Along with the joy of parenthood, with every child comes a piercing vulnerability. It is at once sublime and terrifying

A world of contradictions, wherein everything is gray and almost nothing is black and white.

Wherever you be, wherever you may, seek the truth, strive for the beautiful, achieve the good.

How innocent we are of our mistakes and how we responsible we are for them.

Anyone who has lived through it, or those who are now living through it, knows that caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.

Through Nic's drug addiction, I have learned that parents can bear almost anything....I shock myself with my ability to rationalize and tolerate things once unthinkable. The rationalizations escalate....It's only marijuana. He gets high only on weekends. At least he's not using hard drugs.

At my worst, I even resented Nic because an addict, at least when high, has a momentary respite from his suffering. There is no similar relief for parents or children or husbands or wives or others who love them.

I am becoming used to an overwhelming, grinding mixture of anger and worry.

We deny the severity of our loved one's problem not because we are naive, but because we can't know.

If you subscribe to the idea that # addiction is a disease, it is startling to see how many of these children - paranoid, anxious, bruised, tremulous, withered, in some cases psychotic - are seriously ill, slowly dying. We'd never allow such a scene if these kids had any other disease. They would be in a hospital, not on the streets.

Why does it help to read others' stories? It is not only that misery loves company, because (I learned) misery is too self-absorbed to want much company. Others' experiences did help with my emotional struggle.

When I transformed my random and raw words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into chapters, a semblance of order and sanity appeared where there had been only chaos and insanity.

An alcoholic will steal your wallet and lie to you. A drug addict will steal your wallet and then help you look for it.

Here's a note to the parents of addicted children: Choose your music carefully...There are millions of treacherous moments.

The hopeful part about that is when you do have that help, you will feel better. It still doesn't make this easy. Nothing makes this easy, but you can make better decisions.