Women and Addiction...

It can happen to anyone, anywhere, of any age, and at any time…When I think of addiction, I think of free-roaming vagabonds with brown paper bags or shaking panhandlers tucked in corners. However, addiction is not limited to drugs. People can be addicted to sex, food, exercise, and other nontraditional things. Addiction also does not discriminate. It would be ignorant to assume that all people with addictions are living on the streets, because in fact addiction affects people of all races, genders, ages, and socio-economic classes.
Women are just one classification of people with problems. The group of women can be further broken down by race, sexual orientation, social class, and others. It is oppression or the inability to cope with one or more of these identities that can be the start of such an affliction.
My personal experience with addiction involves my aunt. She was born to a middle-class household, and is the youngest of six siblings. She married a extremely wealthy steel magnate and had three children with him. The issues could be seen even before their marriage took place. The source of fun and socializing centered on alcohol, in fact when you look at any picture of them, they would preface it by saying, “we got hammered there,” or “ that was the best (insert alcohol type here) I’ve ever had.” This issue further escalated, when her husband became more involved with work, and left my Aunt at home to raise three kids and with a nanny. Since there was a nanny, my aunt felt her role as a mother was not needed, so she spent her afternoons drinking in her large walk-in closet and sleeping the day away. As her children grew to teens she would get drunk and hit on their friends. For ten years, the children lacked a mother and her husband lacked a wife. She isolated herself from society and her family basically leaving her only friend to be Jack Daniels. It wasn’t until she was hospitalized and part of her liver was removed that she decided to go to rehab. I look back and can empathize with her, for she was not ready to be a mother or a wife and her inability to cope led her to hit the bottle. Unfortunately, she traded alcohol for pain pills, which doctors do not even hesitate to describe her because of all the damage the alcohol in her system.
That is just one story, which unfortunately, is not uncommon. Women battle on a daily basis. Society and the media usually only examine the most extreme instances of addiction. They look at famous people, for example like Tatum O’Neal, who just recently was arrested for attempting to purchase drugs in New York’s Central Park. Her excuse was that her dog died and that she was researching a role. Her problem is magnified and fortunately for her fame, she will receive the proper help. It is those that are unable to afford the necessary assistance or are reluctant to go to rehab that meet their end.
Addiction is not something to be taken lightly and regardless of whether you are addicted to meth or shopping it will still ruin your life. The media and marketing companies perpetuate many of these addictions, by setting beauty ideals, identifying what is trendy, alienating certain groups, and portraying the abuse of substances in a non-negative way. Our responsibility as mothers, women, sisters, friends, coworkers, etc… is to shed light on problems and intervene before addiction gets the best of someone you know.