My mom used to leave the porch light on.
Every night, no matter what time it was, no matter what state I'd come home in or whether I came home at all — the light was on. She never made a big deal of it. It was just always there. For a long time I didn't think much about it. Now I can't think about it without my throat tightening.
That light was everything she didn't know how to say out loud.
I want to be clear about that — not to assign blame, in either direction, but because I think it's important to say honestly. They loved me. They never stopped loving me. But love doesn't automatically come with the tools to navigate addiction, and my family was figuring it out in real time with no roadmap and no one to ask.
Sometimes that looked like enabling, though none of us would have used that word then. Sometimes it looked like anger that was really fear wearing a harder face. Sometimes it looked like silence at the dinner table that stretched across entire seasons. We were all doing the best we could with what we had, and what we had wasn't much.
There were things said during those years that took a long time to work through. On both sides. I said things I am not proud of. So did they. Desperation makes people reach for whatever is within arm's reach, and sometimes what's within arm's reach are words that leave marks.
My family was grieving me while I was still alive. I didn't have a frame for that at the time — I was too deep in my own fog to see what I looked like from the outside. But when I got further into recovery and started being able to hear their experience, I understood for the first time what the years had cost them.
That understanding broke something open in me. Not in a painful way — in a necessary way. Like a window that had been painted shut finally giving.
We didn't fix everything overnight. Relationships that took years to damage don't heal in a single conversation. But we started having real ones. Conversations where people said what they actually meant instead of what they thought was safe. Where my mom could tell me she had been terrified for years and I could hear it without getting defensive. Where I could tell them I was sorry and mean it in a way that had weight behind it.
I live on my own now. I have for a while. But when I go back to visit, it's on when I pull up. It'll probably always be on. And I no longer take that for granted.
If you're a family member reading this — still in the middle of it, still leaving your own version of the porch light on — I want you to know that it matters. Even when it seems like it doesn't. Even when the person you love gives no indication that they see it.
They see it.
— Shared with permission. Name withheld by request.
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