The First Step of a Thousand Miles

My family has serious issues with drug and alcohol addiction. Mary, my sister introduced the family to this dark world when she was 13. She thought that it would be fun to prove how grown up she was to all of her friends by drinking so much that she had to be rushed to the hospital to have her stomach pumped.
Of course mom and dad punished her by taking away her TV and phone privileges but that didn’t make Mary change any, the next party she went to she smoked Pot and drank. 
Mary did the whole teen age rebellion thing. I got into a lot of fights at school because people talked about what a whore she was, and called her “2 drink Mary” because after two drinks she would have sex with you. Not something that you want to hear about your sister. I remember clearly graduation night, she went out to a party with her friends to celebrate, and tried meth for the first time. She wasn’t the same after that.
Our parents ended up kicking her out after they caught her stealing money from my moms jewelry box. In spite of what they both felt I know that it killed them to do so. Mary never stayed in the rehab centers. And taunted my parents with the song by Amy Winehouse “Rehab” always snickering as she would sing the chores “they said I need to go to rehab and I say No No No…” Over the course of a year and a half we would get word that Mr. Johnson would see Mary hanging out at the park with a bunch of guys, or Mrs. Wade saw her coming out of Lucky Times Pawn, but that was the extent of us hearing about her.

Atlanta is a large city with many places for people to get lost and stay lost. Mary had called home a few times, but my  parents just didn’t have it in them to talk to her. They would go on auto pilot until she hung up, and my mom would spend the better part of two hours crying. I was walking home from work at Burger Town and I heard a wispy voice call my name, it was Mary.
My once beautiful 5’8 blond hair blue eye sister was nothing more than a dirty, ran down shell of a person. Her once long blond hair was cut short just below the ears, and was a tangled greasy and dirty. Here eyes were sunk in with dark circles around them. Her nose was slender and pointed. Her arms were long boney extensions of her withered torso, pocked marked with brown bumps and circles where she had used needles. Not the person I grew up with.

She begged and cried that she hadn't eaten in a few days and wanted me to give her a place to stay for the night. Well she  came back to my place and showered up and put on one of my shirts and a pair of boxers. I didn’t recognize her, she was so thin. We talked about what she had been doing, and how she didn’t know what to do. I suggested that she go to the Atlanta Drug Rehab center. At first she was offensive about it, saying that she didn’t need rehab, that she just needed time to get off ‘that stuff’.
My parents came over that next morning. I had called them after she had passed out on the couch. Mary was less than thrilled that they were there, saying that I was trying to set her up, and that she felt bullied and trapped. We told her Atlanta drug abuse rehab centers were not like those other places that was run down and full of trash, that they were friendly people who were serious about helping others in her place.

We all came to an agreement after a few hours of crying, that we would go as a family to visit the facilities and that if she still didn’t want to be there that we wouldn’t hold it against her and look for a new place or try a different means.
When we arrived, it was like coming to a resort. It was a very warm open space, with people who greeted you as you walked in. We were taken on a guided tour of the facility, where we got to see all the different activities that guests were able to participate in. They made it clear that the programs offered were going to be challenging and were designed to make people challenge themselves and push past self imposed limitations. They even offered family counseling that would provide all of us with the tools to understand what Mary is and would be going through, and how to be there for each other not only as a family but as a support group.

After some deliberation, Mary checked herself into the center. We were told that she wouldn’t have contact with any one for at least two weeks.
When we went to visit her for our first counseling session, I noticed that she had begun to look like my sister again. Her eyes were not dark patchwork circles anymore, it looked to me as if she had gained some weight back. Her hair and nails were clean. She greeted us with a smile and open arms.

We sat through the family session and listened to what Mary had to say to us, as she worked through her steps. We all were crying but they were tears of relief. Mary has been clean almost 2 years now. I know that if it hadn’t been for the treatment center, my sister would have probably been dead by now. She has since started school for Addiction Counseling at Atlanta Community College and is working a steady job at the Pizza Hut a block over from our parents.