Two Families in Recovery : A PARENT’S ORDEAL : ‘You Cannot Imagine the Pain I Felt’

Karin Sanchez speaks of the addiction of her son “Eric” (she requests that his given name not be used) with a restrained, powerful somberness deepened by the death of her husband from a heart attack two weeks earlier.

The couple had been married 34 years, and if there was one thing they wanted, it was to provide a warm, stable home for their two sons and one daughter--something neither had had themselves.

Born into a poor family in Germany, Karin Sanchez was 4 when her parents divorced. At 15, she moved to Washington state with her mother, who married an abusive, alcoholic GI. A year later, Karin married and escaped.

Her husband, Raul, was raised by a working mother after his father’s death. When he married, he vowed his children would never return from school to an empty house.

And indeed, they did not.

“I was always with the kids,” says Sanchez, 51. “I was a mother. I baked and cooked three meals every day. We just couldn’t figure out why our (sons) turned the way they did.”

Raul Sanchez, a floor-covering installer for the Los Angeles Unified School District, worked hard to provide for his family, to give them a comfortable ranch-style home with a pool. He took his two sons hunting, coached them in Little League baseball, bought his younger son the designer jeans he adored.

Perhaps they had spoiled the boy, Karin Sanchez says.

Spoiled or not, Eric began to change after a week in Hawaii on vacation with his brother. Eric was 14; his brother was eight years older and smoking marijuana and drinking heavily. (Today, the brother is married and still struggling with drug and alcohol addictions.)

Once an affectionate child, Eric began avoiding the family and skipping school. He stopped wearing his designer jeans and, his mother says, “trashy” youngsters replaced his old friends.

“For years and years, all he’d do was hibernate in his room,” Sanchez says. And for years she cried. “I could have filled a swimming pool with the tears I cried for my children.”

Still, she refused to admit that her son was in trouble. “My husband used to tell me, ‘He’s doing alcohol or drugs.’ I’d say, ‘No, he’s got an allergic reaction.’ ”

As the truth became apparent, the couple dealt with it the only way they knew: When Eric would sneak out at night, Sanchez says, “I’d yell and scream like normal mothers do.”

Then Sanchez joined Toughlove, the national support network of parents of troubled children, and her strategies hardened.

She no longer knocked on Eric’s bedroom door. “I’d just rip it open,” she says. And over the years the booty she found changed from marijuana to bags of cocaine taped to the bottom of drawers or stuffed into the pockets of his pool table.

When he was 18, Eric ran away from home. Three months later, on a rainy winter morning, he appeared at the kitchen door; he had lost 30 pounds and was dirty and hungry.

At that time Sanchez did one of the most difficult things she can remember, something parents of healthy children can hardly comprehend.

“He said, ‘Mom, can I have something to eat?’ ” she recounts. “I said, ‘Sure.’ I’ll feed anybody if he’s hungry.

“So he made himself some soup, and then he said, ‘Mom, can I go lie on the couch for a little while?’

“I said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’

“He stood there for a while and looked at me. Finally, he said, ‘Well, I guess I might as well go. I have no place to go, but I might as well go.’

“I said, ‘OK, son. Goodby.’

“It hurt. I mean, you cannot imagine the pain I felt. But I knew I had to do it.”

For four consecutive days Eric returned to the house. On the fifth day, his parents let him stay.

A year and a half later he was out on the street again. He had come home loaded and was foulmouthed, Sanchez recalls.

“His father told him, ‘Son, you go to bed now. But in the morning, when you’re sober, I want you out of this house.’ ”

That was last winter. In June, Eric telephoned, saying he was vomiting blood. He had no job, no money, no place to live. “This was his rock bottom,” Sanchez says.

They allowed him home on the condition that he go through detoxification and rehabilitation. But government-supported programs were full. Eric called for three days before finding a detox center that had a free bed. He entered that program, but after a week of fruitless telephoning gave up trying to find space in a longer-term recovery center.

Since then he has remained off of drugs on his own, through sheer willpower.

During the final months of his father’s life, the two would sit on the patio and talk about hunting and fishing, the way they had years before.

When his father died, Eric did not relapse. Instead, he dusted off a portrait of his parents that had been in storage and placed it on the mantel. He is working full time as a packer in a warehouse, and his mom is encouraged by his progress. But although she is willing to talk publicly about his drug experience, Eric is not.

“I’m not a real religious person, but I think God sent my son home to me to be my support. I really do,” says Sanchez.

“He’s changed so much. He’s the young man now at 21 that he was when he was little. He’s back.”