me signs to look for from my dad. She told me things that I could understand so I could know when I needed to get away and call someone because when I noticed the signs, it was no longer safe to be around him. We did this until one day when we were on our way to his house, a cop pulled him over for speeding and then arrested him right in front of us because he had been high. After that day we never had to go to his house